Guest 673- Registered: 16 Jun 2008
- Posts: 1,388
28 November 2009
19:5234042I love local papers and always buy both the Express and the Mercury. In fact, we get them twice as Chris buys them when I am away and I get them on the ferry. I have nothing whatsover against the journalist reporting my sister's misfortune and agree entirely with Barry W-S that he was only doing his job.
It always gets my goat when people say they don't know what it is going on, and missed such and such an event, and in the same breath say they never buy the local paper! Plus these days they have local internet forums, such as this, which the vast majority totally ignore.
Guest 653- Registered: 13 Mar 2008
- Posts: 10,540
29 November 2009
08:0834051I agree Ed.
There are many people who you just can't get through to: they don't read local papers; they throw away the quarterly DDC publication without reading it; they don't listen to local radio; hey don't participate (as you rightly say) in local forums, they don't go down their local pub for a chat about local issues or topics of conversation; they don't shop local and if they do, they walk round with their eyes closed.
Even banners across the road, they don't see. But we still have to try and get through to them - how ?
If people don't buy their local paper(s), those papers will close their local office (as has been done with two out of the three here) and eventually stop printing the paper itself.
As has been my catch-phrase over the last two or three years - "Use it, or lose it".
Roger
29 November 2009
10:0734055In the case of the press I am often not bothered if it is lost. Sad to say my estimation of journos is not high. I admire Ed for his generosity - responsible reporting is great and necessary, but unfortunately it is tainted with the irresponsible kind which proliferates. There are many ways now to get and give information and share conversations. Journalists, who are great and necessary when they are good, stink when they are bad, and the evidence is that the stink outweighs the smell of roses.
howard mcsweeney1- Location: Dover
- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 62,352
29 November 2009
11:4134063sadly, the phrase "i did not know it was on" is a local catchphrase.
i love reading newspapers, local and national, irrespective of how bad they can be, as the internet forums, i have lost count of the people with interesting views on local issues that, for some reason or another, never make them public.
anyone can walk into a library and use the state of the art computers to air their views.
no-one really needs to be computer literate these days, not that much different to using an old fashioned typewriter.
Guest 641- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 2,335
29 November 2009
12:1134065I'm of exactly the same mind, I buy both local papers and get the free paper and spend time scouring through them for snippets of local interest and What's On also of course I keep upto date 24/7 using Doverforum. I also use the internet to read online versions of the national papers as well.
You're right about the library, I do pop in there from time to time and have been known to pop into the local hostelry to have a chat and maybe sample a pint of an interesting brew whilst I'm there.
Guest 690- Registered: 10 Oct 2009
- Posts: 4,150
29 November 2009
13:1534070Bern.
. Never a fiction reader, I find the press could do alot more than what they print. I`m sorry, but I`m not interested in someone else`s private life, or cheap gutter snippets just to sell their papers. Unfortunatly, there are alot of gullible people out there who believe everything that goes into print. I know, I hear them at work.
Tell them that I came, and no one answered.
Guest 673- Registered: 16 Jun 2008
- Posts: 1,388
29 November 2009
15:0434074Oh dear, I think I am partially guilty of diverting this thread entirely from its original subject, Private Security Patrols.
It has now mutated via my reference to what some real uniformed coppers have been getting up to in respect of my family, to Keith successfully diverting attention from that by telling us for the hundredth time that he will not buy the Dover Express on principle, to my defending local papers, to Colin talking about national red tops.
I see that Colin has recognised this and started a new thread on national newspapers so perhaps we can continue that discussion over there and return this one to Private Security Patrols and their relationship to the police force, as per Howard's original post:
"i was listening today to the former boss of the metropolitan police today berating the use of the above. it did not seem to cross his mind that because of the inability of people in his position, people were feeling the need to pay twice for policing."
howard mcsweeney1- Location: Dover
- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 62,352
29 November 2009
15:2034075let us be truthful here, how many of us would employ security for our area if we could afford to and everyone else in the neighbourhood agreed to it?
Guest 649- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 14,118
29 November 2009
15:4634078I have said this before I am in agreement with having a security company policing any area but it would have to be done mainly at night after 1600hrs and at the weekends, they would also and this is a must work with the local p.s.o. if there is one.
Guest 673- Registered: 16 Jun 2008
- Posts: 1,388
29 November 2009
16:0434082Let me start the ball rolling. Nobody where I live would remotely contemplate the expense of private security as the level of crime is virtually non-existent. The only occasion on which I have had to call the police was a one-off, hopefully once in a lifetime experience, many years ago, where a man followed my stepdaughter up from the town after midnight and grappled with her outside our residence. He was unsuccessful in whatever he was trying to accomplish, presumably rape, and ran away. The police arrived within minutes but were unable to track him down. A private security patrol would probably have been in the wrong place when such an isolated occurrence took place and having one standing by for a decade or so on the off-chance of forestalling such an random event would be out of the question.
Guest 693- Registered: 12 Nov 2009
- Posts: 1,266
29 November 2009
20:2734096Private Security Patrols are inherently dangerous: the people employed may fall well short of the vetting employed to check proper policemen/women and consequently loose cannons may get into a job for which they may be entirely unsuitable. Added to that, the requirements of the people employing them may be closer to vigilante patrols than 'security' patrols, because of the very nature of employing privately.
For what it's worth, I happen to believe that we in this country are dreadfully over-legislated and under-policed. Give back the rights of the citizen, let the police do their work withour interference from Government or fear of prosecution themselves from plainly unjust laws that give the criminal more rights than they're entitled to; in other words, make justice the overriding goal; do that and the need for Private Security Patrols will begin to diminish. Arm the Police with the right tools to do their job.
True friends stab you in the front.
Guest 649- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 14,118
29 November 2009
20:4834097Andy I think you are right but at this time that will not happen.
howard mcsweeney1- Location: Dover
- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 62,352
29 November 2009
21:0434100andy is right about the dubious nature of private security, which makes it more disturbing that people feel that they must employ them.
i am in doubt whether we are under policed, as soon as a demonstration or picket line appears an army of police arrive.
where are they normally?
clearly paperwork has got out of hand, they are not clerks, but collar feelers.
i do not see any changes to the bureaucracy attached to the police in the near future, the ones at the top like the pie charts, graphs and statistics too much.
30 November 2009
08:0834107Frankly it is the same with any statutory body: arm them with the tools to do the job and then just monitor - it is the obsession with targets that has impacted on the way jobs are done, and not for the better. there are better ways of evidencing good practice.
Guest 673- Registered: 16 Jun 2008
- Posts: 1,388
13 January 2010
00:1137378Quick update on my nephews sentence. He was given community service and has done his first couple of sessions. They have to meet outside the Law Courts where he was sentenced. On saturday, they remained there to clear all the snow and ice outside. At 1330 he asked if he could go inside to have a leak and was allowed to do so.
Whilst he was in the loo, he noticed a black strip on the wall and wondered what it was for. He is an inveterate fiddler and had to go and touch it. Unfortunately it was a panic alarm and set off the alarms throughout the Law Courts!
His supervisor went potty. "You're in big trouble now, etc, etc." He was sent home in disgrace and is waiting to hear the inevitable repercussions. Shouldn't laugh but I doubled up when my sister told me what he had done now!