I’m a nimby, protect me

[Random_Task]

I’m a nimby, protect me
Timesonline Link

It was dusk on an April evening in affluent Little Venice in northwest London. People were drinking outside the nearby pub as a 33-year-old woman named Sabrina parked outside her house. She had just taken her 18-month-old son from her car and was putting him down on the pavement when she was assaulted from behind.

Two men grabbed her around the throat while another wrenched her watch and engagement ring from her. A fourth looked on. Sabrina was throttled so violently that she briefly passed out, and it was a week before she could speak properly again. Her son was screaming. “I was terrified. I felt totally vulnerable,” she says. “I was also furious. How dare people do that?”

For Sabrina – who asked that her surname be withheld – the attack was the final straw. She had no doubt the men were waiting for her, because other women in the area had been targeted in a similar fashion. Weeks earlier two youths had tried to snatch her mobile phone. Several cars in the street had had tyres slashed by vandals and the police were seldom seen. Sabrina decided to act. She persuaded around 30 neighbours to hire a “private policeman” to patrol the block. “I don’t think anyone who’d been through what I’d been through would want to be a sitting-duck any more,” she says.

Is this the future? Are private street guards destined to become an indispensable and ubiquitous adjunct for the affluent? In some parts of northwest London such as St John’s Wood, Regent’s Park and Maida Vale they already are. Avenue Road, Acacia Road and Abbey Road (of Beatle fame) all have them, as do umpteen other nearby streets.

These two paragraphs caught my attention though:

Six companies offer the service in the capital. Sabrina employed one called 1st Class Protection, which patrols 26 streets in northwest London, adds another every month or two, and is now receiving inquiries from residents in middle-class districts such as Edgware, Totteridge and Bushey. “In certain areas it will become the norm, not the exception,” predicts Assaf Cohen, the company’s managing director and a former Israeli army special-operations officer.

Assaf Cohen, 35, runs 1st Class Protection with Olga, his Belarussian assistant, from an estate agent’s in Hendon. Since 2003 he has built a team of 35 trained guards, including several former Israeli soldiers, a former lieutenant-colonel in the Slovakian Army, a former Lithuanian police officer and Olga’s husband, a former boxing champion from Belarus. To judge by his BMW convertible, he is doing very nicely. He says that streets usually approach him after particlularly nasty crimes have persuaded their residents that the police can no longer protect them and they must take charge of their own security.

 

[Biped]

Wonder if any of his 'boys' are generating leads in those areas before the calls come through . . . if I was looking to get work in security, and I wasn't quite as honest as I could be, I'd duff up some old bird and leave a calling card 50 yards down the road . . . or something.

You know how it goes, salesman comes in, tut-tut's at your security, says his windows are more secure and isn't the neighborhood dangerous etc, etc, etc.

Of course, this is only an example, and in no way would I suggest any impropriety from such a well respected company.

 

[EX_STAB]

Policing following the NHS. Pay once - get crap service - pay again and go private.

 

[dazzer]

I think London will become somewhere like Lima Peru within the next 20 years. In Lima, which has some of the most beautiful and best preserved Spanish colonial architecture in the world is a no go area for most parts with only barrios such as San Isidro and Miraflores being anything like safe, if you go to places like La Victoria or Rimac which is where the big open air markets and the bullfighting and football are, then you are open to getting mugged, beaten up or your fingers chopped off. (if you wear rings)

So for Miraflores to be kept safe, they have private security companies looking after the neighbourhood thus stopping the riffraff from smashing up the place and its inhabitants.

London will end up like this soon enough, with defined 'no-go' areas as the cops are waving the white flag.

 

[TheIronDuke]

An easier solution for the poor dears would be to blow all the bridges between them and that horrible sink estate on the other side of the Grand Union Canal.

I do wish I lived in the smog filled M25 congestion zone, rather than the nice, safe Northern countryisde.

 

[rebel_with_a_cause]

I think London will become somewhere like Lima Peru within the next 20 years. In Lima, which has some of the most beautiful and best preserved Spanish colonial architecture in the world is a no go area for most parts with only barrios such as San Isidro and Miraflores being anything like safe, if you go to places like La Victoria or Rimac which is where the big open air markets and the bullfighting and football are, then you are open to getting mugged, beaten up or your fingers chopped off. (if you wear rings)

So for Miraflores to be kept safe, they have private security companies looking after the neighbourhood thus stopping the riffraff from smashing up the place and its inhabitants.

London will end up like this soon enough, with defined 'no-go' areas as the cops are waving the white flag.

No its the Politically Correct Met Police so they can't wave a white flag they would have to go for rainbow or pink.