Hi mrsK, I tell you, I really was so pissed off about that ticket ! The police never came to help us when we had gangs milling about causing problems and worry, well not till the yobs had dispersed long since, so there was nothing for the cops to bloody do. It went through a patch of happening every weekend sort of three nights running for weeks - drove us barmy. My son was very near to going out and confronting them all with a sword ffs. One evening there was a mob of them messing near our cars, we saw on our cctv monitor that they had baseball bats and we rang the police and went out, the three of us against about 20 odd. We stood in our front garden. Hubby Chris had a 'riot stick' behind his back, so did I. Andy had a sword behind his back. At that time we did not have a dog - Rex our German Shepherd came later!
When we first went out into the front garden, we realised that most of them had Halloween type masks on, so there was no way we would recognise them. One of them said they had just dealt with a visiting gang from another area, and you could see they were all 'hyped up'. It was a very frightening situation. Some reading this would question why we went out like that - well we thought that they were about to roll our Reliants again, or smash car windows, or even our house windows, or our neighbour's, and we'd had enough and somebody had to make a stand against these gangs ! We told them that the police were on their way and they would probably come mob-handed because they had been told about the baseball bats and masks. That information produced a lot of jeering and abuse.
There was a sort of stand-off situation, and one or two of them challenged my son to come out and try to sort them out, and they were shouting abuse and trying to intimidate us. After what seemed ages, some at the back decided they were going to go, so there were only about half of them left. They threw some more abusive words in our direction but were sensible enough not to venture onto our property, nor did they touch our vehicles. They drifted off.
About 7 or 8 minutes later two police cars tore round the corner into our road --- too late of course. We had disposed of our weapons by then, and we told the police the direction they had gone, and the police drove off looking for them. We never heard any more about that incident, so presumably the yobs were not found.
It seems that this sort of thing is commonplace in city areas, even on the outskirts - suburbs, like where we are. It is a frightening thought that today's feral youths are now ruling the streets, and people are just too frightened to even call the police. They just stay in their homes, lock the doors and keep their heads down, and hope they won't be the next targets.

:(:-5:-5