Head Over Heels in Traffic!

More traffic problems this morning when someone found their Vauxhall Corsa inverted by Worcester Park station, according to the Surrey Comet here, together with a dramatic picture of the vehicle in question via Twitter.

Details are scarce so anything you can provide would be interesting, though they're unlikely to be quite as interesting as any dashcam footage that might have been available had one been installed, as is often the case in places like Russia.

Drivers there commonly install.dashcams for insurance reasons and the resulting video have proliferated while continuing to amaze and horrify in equal measure. Not for the easily disturbed. Drive safely people

Morgenstern ach scheine auf die Liebste meine

Marvellous cameo moment in Worcester Park last night as I made my way up towards Brinkley Road having been to see the new Indiana Jones movie (which I'd recommend) after work. Badly parked on the corner outside KFC, that hub of community life, was a gleaming, much admired and very new Bentley. Bentley? KFC? Bentley? KFC? Words failed me....... and they apparently still do.

I notice they've replaced the old CCTV camera opposite Pizza Express with a new little ball-shaped one. I've blogged before about the general ineffectiveness of CCTV but won't repeat myself here. They probably want a clearer view of the traffic jams or the queue outside Bakers Oven.

Gosletts sale seems to be a bit of a damp squib from what little I've seen of it. Mrs Brinkster went there in search of a storage coffee table and the only option in there wouldn't have left her with any change from £400 whilst noted as being half price. It would probably help if you could actually see in the window as from the road they could be running an organ donation clinic for all you can see of the place.

Congratulations to all the Chelsea fans for not trashing Worcester Park in their grief on Wednesday night. I was out doing something else and got to Worcester Park just as I heard the penalties start on the radio and saw the anxious faces peering at the TVs in the Huntsman and Cazbar as I drove past. Any Man U fans can leave your John Terry jokes in the comments.

Lastly does anyone know what's happened to the Hamptons Blog?

Rage against the machine

Every once in a while I'll feel the need to have a beef about CCTV so yesterday it was nice to see the Telegraph confirming what pretty much everyone knows "Police admit drunks not deterred by CCTV". Being the kind of guy I am I've reproduced the best bits here for you:

Surveillance cameras do little, if anything, to prevent late night alcohol-fuelled crime and violence on Britain's high streets, the country's most senior police officer in the field has admitted. Graeme Gerrard, head of CCTV at the Association of Chief Police Officers, said that although Britain was now a virtual surveillance state, cameras usually failed to act as a deterrent for drunken yobs. He told a parliamentary committee that while other countries were astonished at the scale to which Britons were snooped on by the authorities, the evidence suggested CCTV had little impact on levels of late-night violence.

"Some of them may get disappointed when the CCTV goes in that actually... it doesn't deter most crime. I think they are perhaps misled in terms of the amount of crime that CCTV might prevent. Before CCTV can effectively deter people, they need to know the cameras are there. They have got to be thinking about the consequences of their behaviour. It is very effective in places like car parks, where offenders are going out to break into cars, and are thinking rationally. In terms of town centres, where a lot of the behaviour is violent behaviour, often fuelled by alcohol, people aren't thinking rationally. They get angry, the CCTV is the last thing they are thinking about. Even the presence of police officers doesn't deter the disorder on the street, so cameras are unlikely to deter them."

I'm sure you can work out how this applies to to Worcester Park or Sutton in general but if given a choice of the two I'd rather have more bobbies in cars than people watching (or not watching) CCTV monitors.

Friday mega-entry II

It's another Friday and the 6.27 from Worcester Park was fabulously empty. It's tempting to make it a habit seeing as the 7.12 is getting unpleasantly full.

Having railed about the ineffectiveness of CCTV in a previous post the Evening Standard took up the subject yesterday, coming to pretty much the same conclusion. Sutton's clear-up rate seems to one of the best of all even though the borough allegedly has less than 100 council CCTV cameras (though many more placed by other organsiations).

I was interested to see that there was activity yesterday in the former Choices Video shop with the gap between the two parts of the store being bricked up. I don't know whether this was a new tenant re-jigging the layout or the owners trying to make it seem more appealing but hopefully something will happen soon.

Activity was continuing at the Huntsmans yesterday with more painting and some work on the frontage. Anticipation mounts!

The Debra charity shop opened it's doors yesterday after its fit-out. It looks quite organised but I really shouldn't get excited about another charity shop.

Melange du jour

A couple of articles have appeared relating to an assault in Worcester Park with links here and here. It does bear some similarities to the assault sign that's turned up outside the Huntsmans but has some differences too. The locations are a few yards apart while there's only half an hour between them, but on entirely different days. Any ideas on whether they're the same or different?

This leads me on to my pet subject of why security cameras don't reduce crime, so to quote the last link:

"The 178 video cameras that keep watch on San Francisco public housing developments have never helped police officers arrest a homicide suspect even though about a quarter of the city's homicides occur on or near public housing property, city officials say."

The story's similar in Surrey with CCTV cameras in Leatherhead and Ashtead unattended at the kind of time you might expect incidents could happen, and I doubt that the Police have obtained any decent pictures from the recent incidents even though they've occurred within yards of the CCTV cameras.

If they want to stop crime in Worcester Park then CCTV is really not the way to do it.