26 October - Clandestine spying?
Gayton Road Belvedere is not alone in getting regular visits from the council’s
gestapo car which they prefer to call a Mobile In-car Camera Enforcement vehicle (MICE).
When MICE are on site the driver puts up a warning sign as required by law but
two weeks ago a sign was taped to a lamp post as usual with no MICE in sight. I assumed that one of
the operatives had forgotten to remove it; but two weeks later it is still there and one must
wonder if it is intentional. Could it be that instead of sending a MICE to
occupy a parking spot and thereby displacing someone into the bus stop area so
as to better fund Craske’s expenses pot, they now use RATS (Remote
Attrition on Temporarily Stopping) to spy on offenders instead? With something over
a dozen cameras hanging over the area it could well be the case.
The sign was not facing the road today and on a windy day last week it had
somehow folded itself around the lamp post in a way that totally obscured every part
of the camera icon. If the RATS were really spying that day (or today) and issuing tickets
it would be totally illegal, not that that would trouble a corrupt council very much.
I would ask the council to explain but they no longer reply to my enquiries. Mr. Puomo
(rubbish department) has remained silent since the middle of August and
Mr. Kiley (Road Safety) has not responded since I named his colleague
Rupert Cheeseman for mismanagement of the Abbey Road death-trap
project. Probably I shall have to send a list of outstanding questions to the Deputy Director of
Customer Relations, who, to be fair has always been very responsive but not unreasonably
asked me to go through normal channels if I can. But if Serge Poumo and Gordon Kiley
are going to play silly-beggars then maybe I’ll have to lumber the top brass. Either that or
put in an FOI and incur the wrath of
another
councillor who has lost sight of what democracy means.
Anyone who has been interested in photography for as long as I have will know
that the representation of a camera on the warning sign is of an old Rollieflex popular with wedding photographers until the late 1960s. They will also
notice that the one shown here is upside down. If a disabled person displays his
badge upside down he will get a ticket so surely Bexley’s warning sign, hanging
upside down is also illegal, even if it faced the road, which it doesn’t? One
rule for the council criminals and another one for the innocent?