Travellers descend on Asda car park and refuse to move in stand off with police

[dowie]

Saw this and thought of GD:


https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6946611/travellers-rhyl-wales-asda-car-park/

ASDA employees were involved in a heated stand off with a group of travellers who set up camp in a supermarket car park, according to reports.

Staff at the store in Rhyl, North Wales, reportedly stood in front of a convoy of caravans in a bid to stop them setting up temporary home on the premises.

Fair play to the staff though for taking a stand, it is sadly another illustration though of how poor we are at tackling these people when they do commit crimes. Anyone else openly committing criminal damage would be arrested, especially if they hung around afterwards... but if you're with an aggressive gang complete with feral kids then the police will back off a bit and take the kid gloves approach - ignore the criminal damage, the fly tipping etc.. try to just monitor and claim it is all a civil matter.

 

[dowie]

I wouldn't choose an ASDA car park to setup camp, maybe they were desperate, where do you think they should have gone / live?

What a ridiculous position to take, no one is forcing them to set up camp in ASDA car park. If they're from the UK then they'll be able to get housed here or indeed might be able to arrange licence pitches. If they want to travel then they can pay for pitches too... just as anyone else who wants to travel or go on holiday has to pay for things like hotels or camp sites etc..

 

[dowie]

dont think thats possible as a large group of people, not everyone wants to live in mainstream society or be part of the social contract, look what happened to new age travellers.

Well it doesn't really matter, I might want to live in a castle but it doesn't mean I can turn up on some land belonging to someone else and start building one.

 

[dowie]

It isn't just trespassing either, there is criminal damage (in this case likely witnessed and caught on cctv), ditto to fly tipping. In the case where they park in public parks they often damage the grass, not to mention I believe there is another criminal offence relating to driving vehicles there.

Of course if you're an individual who decided to take your car down to the park and drive around a bit you might well find the police taking more of an interest.

With travelers they seem to ignore the criminality and just wait for the council or land owner to go to court.

Would be nice if court orders weren't required and the police could just tell them to move when called instead of waiting a week to do so. Certainly the change in squatting laws put that form of anti social behaviour to a quick end aside from in commercial buildings.

 

[dowie]

standard response from some farmers is simply to get the old muck spreader out... coat the rest of the filed in **** so it completely stinks and the traveler don't hang around for too long

sadly not so practical for ASDA car park

 

[dowie]

What a surprise 5 pages in and the right wing hate brigade are out in full force. Couldn't care less if these people have no where to live. They'd let them die on the streets without the NHS if it was up to them.

#triggered

it is a lifestyle choice

Better still, I’ll pour petrol on them if they’re on fire.

ever the diplomat there Diddums!

What's a dag?

A Directed Acyclic Graph - basically a directed graph with no cycles - see the excellent book by Koller and Friedman for more details

 

[dowie]

With a lot of the travellers coming over from Ireland, after Brexit will they be sent packing?

Brexit doesn't really have an impact on whether they'll be allowed to live here etc...

People from Ireland can live and work in the UK just as people from the UK can live and work in Ireland.

 

[dowie]

Frankly the police are more likely to pursue criminal charges against someone using a slur about them on social media than actually prosecute the travelers for mass trespass, criminal damage, making violent threats etc..etc...

I'm pretty sure they could get them under "breach of the peace" too given the way they often kick off.

 

[dowie]

But they don’t, and that is the $64 question, WHY NOT? Does anyone have a sensible theory?
It has been said, rightly or wrongly, that the police were reluctant to get involved in the allegations of sexual abuse of underaged girls in the North and Midlands by men of a particular ethnic background, for fear of being accused of racism.
As apparently these “travellers” have now been designated as a race, do the police have that same fear, so are looking on, with eyes wide shut.

Quite possibly for similar reason to the blind eye being turned to rape gangs (though obviously with less severe consequences for the victims in general in this case). The whole political correctness thing plus possible fall out/souring of relations with "the community" etc..

AFAIK Scotland already has laws that can be used against illegal traveler camps but an ex senior police officer up there complained that the police were too concerned with being PC to use them. And it seems that there are existing laws the police could make use of in England and Wales too but chose not to. I still think that something akin to the approach taken with squatters is needed - make it a criminal offence and remove the excuse of "its a civil matter".

 

[dowie]

Good news, they've left now, however they have complained to the police that somebody was using a drone to drop water balloons filled with **** on them, ahh the wonders of modern technology xD

It annoys me somewhat that the police will probably go after whoever did it if they can find out, yet they had no interest in dealing with scumbags breaking into a car park, assaulting/threatening staff, etc >.>

I did wonder about things like that happening these days, obviously whenever they turn up in villages and the kids raid the local shops, dog walkers can't use the park because they'll be attacked abused etc.. pretty much the entire village just hates them and wants to get rid of them. Back in the day it could literally be a case of pitch forks coming out and the gypsies being sent packing if they turned up and misbehaved, these days normal people with houses need to worry about the risk of being prosecuted, risk to their job etc.. something gypsies don't necessarily need to care about if their income is a mix of dodgy cash in hand building work and robbing pensioners.

Now I've heard of the farms spraying **** in adjacent fields and creating a big stink to drive them off but obvs not applicable to car parks, it is good to hear that people have been taking alternate approaches.

 

[dowie]

The person who runs the Elmbridge Police twitter must be on a wind up today!

had to google that and saw this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...esidents-empathy-travellers-illegal-camp.html

comments on twitter in reference to several of the vehicles having no tax/MOT apparently...

also just looking in that article, there is a numberplate on a caravan drawn on with marker pen! Clearly illegal then... and video footage of cars being driven around tearing up the grass... which is again illegal.

Of course the police ignore it all and only mention that they'd step in with regards to criminal damage but of course that is hard to catch people in the act.

 

[dowie]

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/68851...te-is-a-risk-to-their-kids-health-and-safety/

One woman said: “The council people need to do what they’re paid to do. All this rubbish could make my kids ill.”

Surely tell them not to eat it then?

 

[dowie]

Pretty much, yeah. They don't even make use of the laws they do have available. Yet when "Tommy Robinson" shows up outside a court house and they want to just get him arrested for *anything* then they can just cite the generic "breach of the peace" and he's straight in the van and then they can decided later to pull him up for contempt of court.

There was the youtube video where Laura Southern wanted to set up an LGBT rights stand in Luton town centre, locals weren't happy and the police shut it down immediately citing again "breach of the peace"... now I'd suspect locals in most places aren't generally happy with travellers turning up in a local carpark or park, especially when the kids are running around causing chaos, abuse is being shouted, threats are made, cars are driven around in circles on the grass etc.. seems like much more of a potential breech of the peace than accosting alleged rapists outside a court house or setting up an LGBT stand in a muslim area. AFAIK police do have powers to remove travellers in relation to public disorder or serious criminality but it is very rarely used. Let alone all the obvious offences relating to driving on park land, criminal damage, various motoring offences that they turn a blind eye to.

 

[dowie]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...criminal-offence-stop-travellers-moving-onto/

Dozens of Conservative MPs including several former Cabinet ministers are demanding that the Government makes trespassing a criminal offence to stop travellers moving onto private land.

The MPs, led by Mark Francois and John Baron, have written to Theresa May and Housing Secretary James Brokenshire urging them to make “acts of deliberate trespass a criminal offence”.

They say that people “have a right to expect that the law should be applied equally and fairly to all and they want to see the authorities given additional powers to deal with unauthorised encampments, which are an increasing problem, particularly in the spring and summer months”.

The news has emerged days after a police force in Surrey failed to take action to remove a group of travellers who had set up camp illegally in a park in Thames Ditton.

The group were eventually evicted by the local council after three days, but left behind significant damage and mess, including "rutted" football pitches from drag racing cars, two dogs, and a water-logged cricket pitch, forcing this weekend's games to be cancelled.

The council also hired a specialist cleaning company to carry out a "cleanse" of the the park's playground following their stay.

Would be helpful if only to give the police fewer excuses to not take actions, I mean the group mentioned above were openly breaking laws but the police did nothing... without a camp there if some random person were to drive onto the local playing fields and thrash their car around, damaging the pitch etc.. in full view of locals and the police were called then they'd deal with it pretty quickly. Insert travellers into the mix and they have a much higher threshold before they'll get involved in any lawlessness and will just claim it is all "a civil matter"....

Get rid of that excuse, make trespass/unauthorised encampments a criminal matter (even though mass trespass already is) and remove the potential ambiguity that politically correct senior police officers can use as an excuse to continually treat these people with kid gloves.