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Fringe Benefits
News in Brief
Lego Living
A Councillor Speaks
Straight to the Point Hackney Museum
Spectre at the Feast  
Musical Meanderings
Radical Dairy
Yum Yum, Yum...
New Kids on the Block
Ingrid Ricciardello
Fringe Photos
Crime Wave
Edgar Allen Poe
Arts & Entertainment
Flower Power
Word on the Street
The Clapton Messiah
Surfing N16
Good Bar Guide
Drinking organic
Garden Colour
The North Bank
Crossword

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p22

A reader replies to our article on street crime in the last edition of N16.

I felt compelled to write to you upon reading your interesting article in N16. As you do not appear to have concluded one way or the other about crime in the borough I thought I might share my experience with you. I have lived in Hackney for less than two years and I would like to catalogue the crimes, of which I am aware, that have occurred within less than half a mile radius of my house. While most of these crimes have not had any direct effect on me they are, nonetheless, crimes that are not Evening Standard or Hackney Gazette headlines.

1. A man shot in the head while sitting in his car on the High Street
2. A man battered to death by a group of youths in London Tavern, Rendelsham Road
3. A man shot dead, two others wounded on Reighton Road
4. My neighbour mugged (with knife) on corner of our road at 8:30 at night, bag stolen 5. Next door neighbours smashing in a window at 7:00am due to an ongoing feud
6. Police arrive next door to deal with a stabbing or beating
7 Police arrest a youth outside my house again associated with next door (a council property for people awaiting accommodation)
8. Across the road burgled
9. My wife (6 months pregnant) has her bag stolen by scooter thieves while riding home from work on her bicycle

I would say that to live within the vicinity of this level of crime is something that nobody else that I know of has to put up with. Regarding the last point (9), the police officers who arrived at the house remarked that Hackney was a 'war zone', not enough officers etc. They were glad to be able to come to a crime that, they considered, minor as they usually came to mugging/robberies where weapons were involved!

...World Cup Memories

Re your point about being held up in Church Street as a minor incident where 'nobody got hurt' Please! It is this attitude that needs to change. When I moved into my property my next door neighbour, who had been burgled, suggested that this was expected as it was London etc. (she has since moved with her two children to Oxfordshire). I say that this is totally unacceptable. It is as unacceptable as the police suggesting certain areas are 'no-go areas'. Your remark regarding the police. turning up a half an hour after the Church Street mugging is depressing, particularly when you bear in mind that the police station is less than five minutes from the incident, at a slow walk. We are in danger of becoming as inured to the rising levels of crime in the borough as we clearly are to the filthy streets and hopelessly inefficient council.

A rather depressed reader,
Declan Carey

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