For some reason that escapes me, I’ve been more active on Feckbook. Good lord, how do people cope?
The NIMBYism, the outrage, the continual fear.
As LeeH-W said, it’s almost worth buying an old, tatty van, dressing scruffily (easy for me), having an East European accent (or just not being white, if you’re not), and seeing how many mentions you can get on local FB groups while going about your legitimate business. I’ve seen FB posts branding people as “suspicious” for:
Which pretty much means I’m public enemy number 1 on a facebook group, as I could see myself doing all but the last item.
There appears to have been an increase in crime locally- car theft particularly- but the actual truth is that it actually peaked in the mid 1990s, when cars were comically easy to steal- even easier than a recent Ford Fiesta, which should win a prize for inept design.
Interestingly, the trend is the same for burglary.
Social media is, of course, fuelling the panic. We all get to hear about every minor incident that someone feels transgresses correct (or what the poster deems correct) behaviour, no matter how trivial that might be. Criminals have been all around us for years, but now, with the advent of cheap CCTV and a way to share the results easily, we know about it. People have been wandering up your drive, or hanging around in your street for years, but now we know about it, and publicise it, though of course, we don’t need footage, or indeed any evidence whatsoever: just walking in the street is enough:
People have stopped in the road, dressed scruffily, taken photos, stopped to pet cats, been a different skin colour, or from another country for years, but now we post them on Facebook as criminals because we’ve created a climate of fear, and we’ve almost got competitive reporting on Facebook.
There have been beggars and homeless for years (though of course we have an unprecedented rise in them because this shitty excuse for government has drastically cut the support networks for people in trouble), but now we post about it, fear it, and increasingly blame the victims, and make wild generalisations: I know that some of these people are criminals, but that doesn’t mean all of them are: it’s almost as if there’s criminals of every nationality, ethnic group, and social class and that making assumptions about this is wrong.