For the most up to date content you may want to read the posts on our discussion forums and keep an eye on the Media Coverage Boards if you want to spread the word further.
You can also take a look at the expanded catgegories that now includes a section for various resident's associations. If you want a discussion forum for your own Resident's Association then send me your details.
For those of you who are joining us for the first time perhaps we can give you an outline of events.
Basically it all started out in November last year. I'd been out to buy a pint of milk and saw the local shopkeeper surrounded by a gang of 10/15 kids throwing stones at him so I just ran over and knocked into the nearest one and took the old guy back into his shop. Just as we were getting inside one of them threw a stone straight at my face and hit my just below my eye. I was lucky not to be blinded.
I'd had a lot of time to think about things. I had been sitting in an Accident & Emergency room for 3 hours getting a flap of skin stuck back onto my face and I was thinking I can either go out the next day with a baseball bat and it would be me ending up in prison or I could decide just no to leave the house at night, and then I've made my own little prison regardless.
It just struck me that there are a lot more of us than them so why not make a virtual community where people could get together and do something about it.
Obviously it had needed to happen becuase within days I was getting a dozen emails a day, one even from a 70 year old woman who told me that she had lived here all her life and only now did she feel afraid to go out.
Now people can log onto the website and find a lot of links to various police initiatives and the council Anti Social Behaviour Units, but they can also fill in reports on what these kids have been up to, and send in digital photographs. The problem before was that you can't really police an amorphous gang of kids, but when you get to know the individuals involved you can target the ring leaders and give the police the evidence they need to actually get prosecutions.
I've lived on "The Island" for over 10 years and I was orginally drawn to the sense of community that you get here more than anywhere else in London, but that all seems to have changed this last year.
You basically have these gangs of kids gathering 15 or 20 at a time with their baseball caps on and their hoods pulled up strutting about like they own the place.
They used to get up to mischief but it went from graffiti to breaking windows to throwing peanuts at people to throwing bricks. Nobody is taking it upon themselves to let it be known that this is simply not acceptable behaviour.
I've taught classrooms of 16 year olds these last 4 years and its a tricky stage of their lives. The first thing you get told in teacher training is that when kids get to that age they are just hormonally programmed to try it on. Your role as a teacher is to provide some discipline and impose some structure. Ultimately they're happier as you don't wind up with a power vacuum and everyone gets stuff done.
Kids have bags of energy and if a youth is behaving badly, it is societies' duty to provide the resistance to stop them falling into that cycle of petty crime.
You need to take that energy and channel it into something productive. You need to be able to get across to them that there is better out there for them than just hanging about street corners every night. There is so much to do around here. There are football grounds, basketball parks, swimming pools, sports centres, horse-riding, all within a ten minute walk. But all you hear is "There's nothing to do around here." You know, there is no such things as poverty other than poverty of aspiration.
The schools have never had better resources, but you get the sense that education is just not valued in their lives. There is just this pervasive culture of entitlement. The TV is just a shrine to the cult of celebrity and you see the riches of the Beckhams but never the work that goes into getting them. These kids wind up thinking they're hard done by because they don't have a widescreen TV in their bedrooms.
I implore the parents, do you really know what your children are up to. Take a look at the website, sign them up for some free evening classes or take up a new hobby with them, because if you don't bring up your kids then the education they will receive will be from the older youths who are nicking cars or burglarising. If you want a decent place for you grandchildren to grow up in then you better take action now.