Appeal for witnesses

Thank you for visiting this page. Can you help?

Can you help?

I guess you will have seen the notice I put on my car which is parked, legitimately, in one of the Farthings’ bays at Borough Road. You will probably have noticed that the car has been vandalised by some substance being applied to the windscreen.

I apologise to residents for having to leave the car positioned where it is for the next few days, but this is at the request of the police who, at some stage, will visit to inspect the car and record the damage inflicted.

While the damage to the car is a relatively trivial case of criminal damage, the police are linking this to another registered incident of criminal damage which took place three weeks ago. The police are currently treating both as separate cases of criminal damage but have advised me that they may try to establish a ‘course of conduct‘ which would lead to the much more serious offence of harassment.

The police have asked me to appeal to residents and neighbours for any information on suspicious behaviour at the times of the two incidents or any other knowledge you may have about these incidents.

Please call me, Alan King, on 07740 101101 if you have any information, or email me on alan.king@zen.co.uk. You do not need to give your name. It is sufficient for me to pass just the information to the police, including possible perpetrator name(s), so that THE POLICE can take it from there.

Many thanks for your help.

Alan King

The first incident

The first incident took place between 20:30 on Saturday August 24th and 09:30 on Sunday August 25th. As a result of my isolating during the initial Covid outbreak, my car was in the garage, unused from the beginning of March and the battery had gone flat. At around 17:00 on Saturday, I ran a cable from the power socket in the Farthings binstore, concealing it safely away to avoid any danger to the public. The cable exited the binstore at a height 2.5 metres or so directly onto the roofs of the garages, from where it ran over the roofs and down into my garage. The laying of the cable across the roofs required me to use a ladder for access. Safety was my prime concern and, between 17:00 and 20:30, I checked every 30 minutes that all was well. At 20:30, I removed the plug from the socket and tucked the plug safely away to prevent anybody inadvertently reactivating the power. At 09:30 next morning, I went to the binstore to reconnect the cable to continue charging for a few more hours. I found that the cable had been cut at the point where it exited the binstore onto the garage roofs. I needed to remove the remainder of the cable from the roofs and used my ladder to access it. I saw that there were three further cuts to the cable in the section where it ran across the garage roofs. Whoever did this would have needed to place a ladder at two separate points along the line of the garages – a VERY determined action!

The second incident

As mentioned at the top of this page, the second incident involves a black substance being applied to my windscreen. It is uncertain exactly when it happened but I believe it was at some time between Sunday evening September 13 and Monday evening September 14 when a neighbour alerted me to it.

An aside about contacting the police

I must add that I was sceptical that reporting these incidents to the police would serve any worthwhile purpose, HOWEVER, I have been EXTREMELY impressed by the police reaction to what I considered to be just a case of socially-maladjusted or mentally-disturbed individual(s), which I just wanted to put on record. I would strongly recommend that you report to the police ANY anti-social or malicious activity which causes you concern – you never know how the perpatrator’s irrational sense of logic might escalate into something more serious.  You can report in the following ways:

• by going in person to your local police station (5 & 7 High Street, Kingston upon Thames, KT1 1LB)
• by calling 101 (non-emergency number)
• on the website https://www.met.police.uk/report (although my experience is that the website is a bit flaky and it bombed out on me 3 times before I resorted to calling 101)

Please trust the police!