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Saturday, 18 October 2008

The Moving Barricades

After about 3 weeks of starting this gated community thingy, nothing much has improved. It does give a sense of being safer, but that's all. There has been very strong protest from disagreeing residents. Public has also complained that roads cannot be blocked. They are public roads! But alas, Jeff thinks he has the right to reclaim all the roads.

There was a robbery. After the gated community started. Came by bike, and robbed a group of friends. Guards didn't know about it. So, it is not all that well. Now, Jeff wants to fence up the whole place. I mean, eff - do you want your kids growing up in a prison?

Comments vary. Jeff keeps telling everyone that if there is no gates and guards, your family could be next. So, someone asks him - if there are guards and gates, would he guarantee that nothing will happen? Jeff calls them unreasonable.

More critically, there are serious shortcomings. Firstly, it is close to impossible from stopping motorcycles from zooming in and out. Snatch thieves are usually on bikes. Then, this area has about 4 or 5 entrances / exits, after blocking up half of them! This means that the six guards employed are tied up with sentry duty. No more guards on patrol. So, even if there is a fence - just climb it, or cut it, and you are free to break-into houses.

Then we started noticing a more serious problem. Imagine this as a housing area. Where on earth are the guards suppose to go to, when they need to go? Yup - they need to walk all the way to the shops - thus leaving their 'checkpoints'. The irony of this place is, they need to go to the shops that Jeff has openly declared that the shops are not part of our community.

What happens when it rains? The lack of proper shelter puts everything to a stop. Some guards have just an umbrella, others have a hut. Either way, that's not enough shelter to continue to verify vehicles into the area. So, it fails, yet again.

Oh, being Jeff - there is still no statement of accounts, no telling who are the signatories to the bank account and still no clue how many is actually against this idea. I am all for a safer community, but for fuck-sake, please do something that works. This is just too "Barisan National" for me. Another resident has commented - if you think a bunch of disused oil drums (the barricades) and a bunch of foreign workers (the guards) can actually make the place safer, think again.

Another matter - if you need to use oil drums to barricade a place, please make sure they don't collect rain-water. Dengue is more deadly than snatch thieves. And imagine - this is a fairly well-to-do housing area - now barricaded with disuse oil drums. This bloody place looks like a scene from Somalia. So, please have some taste and have something proper.

Will CCTV help? Bugger, no. Remember the footage of the guy dumping poor Nurin's body? The entire act was captured on CCTV. Polis DiRaja Malaysia even sent it to the FBI. Alas, nothing came out of it. Why? Firstly, the image quality is bad. Just imagine, if you need about 150 dots per inch (dpi) for a person's face - what's the resolution you need for your CCTV covering an area about 5 meters by 5 meters? That would be about a 10 mega pixel image. Not many CCTV, (mind you - not a camera with a still image) has that resolution. How the eff are you going to store the images? And for a moment, let's say all the technology is there - someone could put on a helmet with a full visor and commit crime on a stolen bike. You try to beat that! As usual, Jeff now wants CCTV.

The part I cannot understand is, instead of educating the public, instead of teaching your kids to be streetwise, they decide to fence themselves in. What more, the measures don't even half work.

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