Following a completely one-sided pro-CCTV article in the Nottingham Evening Post on Monday 13th April (see  http://tinyurl.com/cxjaft for some depressing reading) we are calling for Forest Fields residents who do not welcome the introduction of CCTV here to make a concerted effort to help stop it over the next week.

Firstly, please come down and express opposition to the scheme at the public meeting (billed as a "presentation" - will they allow much time for debate?), which will be held from 6.30pm until 8pm on Thursday April 23 at Djanogly City Academy on Gregory Boulevard.

It is absolutely vital that as many of those who oppose the scheme as possible come to this meeting, to show our numbers, that we are not a tiny minority, and that objections to CCTV are based on a mountain of facts as well as personal feelings.

Even if you don't have much to say, at the last public meeting, a simple show of hands was asked for to gauge numbers of people for/against.

What with it being a meeting called by the police to discuss crime (and in the context of having talked about crime for the last hour or more with people who are really angry about it), it was no surprise that most people there were "in favour of CCTV" - and this was then used as a basis for extending their views to the whole community.

Please don't let a handful of self-selecting reactionaries - mislead by a lack of information and deliberate talking-up of the supposed "benefits" of CCTV from the police - condemn Forest Fields to being spied on, simply because those who oppose the scheme get mistaken for an insignificant paranoid minority.

It is absolutely essential that we make our presence known at this meeting, bring up inconvenient facts, ask difficult questions, and stimulate further informed debate about CCTV. (We could have a field day just from the Evening Post article alone - just look at the misleading, zero-basis-on-fact comments from PC Mark Tindall!)

So, see you there!!

Secondly, this coming weekend (18-19th April) and in the run up to the meeting, we will be doing a leaflet drop around Forest Fields to raise awareness of the facts about CCTV which the council, police and "Area 4 Neighbourhood Management Team" will no doubt fail to mention in their door-to-door leaflet and survey. If you could spare an hour or two to deliver some leaflets, please get in touch with us at the email address below.

Thirdly, the "Area 4 Neighbourhood Management Team" are going to be posting a consultation leaflet through our doors prior to the meeting. Please use yours to object strongly to the scheme. We will be posting our own leaflet up here in the next 24 hours, which contains plenty of information about why you might want to object to CCTV.

Fourthly, after the consultation leaflet comes round, please try to discuss it with your neighbours where possible, get people informed, and raise awareness about why CCTV is bad news for Forest Fields. If you need help getting started,  http://www.no-cctv.org.uk/ contains plenty of useful information (although you may have to trawl the site a little bit to uncover it).

Finally, if you would like to be involved in any way with organising against CCTV in Forest Fields, please contact us at the email address below.