Who is responsible for cleaning-up the dog fouling and finding the offending dogs/owners?
Wandsworth Borough Council are responsible both for the cleaning and legal enforcement on the site. Their cleaning contractors are Lewis & Graves.
The council’s dog warden service appears to be useless, they have never been seen on site.
Do you report the dog fouling to Wandsworth Council?
Yes, for every post on this web site all of the images are sent by email to the following people/services (ie they all receive 50+ images a day via email):
Wandsworth Dog Control
Wandsworth Housing Management Services
Mark Callis (Dog Patrol Warden)
Mark Curtis (Senior Estate Services Officer)
Yasmin Akbar (Estate Manager, Doddington)
John Thompson (Senior Estate Manager)
What response are there from the emailed reports?
From various email responses, public and private meetings:
Wandsworth Dog Control: no response.
Wandsworth Housing Management Services: do not want to receive email reports.
Mark Callis and Mark Curtis: say they do not want to receive reports because they are aware of the situation (January 2014), oh, and what’s the problem anyway, dog turds disappear over time!?
Yasmin Akbar: reports are not sent “to” me!? (they are “cc’d”).
John Thompson: not my job.
There was a little bit of activity during January 2014, but nothing since, in that some of the fouling was cleared. There appear to be occasional clean-ups, which decrease the number of sites, noticeably after the Easter break, but in general the problem is getting worse rather than better (so far during October 2014 there are over 75 sites reported every day, which indicates no cleaning for an extended period).
Are the image marker positions accurate?
There are a number of factors that affect marker position, but, in general the marker positions should be considered a guide (within ten metres) to where the image was taken, rather than the absolute spot (within one metre). Some of the markers will be very accurate, some will be 20 metres (or more) out. All images are taken within the area tinted red on the map (and this should give you an idea of how accurate the marker placement is).
On several occasions all of the images have clustered in one or two spots on the map. We take this to be when the camera has trouble getting a GPS signal, and thus does not update position as often as it should. Some images have no GPS data at all – these have orange markers, and are placed randomly on the map.
There is a tendency for the images to cluster on the map. This may be because the camera is not updating its position, or that the images were taken at, or very close to, the same spot. In these cases markers are placed directly on top of each other, which makes clicking the markers impossible and under-represents the total number of images found on a given day. To overcome this problem all markers are ‘wobbled’ by a maximum of about two metres, which opens-up the overlapping markers and makes them more accessible and visible.
You should therefore take the image markers to represent the total number of images found on a given day, rather than indicating exactly where the image was taken.
Some of these images are just ‘smears’, why is that?
The purpose of cataloguing the dog fouling in this area is to show when it first appeared, how long it lasts and how it is spread around. So, the images show fresh turds, ageing turds, turds that have been trodden on, turds that have been kicked around and the resulting smears and specks that result from that.
Overall, the images show how, over an extended period, this dog fouling is not being tackled by Wandsworth Council, either by cleaning it up, or by catching the dog owners.
How long does a dog turd last if it is not cleaned-up?
At least three months. This is dependent on the weather (if it is raining a lot then it may be quicker) and the number of people who have trodden in it/kicked it around. The fastest form of dissipation (rather unpleasantly) appears to be people treading in it.
However there are instances of dog fouling that have lasted the entire period of this survey so far (since December 2013 to October 2014).
Are you mad?
Even if we are mad does that detract in any way from Wandsworth Council and Lewis & Graves lack of action in tackling this problem?