I first wrote to my councillor in early November 2022, when reports of dog wardens frightening local people off the fields in Plymstock and Elburton were everyday occurrences. I had gone away in September 2020 and came back to fields that were eerily empty. People were too scared to use their own parks. Council measures were unbelievable. It felt like Franco’s Spain rather than the UK 2022.

I have been in contact with one or other member of the council ever since.

Currently, I am trying to have the council publicly acknowledge their atrocious behaviour on February 7 2023, where they accuse me of being a criminal.

Let me recap these events in case newcomers to the petition are not aware.

That was a wonderful morning, with crisp grass and empty fields save for ourselves and a couple of dog owners exercising their pets. Most people were at school or work and just ourselves, a group of seniors, had spent forty minutes walking our pets round the fields. The others left and Paul and I went over to chat with the women playing ball with their dogs.

We believe someone local, possibly from the clubhouse, called a local senior councillor who is known to be ‘anti dogs on sports pitches’ to let him know there were felons on the sports pitches with dogs off-lead, and he dispatched the wardens to catch us.

They approached from behind, and one intercepted my giving out a flyer about our petition, with “Can I have that?” and leant forward to take it, without waiting for an answer. To say they were not dressed professionally is an understatement. We did not trust that they were council employees and simply turned away and walked off the fields. They followed us for two hours, constantly asking for our personal details, repeatedly calling the police and threatening us with being reported to the police. During those two hours their behaviour was appalling: they taunted us and said they were enjoying themselves so much that they would be happy to follow us till the end of the afternoon. It was good fun to mock and intimidate two seniors.

During the ordeal I took a couple of photos of the wardens (now called ‘envirocrime enforcers’ by council officials) and put them on social media. The overwhelming response was that they were not for real, they were scammers, they were out for a quick buck.

In fact, one outraged fellow dog owner sent my photos to the then councillor for Plymstock fields, Rebecca Smith. She looked at the photos on Facebook and commented: “They don’t look like wardens. Let me look into it”.

The very councillor for Radford didn’t believe they were wardens when she had the luxury of looking at the photos of them, but we who were caught unawares on the fields, are classed as criminals because we did not accept their being official representatives of PCC.

Can you see anything wrong here??

This is a link to a newspaper article that covered the story:

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1733071/Council-dog-wardens-pensioners-Plymouth-park

And below Ms Smith's FB message: