You've all been so busy on this thread, there are a lot of posts I want to reply to, so I might be a pain and reply to them all individually! I was hoping that if I scanned to the end that there would be some news, but I see that's not the case
From the Facebook page ...
A woman who has private cctv footage of vehicles and someone on a bike along the Barton Mills road was still waiting (as of last week) for Police to get back to her and collect the cctv.
People living in the houses surrounding Short Brackland have not had any Police contact - door to door enquiries OR premises/outbuildings/gardens checked!!
I'm constantly divided on opinion - either Police know something we don't (and family don't either) OR Police don't have a clue and are pretty useless ...
The thing is that houses and gardens are private property. The police can't search them without permission. They have put out multiple appeals to the public to do these searches themselves, and I think the latest appeal, which went from the police to the media?, was just on this Friday.
As for door-to-door inquiries, my only thought is that they've been appealing for people to come forward with information if they were in town that night. So if someone heard a disturbance, then they should have come forward and contacted the police. I'll grant you that not everyone will, and that house-to-house inquiries are useful for picking up those people who don't come forward because they didn't realise they had heard/seen something. But what if police really don't think he is in that area so they're not actually so bothered about doing door-to-door in that area and it comes down to people searching their gardens for themselves because those things are private property?
If the phone did travel to Barton Mills/Mildenhall area, then I can't see much point of the garden searches in BSE centre, because there's no indication that has been lost/discarded in BSE centre and might have been left in a garden there?
So there are some things the public can do, some things the public must do, and some things the public can't/shouldn't do.
Searching their own premises is something the public should really be doing themselves, because it's private property and the police can't do those searches very easily. The police have put out notifications for the public to do these searches of their own property, not just in BSE centre, but also out in Barton Mills/Mildenhall area. Whether or not that filters through effectively to the public in those areas, I don't know. Technically, this is the sort of appeal that should go out via local news channels, not national news channels, and only the locals on the board who watch local TV news and listen to local radio stations can tell us whether or not that's been happening.