The smoke screen ....

In a park that has been neglected for quite some time, and where there was no management to enforce rules and regulations, a culture of prostitutes, thieves, drug dealers, and addicts, will develop and take control of the park.

Within this culture everyone is out to save their own hide, therefore lies and deference becomes the perfect smoke screen. If you ever have the experience of trying to do a turn around project on such a park you will surely experience the lies and the people trying to defer blame to throw you off course. You see the longer they keep you confused the longer it will take you to identify the problem people and take some action to remove them from the park and make your improvements. They hope that through their smoke screen you will never identify them as part of the problem. In some cases they will even try to befriend you in order to gain inside information to pass on to their friends about your plans. When you start to see through their smokescreen the worst of the bunch will even revert to trying to intimidate you in any way they can possibly think of.

I have experienced all of the above, and believe me it does slow you down a bit. You will have people tell you lies about others to try to prolong their own stay and throw you off course. They may tell you that someone is selling drugs, knowing that person is innocent to send you in the wrong direction. This usually occurs because someone feels you are getting close to identifying them as a problem and don’t want to be removed from their nice comfy environment where in the past no one ruffled their feathers and let them do whatever they wanted to.

Continue to push forward with your efforts to solve your people problems, as you show your residents your goal is to improve the place they live, some of the good residents will slowly start to pass information on to you about where the problems really are. Over time you will begin to know who to trust, make sure you never use their name in your efforts to create the changes. Through patience, careful observation, enforcing your rules, assistance from residents and communicating with the police, the results will come.

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