Thirty years ago we lived on an estate where most of the neighbours were friendly and we had no problems. But there's always one family that spoils everything, isn't there?
My son, who was about 6 at the time, started to be bullied by the boys of that particular family. They were quite 'feral' - ignored by mother, left outside in all weathers. She even went on holiday one Christmas and left them in the charge of a 'friend' who was the local drunk. They knocked on my friend's door to find out if it was Christmas day, yet! Poor souls, but try as I could, I couldn't get them to stop the bullying of my son, coming to the house and peeing on the doorstep, all those horrible anti-social things others of you have written about.
It came to a head one day when one of these boys beat my son over his back with an iron bar. My husband, who is the most mild mannered of men, grabbed the kid by the neck of his shirt and marched him over to his house and complained to the mother about what the lad had done.
Half an hour later, we had a policeman at our door to warn my husband that he was to get off with a warning this time etc etc. The PC was quite embarrassed because he could see the truth of what happened but he had to follow procedure. The mothers who 'protect' their badly behaved kids and refuse to hear a bad word about them do them no favours at all. Wish we'd had iphones with video in those days.
The following year we moved out of the estate and bought our own house in a nice area. Our kids blossomed and we never had that kind of trouble again.
Wish I'd known about the Mahonia plants then, though! Mind you, these days you'd probably be told to remove them because some little darling had scratched himself whilst pooing on your lawn!
But I would definitely use video to record these kids - the mother who refuses to believe their darlings are devils can hardly ignore the truth when shown their kids in action on video! Mindyou, they'd probably get the police round with accusations of paedophilia! I think that actually happened to one poor man, didn't it? Although the police had records of his previous complaints and they believed the reason why he was forced to use video.