Well let's talk about the Travellers I rubbed shoulders with last week. This will be a story full of cliches and stereotypes, but that is their fault, not mine.
I am staying temporarily in a town I am not that familiar with. I came out of a restaurant (dubious theme pub/carvery affair, not haute cuisine) and next to my car were two vehicles, slung nonchalantly and hapharzardly, diagonally across two spaces each. The first was one of those big glitzy monster truck things, and the second was an old flat-bed lorry.
This lorry was piled up into a sky high tower with old scap metal in such a mind-blowingly dangerous and chaotic manner (and tied up with two bits of nylon rope 
- seriouly, two bits of thin rope!) that my 12 year old son and I just stood there with our mouths agape, amazed that the washing machine that was the cherry on this very tall cake had not yet fallen onto our car. We stood there for five mins staring at this sight, and pointing out to one another all the various dubiously stacked, heavy, jagged items that were not secured at all and could fly off into someone's windscreen at the first negotiation of a roundabout. It was like a sight from a cartoon.
So I phoned the police. I considered it to be an unsafe load. But being the type of person I am, I didn't phone 999 in case it wasted resources as it was only a potential accident waiting to happen. So I went to the trouble of finding the non-emergency number of the local station, which I knew to be about a 2 minute drive away, as I had just driven past it. They asked for the number plate and said they would send someone out. We waited, and we waited.....
Eventually the vehicle owners came out. Two Traveller couples with three pre-school aged children each. All the kids were put into the vehicles, babes on laps etc, without any car seats and off they lurched off happily around the roundabout with their mind-blowingly precarious cargo. And before anyone says 'how do you know they were Travellers?' I can identify them pretty easily thanks, in the same way I can identify most social/cultural groups - by the way they act/look/dress/speak.
We waited 10 more minutes - no police came.
The next day I was driving about a mile or two up the road from the carvery when what should I spot at the side of the road (parked most incongruously on a tiny greensward next to a war memorial, right on top of a set of busy traffic lights, completely blocking the visability around the corner for other motorists, which in ordinary circumstances would have had them reprimanded/moved by the police immediately) were two caravans, the same two vehicles I had seen, and a pile of old furniture and metal. I smiled and nodded to myself and drove on, thinking 'Ah well, at least they are travelling, trying to work, and they clearly won't stop there long as they can't even let the toddlers out of the trailer to run around.'
Three days later I drove by there again, and they were gone. But left in their place, artfully arranged around the war memorial, was a pile of old chairs, an old oil drum and various other bits of rubbish that clearly hadn't turned out to have enough scrap value for them to be bothered with. Nice. And yesterday it was all gone, so the council had obviously come out pretty sharpish to clear up after them.