#102 Memo To An American Police Officer

August 27, 2016

Was there a moment of shock when it came to you?

A sharp intake, the rasping breath of realisation?

Or simply relief at surviving your rookie shifts,

Then boredom and danger cocktailed into queasy routine.

So you wanted to be a police officer.

Protect and serve; defend and provide for.

If it’s not changing the world, you said to yourself,

At least I’ll be putting the bad guys away.

Instead all you Blues were recruited to the war on drugs.

In designated neighbourhoods your new assignment is to enter

As many perps as possible into the judicial process, if only

For possession, leaving little time for traditional policing priorities

Such as catching killers. In these districts nine out of 10 killings

Now remain untried and unpunished, unless you count

The unlawful acts of recrimination which have all but replaced

The intervention of the state in the expectations of local people.

Of the three guys on the corner, you’re the only one

That ain’t got his own. Dealer knows his job. Users, too,

Have a particular role to play. But you’re the little lost boy

Whose dotted line went off in unexpected directions.

Within your ranks there’s a hard core who might have done it

Anyway, at any time. But the not knowing who you are,

Not exactly sure what or who you’re there for

Must have been a factor in some of your folks not knowing

How to react, therefore emptying the magazine as if that means

Rubbing out a few pages instead of tearing into the flesh and bone

Of a fellow human being. Who knows whether all those ID checks would have

Gone so badly wrong if the policeman’s lot had not been re-cast without telling him?

#65 Graceless, Sometimes Deliberately So

November 13, 2015

‘There was a huge red ball in the sky above the centre of the city. I turned to my mother and asked “what’s that?”. And she replied: “that’s the cathedral”.’

A few days before the seventy-fifth anniversary of the blitz on Coventry in November 1940, an elderly woman was asked to recall that night of her girlhood when her home town burned down.

From early evening until early morning, more than 500 German aircraft dropped bombs on this Midlands city. Coventry was sent to pieces. Forlorn attempts to save themedieval cathedral came to nothing when the water supply ran dry.

Our eye-witness spoke in the voice we reserve for memories we revere – resonant (we hope), redolent (we’d like to think), little short of sanctified; until the last phrase, when the reverential tone was flattened into matter-of-fact.

Whether she was echoing her mother’s lack of intonation, or whether the change oftone was all her own; or perhaps it’s part of the Coventry city psyche – any road, ‘that’sthe cathedral’ was delivered deadpan, without any saving grace.

No more tripping the light fantastic for those good ol’ cops charged with murdering a six year old last week.

The dead boy was a passenger in his father’s car when it came under fire from Louisiana law enforcement officers.

Taken before the fatal shooting, Facebook photos of father and son make you think ofa beam of light between them.

A long way from luminous, the officers’ leaden mug shots suggest graceless lives lived on a flat earth peopled by perps, victims and law enforcement; and barely a human soul among the lot of them.

Maybe with partners and families they managed to enter into the spirit of the thing (thething spirited, spiritualised because people have entered into it); or perhaps prison-style purgatory is where they’ve been living all along.

Half-way between the bombing of Coventry and the recent recollection of it, in theearly 1980s the same flat tone was clearly audible in the singing voice of Terry Hall, lead vocalist in Coventry’s best-known band, The Specials. He set about using it to deliberately poignant effect, even if it was also part of his personality (the singer’s persona who previously worked in a stamp collecting shop).

A gift to be able to turn it on and off. But what if you can’t give it back?

Life among the graceless must be a crying shame,

#63 Alienation Across The Mersey

October 17, 2015

Something twisted this way comes,
Male voice mixed with metal
Iron in the soul – mirror shades without the wearing of:
No way none of yews is coming through to me.

Out on the rob with a one-armed bandit – scally lad (18) and an older man (30) with only the one hand. Broke into an estate agent – that will get you a house and a purposeful life of paying for it, as if.

Stolen cash, stolen fishing tackle (people pay good money to perform their solitude), and a stolen Mitsubishi pick-up that’s red rag to a pig. Police car chase through Wallasey in the early hours, racing past the use-by dates of late Victorian streets.

Forty minutes on, local cop throwing down a ‘stop stick’ (tire deflation device).

Not stopping, the vehicle ploughs, mows, drives off. Three days afterwards Clayton Ronald Williams admits causing the death of family man PC Dave Phillips (34). In courtthe charge against him is read out: murder.

A jury will decide. But who decides when adolescent alienation may be integrated into society? And please don’t define this attitude as ‘testosterone’, as if modern Man is only age-old monkey glands.

On different days this could have been Mercutio, inviting death by Tybalt with irony in his soul. Or Johnny Rotten pantomiming the Anti-Christ. Or first across the wire and into the enemy trench. All of them shielded by the same conviction:

No way none of yews is coming through to me.

Lazy Lazarus

January 26, 2013

Anyone with information is asked to call 101 and ask for Log Number 630 for 25/1/13. That’s how Devon and Cornwall police have recorded the death of a would-be armed robber who was overpowered by punters in a betting shop – one of those betting shops where the listlessness is so thick and suffocating you could use it as loft insulation. At around 6.45pm Friday, a 50-something bloke strode into the Ladbroke’s on Crownhill Road, Plymouth (pebble-dashed, next to the fish’n’chip shop with the scaffolding), brandishing a ‘pistol-like weapon’ (subsequent police description) and wearing a gas mask. Must have been the gas mask: his face hidden but the punters could see immediately this was moreDad’s Army than Grand Theft Auto. They didn’t panic but sounds like he did when maybe a dozen of them piled in: can’t breathe; passing out; never to regain consciousness. But was he conscious that he couldn’t pull it off even with a ‘pistol-like weapon’ in his hand? Is that what kept you down on the pale blue vinyl flooring, Lazarus? That no one pays attention to you; still wouldn’t, even if you got up and walked.

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Tag Archives: Policing

#102 Memo To An American Police Officer

#65 Graceless, Sometimes Deliberately So

#63 Alienation Across The Mersey

Lazy Lazarus