Nasty People
It’s surprising how many detained persons try to illicit a reaction from a police officer by giving them verbal abuse. I mean, they’re already in handcuffs, in a prison cage in the back of a van, but it seems like they still want to provoke a fight. Perhaps it’s a fun game.
Luckily for me, it’s very hard to make me bite in these circumstances, but I’m sure there are officers out there with a much shorter fuse whose buttons will be pushed by these people.
The other day I was get the usual “bald” and “grey” comments. I just find them funny, you see, I am going bald and grey. Nothing to upset me there. So he upped his game calling me “fat”. Of course, each of these comments were accompanied by the obligatory “F”, “C” and “T” words, which I’m omitting from here, I’m sure you get the picture without them being required. Anyway, I’m not a slim chap by any stretch, I’m 13st 6lbs, and have a slight “Ned Kelly” on show. So again I can just laugh it off and ignore it. “Yes, that’s right I am… I love pies yum yum yum” etc.
So he moves on to the fact that I was bullied at school. Every copper in the land was bullied at school you see. That’s so obvious. It’s why we like to lock people up, to restore our feeling of power after feeling so cruelly impotent at school. Well, I was never bullied at school, and none of my colleagues were either. Yet it seems Joe Public thinks all coppers were. Perhaps it rationlises in their tiny minds the fact that we don’t like bullies and scrotes. “Yes, that’s right I was. Everyday, they called me fat grey bald and stupid and it made me so bitter I became a policeman so I could lock up people like you” etc.
It’s all very easy to ignore, it’s not the first time I have heard it. He sees that he’s not getting the reaction he wants so he tries a new one. “I hope your daughter gets raped by a nonce while she’s at school”. Hmm… a bit nastier that one. I have no children, so again this is of no consequence to me, but it does get me thinking about how I would react if I had a daughter, or worse still, if I had a daughter that had suffered sexual abuse of some sort. There isn’t really much I can make light of in reaction to that comment, so I sit and ignore him.
Maybe, due to my silence, he thinks he’s scored. He goes on into graphic detail about what he hopes the nonce will do to my daughter. Then he decides he’d like to be the nonce telling me he’d rape my daughter himself because that would be funnier for him. I’m glad I don’t have a daughter as I feel like that he probably would have provoked me by now. I continue to sit in silence.
He then changes tack again. “I hope all your family dies” etc. My mum is currently undergoing chemotherapy, she’s not very well, but I’m confident she will be ok once she has completed her treatment. But he’s finally striking a chord with me now. He goes on about each family member in turn, describing horrible deaths that he hopes befalls them, and eventually he wins. I tried hard to resist but I guess everyone has their breaking point. I shout at him to “shut up or I’ll get in there with you and smash your face in”. I’m instantly ashamed of what I have said, but at least I know I would never actually do that. It was an idle threat. I’m not a fighter at all. I can’t fight, and won’t fight. Some bobbies are happy to start wrestling people to the floor, or going toe to toe in order to gain control in violent situations. I’m not - I’ll go straight for my CS and back off any day. I’m not risking getting a punch when I can drop someone from 15 feet away, but that’s another story!
He provoked a reaction, so he won. He sat in the back then laughing about how he’d knock me out if were ever went one on one. He kept asking me for a fight - one he was never going to get, but at least he’d stopped going on about raping my daughter and killing my mother. Now he just went on and on about how he’d batter me, then when I was lying in a bloody mess on the floor, he’d bugger me, and then when I lay there bleeding and crying, he’d piss all over me. It was much easier for me to ignore this and to make light of it again, so I just let him carry on, but I was still ashamed that for one instant in the 15 minute onslaught that I was subjected to, that I let my guard down and lost my cool.
I learned something about myself that day. I learned that you can say what you like about me, just don’t bring my mum into it!