Planet Notion - Notion Gets Mugged

29/08/2007

Is it true? Are supposed UK terror chiefs Abus Hamza and Izzadeen conducting a long term

plot to send house prices plummeting by making our streets deadlier than a Darfur refugee camp,

and are they using hooded delinquents and immigrant mobs to do it? Notion sends one terrified reporter onto the streets, and waits to see if he makes it back alive...

So, about fifty metres from my house I stop to enjoy a pleasure soon to be outlawed – lighting up at a bus stop. Six hooded guys approach. ‘Gotta fag?’ says one. I gesture with the cigarette – only rolling tobacco. I ask if this will be ok; he just grabs it from my hand. That seems a bit unsociable... Unsociable... anti-social... AH! I could be on to something here.

Obviously, two seconds later he has his hand in my pocket on my iPod. We tussle a little, fall over and he runs off up the street . His mates look as surprised as me – they’d even tried to get him to stop. Now I’m fucked-off and iPod-less. At least I’ll get to talk to the police, eh? Why, then, I wonder, do they have such terrifying powers? The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act of 2005 removed all distinctions between powers of arrest. In the past, we were protected from the occasional power-trip-smalldick policeman (‘There are plenty of wrong ‘uns,’ X admits) by the difference between arrestable, serious arrestable and non-arrestable offences. Now, any constable can arrest you for an offence as minor as dropping litter. Oh, and if you are arrested, the officer is obliged to take a DNA sample, fingerprints and a photograph for the criminal databases – before you’ve even been charged. What happened to innocent until proven guilty? And all this because you’ve pissed off a mini-Hitler rozzer on a bad day with powers the Stasi would like to work under, given to him to fight gangs he never comes across. I suggest that this is a little bit ridiculous. ... ‘No, because we’re not going to arrest someone for pissing us off,’ says X. ‘We’ve gotta use common sense – if we just kept arresting Somali kids for dropping litter cos they looked at us funny we’d get hauled over the coals. We’d get massacred.’ ... Not the point – while he might not do that, he has the power. And so do others. They might. How mean can the streets get if the police wield powers they don’t need, to fight the menace they never see? Y tells me that ‘ the big drive at the minute is from alcohol-related crime. Harassment, fights, anti-social behaviour... it’s rarely deadly and it’s never the gangs.’

So none of it, then, is the street-level initiation of would-be gangster superstars? ... ‘It’s sixteen year olds playing at being hard, or it’s druggies and others getting late night drunks on buses,’ says Y. ‘Organised crime might contribute drugs to the streets, but they stay away themselves.’ Which is all common sense, really. Do DCs X and Y have to deal with them at all then? ‘Never,’ they say.

DCs X and Y are shitting themselves with laughter. Y asks again, ‘You’re writing about street crime? And you just got mugged?’ Yes. Yes I am, and yes I did. Now shut up. We’re in an unmarked squad car, about ten minutes later. Given everything we’ve heard about the dangers on the street these days, I’m wondering: skagheads funding gun purchases from mafiosa in order to blow shit out of the punks in NW5?

DC X: ‘Just kids. They’re bored, they see a chance and they’ve heard so much about it they feel like they’ve got something to live up to.’

DC Y agrees. ‘One of our busiest times is just after schools are out - kids mugging kids.’ Anyway, after twenty minutes of driving around like this it’s obvious they’ve scarpered. We arrange for me to go down to the station; I’ll look at ten photos of kids from NW1, kids on the police database who fit my hazy description. What have they done to be on there? They might be ASBO kids. Or they may just have been arrested and then not charged with a crime. Innocent – but their details kept. Then, they’re presented to me as potential criminals. Innocent? None of us. Mean streets? Well , apparently it’s not the gangs and the guns making them mean; kids and drunks making a nuisance of themselves, and a police force with exaggerated powers and backed by CCT V cameras and databases of potential criminals watching them. We might not be innocent, but we’re probably safer than we thought.