Stick em up

As some of you may know I am a big fan of US cop shows, CSI and stuff like that.
What I am not so keen on is seeing the police over here in action first hand.

I was on the train, happily reading my book, with just one other guy sitting on the same bank of five chairs.
By the kind of bad luck that I hoped wouldn’t follow me here, the two wasted idiots who had been screaming and shouting on the platform for the last ten minutes got on and sat on the bank of four chairs across the aisle from us.
They were completely off their heads, but also, fairly harmless. I mean the guy was built like a brick shit house, but he just kept telling the woman to sit down and be quiet until they got to NYC, so they were really not bothering me and I went back to reading my book.

Unfortunately when the conductor came along for tickets (which by the way they do most efficiently on all trains and should be used an example to conductors in the UK) they didn’t have any.
The guy got up and was swaying around giving his cock’n’bull story about how they did have them but they lost them blah blah blah.
Anyway, they really weren’t doing any harm, the only thing was he kept swearing and people don’t really seem to swear that much over her.
I barely even noticed, and could probably have taught him some far better words and phrases, but the conductor was deeply concerned that he was offending people with his blue language.
Anyway, he headed off down the train and I assumed that was the end of that.

Five minutes later he came back with two cops.
I don’t know if cops ride on all trains or if they just happened to be there, but it was a pretty good trick. Despite really being totally unnecessary.
Anyway, it all started off very calmly with the guy saying they’d be good, and the cops saying ok if you’re good there wont be any problems.
But the dude was drunk, so he was a bit loud, and still swearing, and couldn’t really stop when the cops told him to.
So it got a bit more heated. And then the guy sitting opposite me actually picked up my bags and made me move up the carriage, which I thought was overkill but it turned out it wasn’t.
Things quickly escalated, and I still had a totally clear view of them and could hear everything and I really cant believe they did.
I cant help feeling that if this had been in England these guys would have been told not to do it again, and then left alone. Because really, why would you antagonize people who are wasted, but not doing any harm?
I will never, ever do anything wrong in this country. As far as I can see there is a strong desire to do some “serious” policing which is only ever going to lead to problems.

Anyway, long story short, it reached the point where they had cuffed this woman, a fairly little woman who was so out of it she couldn’t really stand up, and they just said it was for her own protection.
But this understandably upset the guy, and I was fairly close to sticking my nose in at this point because it was so unnecessary.
So then the policemen decided that they wanted to cuff the guy too, and he just sat there asking them why.
Which they amazingly interpreted as him resisting arrest.
So they started hitting him with their batons. And I mean hitting. He was big and drunk enough not to really notice at the time, but he must have been black and blue the next morning.
So the hitting and the shouting continued, with the cops very carefully and loudly shouting “stop resisting sir, stop resisting” so that all the witnesses could say he was resisting arrest.
No joke, I could have got cuffs on him without any of this nonsense.
But they weren’t really trying to cuff him, they were waiting for him to follow orders, put his hands behind him, turn round, and wait to be cuffed. I cant understand why they didn’t just reach round, take hold of his arms and cuff him anyway. But they didn’t even try that.

And then they told everyone to evacuate the whole carriage, and maced him.
Bear in mind that this guy is still just sitting in his seat on the train at this point, asking why he is being arrested.
So they sprayed a whole can of mace on him, hit him a bit more and then cuffed him. And then we stopped at the next station and a whole van load of cops came on and dragged them off, with enough force to make you think it was a bank robbery, not a bit of drunk and disorderly.

The most telling thing was when we were all going through into the next carriage and someone said should we do something and one guy said “I aint going in there, I’m a black man, what do you think they’d do to me?!”. Quite right too, I’m a small white girl but to be honest I don’t think that would have saved me either.