’Police! Open Up!’ - Part Two

.
I commented last week on the plight of the elderly couple in Brooklyn in New York who were mistakenly suspected of being felons, not once but fifty times, by police. The couple received an apology and, of all things, a cheesecake!

Something like it can happen here.

Officers from Hampshire Police recently battered down the door of a young couple in Dibden Purlieu, near Southampton, believing it was the home of a suspected drug dealer. They detained the father of two children until they realised that the suspect had moved out of the property some time before.

Later in the day, officers returned to the house, not with a cheesecake as in the case of the Brooklyn couple, but with a £1.79 bottle of beer and a bunch of flowers.

I think I’d have preferred the cheesecake!
.

‘Police! Open Up!’

.
Let’s see. You’re a nice old couple in your eighties and live in a nicely painted detached house in a nice quiet neighbourhood in Brooklyn in New York. The front lawn is neatly mown, the two bushes neatly trimmed and the Stars and Stripes proudly flutters from a flagpole in front of your house. On the face of it, you are a respectable old couple enjoying your retirement in peace and quiet.

Not so. For over the last eight years, the police have arrived at all hours of the day and night, hammering on their front and back doors and screaming out, ‘Police! Open up!’

Not once but fifty times!

What must the neighbours have thought? Is the old man a drug dealer? Is the old lady running a house of ill-repute? Are the old couple running some sort of illegal racket via the internet? What is going on here?

The answer is that the old couple are indeed a respectable couple enjoying, as one might expect, their retirement. Only, thanks to the police, it’s not quite so peaceful.

It turns out that in 2002 the couple’s address was used as test data for a new computer crime-tracking system - except that when it went live their data remained in the system. Despite their complaints, and assurances from the police that their details would be purged from the system, their data remained on it and the disturbances and upset continued.

However, following the latest incident, the couple’s address has now been flagged with alerts barring police officers from further questioning them. Only time will tell whether this is effective.

One would have thought that the couple could have sued the New York Police Department for substantial damages, but they appear not to have considered this. Maybe because the New York Police Commissioner no less visited the couple last week to apologise and to hand over a conciliatory gesture of a cheesecake.

It must have been a very good cheesecake!
.

‘Good Riddance’ Day

.
New Yorkers have found a neat way of ridding themselves of things reminding them of unpleasant experiences.

In the third annual event of its kind, ‘Good Riddance’ Day enabled New Yorkers to bring their letters, summons, divorce and other papers, newspaper articles and other reminders of the bad things that happened in 2009 to Times Square. Here these items could be shredded, smashed or pulverised and placed into a waste container.

It’s a nice idea, but if only it were that easy!
.

9/11 Remembered

.
On this day, a Tuesday, in 2001, the full horror of what became known as the 9/11 attacks slowly unfolded before a shocked world.

I watched much of the television coverage myself and wrote at the time of that terrible day: ‘Nothing anyone can say can sum up the horror of these incidents and the thousands upon thousands of lives that must have been lost. And there is nothing anyone can say, in the name of religion, politics or anything else, to justify such a barbarous and wanton act of cruelty and callousness.’

Since then, video footage of the Twin Tower attacks, of the burning Pentagon and of the crashed fourth plane in rural Pennsylvania, of people jumping to their certain deaths rather than risk being burned alive, of buildings collapsing and spreading a deadly and suffocating cloud of ashes and other particles, has now been shown so many times that the initial shock has worn off somewhat. Among the very many distressing sounds of that day, we have since heard some of the recorded conversations of rescue workers trying to do their best for other people, and of the last, heart-breaking agonising conversations some passengers had with their families.

At the time, we questioned whether we were watching an impossible reality or some sort of warped fantasy. Were these real planes, explosions, smoke and flames, jumpers, people running from danger, corpses laid out on stretchers on the grass, over-stretched rescue teams risking their lives in impossibly dangerous conditions and people quietly helping or queuing to donate blood - or were they all scenes and props from a movie?

But it wasn’t fantasy. It was all horribly true, and it was impossible not to weep and pray for all of those who had been touched and affected by that monstrous act and to extend a hand of compassion and the warmth of love to them.

As, in remembrance, we do today.
.