14 posts tagged “police”

I saw a bit of this on telly, but didn’t expect it to be passed around the internet as much. Background: ‘Safer communities together’ is the local slogan for the police, much like ‘To protect and serve’ for some American police departments.

Welcome to Brown’s Britain.
   And one copper who might give so many of the good ones at the Met a black mark.
   I know there were some difficulties with protesters and I assume the police officer’s judgement was coloured by that. One would hope, however, that the training would keep the macho bollocks in check.

My favourite episode of Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, starring Michael Crawford as Frank Spencer, who did his own stunts in the show. Trivium: the best Spencer impersonation I saw was done by Karl Urban, when we were kids at primary school.
   I began this post as I was looking for the police interrogation scene, in part three. The stunts and courtroom scene are classic—this episode has it all. The final courtroom quotation is priceless and I used to quote it at law school: ‘British justice must be done / Not only done, but seen. / And now I’ve seen it done to me, / I know how done I’ve been.’

The Murdoch Press published a story called ‘The 20 Greatest Car Chases in Movie History’. Yet the Mauricio Merli starrers of the 1970s were all omitted, which I thought was an oversight given that French film Taxi made it. The majority of the list was made up of Anglo–American fare (though I do agree with the nods given to Ronin and Bullitt). Some could be beaten by episodes of Cobra 11.
   So here are a few from the late Mr Merli on the big screen in an attempt to redress the balance. Please note there is violence in these clips. And the villains drive BMWs; unsurprisingly, the hero always drives Italian.

It surprises me that O. J.: the Untold Story, the BBC documentary about the likely murderer of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, has never aired in the US, though it has aired in other nations.
   I am no fan of O. J. Simpson (admittedly he was good in Capricorn One) and there was a lot that emerged in the 1995 trial that showed the guy was a slimeball.
   The latest Las Vegas incident shows a man who has flouted the law so many times for other acts that he has become arrogant and callous.
   However, the documentary convinced me that Jason Simpson was the real killer, as I have said on this blog before.
   Perceptions are very different among different groups of people. The majority of white Americans thought O. J. was guilty. The majority of black Americans thought O. J. was innocent.
   As it has come up a few times during the last few days, here is a link to the BBC preview on its website.
   I paste from that article and I admit to taking a lot more than what is reasonable below, but it’s only out of concern that the BBC won’t keep some of these older pieces online, especially as it bears the old layout. (I’ll remove the below on request and I ask readers to click on the above link for the original.)

Wednesday, 4 October, 2000, 11:46 GMT 12:46 UK
New clues in OJ Simpson murder mystery

By Malcolm Brinkworth, producer of a BBC programme which sheds new light on the case of former American football star OJ Simpson.

… OJ—The Untold Story reveals that clues that some believe pointed away from Simpson as the killer were dismissed or ignored …

Dr Lee: Crime scene was "contaminated"

Dr Henry Lee, one of the world’s most respected forensic scientists, states … that the crime scene was “out of control”, was contaminated and that the police had destroyed so much at the murder scene that it was impossible to reconstruct what happened that night.

Dr Lee also reveals that the police failed to take crucial blood samples from Nicole’s back which might have helped solve the case.

Who did kill Nicole Simpson?

It is their view that the evidence was seriously compromised and would have been rejected by the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service.

Potential new suspect

The film also explores new areas, which have not been fully investigated by the authorities. It features private investigator Bill Dear and follows his enquiries into Jason, Simpson’s son from his first marriage …

Jason: History of violence

The programme examines the evidence that shows that six months before her murder, Nicole was put under surveillance.

A man called Bill Wasz, who he says, had supplied cocaine to Simpson, Nicole and friends, had been hired by one of Simpson’s friends to follow her and take photographs of Nicole with any man she might meet.

He recorded his surveillance in a notebook. In an interview from prison, where he is currently serving a jail term for armed robbery, Wasz explained that 10 days after handing over the photographs, he had been asked by Simpson's same friend to a meeting for a new assignment.

At that meeting, Wasz says, Simpson’s friend then hired him as a hitman to kill Nicole.

Police ignored ‘hitman’ claims

The programme reveals that the police were made aware of Wasz’s story just a few weeks after the murders and … the prosecution decided to dismiss it.…

Finally, one of the Bushes meets some New Zealanders—the First Lady is greeted by New Zealand soldiers and police officers in Afghanistan. The haka is a customary greeting, borne from Māori culture.
   I was going to go in to a bit more depth on this video about how nice it was for Mrs Bush to have some contact with our country. However, I am embarrassed by some 19-year-old New Zealander on YouTube who has entered several racist, anti-Māori comments at this video’s page.
   If any Kiwis want to comment on JZZ’s anti-Māori rhetoric, which I think embarrasses our country as it is hardly representative of what most New Zealanders think, please head on over to that page.
   Normally I would just consider him a teenage troublemaker and troll, but there’s another part of me that says if we keep turning a blind eye to our young people’s misbehaviour, then are we telling them that it is acceptable?
   Slamming a single race is hardly productive.
   I assume for the purposes of this discussion that the teenager is Caucasian, statistically speaking. I realize he could be another race.
   In one comment, while calling Māori unkind, a ‘wishy-washy race are full of fakes, liars and cheats,’ he also mentions that no Māori has over 50 per cent blood. Anyone see the easy target there? Using JZZ’s logic: the Māori were, after all, living in relative harmony before the arrival of the English—ergo dilution of their blood by pakeha has introduced criminal genes.
   In another comment, Māori are branded uncivilized because they only had a written language since the 1800s. I guess using that logic, that must make my own race superior since the Chinese have had a written language a few thousand years before Christ.
   And a teenager who posts videos of a Toyota Soarer is hardly, as he describes himself, a ‘car connoisseur’. The Soarer can only trace its automotive lineage to 1981, 96 years after the internal combustion engine automobile was first devised.
   Of course these are all silly arguments. By taking JZZ’s logic we get nowhere.
   This is not a politically correct demand for all New Zealanders to “just get along”. But we are obviously creating a generation of some New Zealanders who by their racism will impede national progress.
   The root causes of, say, there being a large Māori–Polynesian prison population stem from colonization and a failure to integrate cultures.
   We cannot turn back the clock but we can become steadily more open-minded to our own solutions that are distinct from the monocultural Westminster system.
   And as a community that once enforced its own standards, perhaps it is time we extended that same thinking to the online world.
   YouTube isn’t a forum to educate in any depth with its limited space. However, it is a place where we may signal disapproval of behaviour with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, and perhaps the odd pithy comment pointing out the faults of racist thinking.

I wasn’t a huge fan of Dick Emery but I have £9 left over from an Amazon UK coupon and have been considering buying his 1972 film, Ooh, You Are Awful (a.k.a. Get Charlie Tully). It is a trivial, film-buff interest: the movie formed the basis of the Hong Kong movie series, 最佳拍檔 (Aces Go Places), and even some of the gags are repeated. The above one, where Dick is in his Mandy character, isn’t in the Chinese film, though others are (almost line for line, in some cases)—and the overall storyline (the location of loot is tattooed on a series of female posteriors) comes straight from here.
   Unless I can find some Alarm für Cobra 11 DVDs through the UK service (the coupon can’t be used at other Amazons), the credit may go on Emery—especially as it expires on June 11. Suggestions on how to waste £9 are welcome (remember, shipping will be £3 to New Zealand).

This has been, apparently, doing the rounds for a while, but I have missed it. It finally came on PDF today from a colleague. Normally I don’t have a lot of sympathy for law-breakers, but this gets extra marks for imagination.
   A Mr Justin Lee was booked for speeding, doing 116 km/h in a 100 km/h zone. This was issued by a police officer:

Justin Lee 1

Justin Lee 2

Justin Lee 3

Justin Lee 4

Just as I finished writing about Philip Glenister getting his driver off a ticket by acting as Gene Hunt, I surfed over to an article about Canadian actor William Shatner linked from the Daily Mail page I cited earlier:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=565380&in_page_id=1879

   In the 1960s, Shatner wore his Capt Kirk uniform rushing to work and was also stopped. He writes:

I got out of my car, dressed in my uniform. The police officer looked me up and down, frowned and asked: “So where are you going so fast at this time in the morning?”
   I told him the truth: “To my spaceship.”
   He sighed. “OK, go ahead,” he said, before adding the Vulcan blessing: “Live long and prosper.”

   Nothing new under the sun.
   The story is quite good, told in the first person. Shatner recounts his lows and the death of his third wife (after what seems to be the final paragraph talking about the price of his autobiography).

The first time I read about Philip Glenister getting his driver off for speeding (35 mph in a 30 mph zone) I chuckled, as he adopted his Gene Hunt persona. The cop saw the actor and said, according to Glenister, ‘I’m terribly sorry about this sir, I’ll let you off this time if you don’t mind.’
   Glenister had apparently said to him prior, ‘Yes, I’m the one on the booze, not him. Go and catch some proper criminals.’
   Then I found the earliest article on the incident in the Daily Mail tabloid which contrasted this with others in the UK:

   Earlier this week it emerged that Sydney Duffy was fined for doing 35mph in a 30mph area when he tried to leave the road quickly as his wife had an epileptic fit. The 63-year-old has appealed against the fine from Cumbria police and will appear in court.
   And Stephanie Cornwall was issued with a £60 fine after rushing to hospital when her six year-old son Alfie was mauled by a dog. The mother, 40, from Leicestershire, was travelling at 37mph in a 30mph zone.

   One law for celebrities?
   The Met should have more sense than to fine people like Mr Duffy and Ms Cornwall.
   At least here the traffic cops allow for some speedometer error and that humans cannot be expected to constantly monitor their speed when traffic safety is at issue. If you kept staring at your speedo, you might get involved in an accident!
   It is worse here in New Zealand than it was 30 years ago but by and large, 5 mph is not something for the cops to get that upset about.
   I know there are exceptions but I am talking in a general sense. As we work in metric, 5 mph is roughly 8 km/h.
   The second incident probably would have been frowned on more today, less so 30 years ago: 7 mph goes past that 10 km/h leeway that some cops have as a rule of thumb.
   I tend to drive at the legal limit but realize that due to speedometer error I can be anywhere between 5 km/h over or under.
   The ‘Your speed is’ digital signs around some parts of New Zealand are helpful as a means of calibrating my own speedometer—so why do so many of them have their displays closed?
   They tend to show that my car’s 50 km/h is actually 47 km/h so I tend to go closer to 55 km/h on my speedo.
   The problem is that speeding here is governed by legislation that brings strict liability, which basically means “no excuses”.
   But I would think a Kiwi copper would have been able to judge in both cases somewhat better than his or her British counterpart.
   I am not sure if we would distinguish between celebrities and everyday folk. Any stories? I know of one incident told to me by an eyewitness (the passenger) where a rich driver was let off because of the car he drove, and the officers wound up going into macho mode to discuss the vehicle and neglected to issue a fine for excessive speeding. I cannot reveal more since I am not permitted to, and I would hope it is exceptional rather than commonplace.
   If a flash car could get me off a fine, I would have really opened up the Astons and Porsche 911 I have driven, but I prefer my clean licence (knock on wood) and was much more careful.