One morning last week before eight, a couple of police cars shot past our flat and stopped just beyond where we could see without pushing our faces right up against the window. Sirens and lights. Cornflake wondered what could be going on. It was too early for me to care, but when I left home for the studio shortly afterwards, the road was blocked off at one end. There was a significant police presence, that got me curious. Later in the day Cornflake and I unimaginatively, put forward some road traffic scenarios to explain it all. We should have applied more imagination, more crime style.
That evening I was winding down on Facebook when a newspaper video article popped up. Video taken just a few doors down from our home. A man pulling a gun on a policeman, who bravely took him down with a taser. My first response was OMG!
It turned out that it was a replica gun and the policeman was not your regular plod but part of a parliamentary protection team. Whatever that is. In addition to the replica gun pointing criminal, and the taser toting policeman, the video included a push bike. I’m totally behind the idea that gun violence shouldn’t be glamourised, but I found the homeliness suggested by a bicycle, during a dull London morning rush hour much less dramatic than I would have imagined a gun/taser stand off to be. Perhaps, in part because I would have said that pulling guns, real or replica, on policemen was a nighttime activity, not a pre breakfast one.
I might have watched an episode too many of Miami Vice.
Has glamorous movie violence given me unrealistic expectations of actual street crime? Do I have unreasonable requirements of real life drama? Might I have been more impressed if the policeman looked like Don Johnson and the baddie was standing by a Lamborghini? Does crime need a soundtrack to impress?
Well, yes I probably have watched too much Miami Vice.
The dullest dramatic crime event I’ve been involved in was many years ago, one afternoon in December. I got caught up in a pre covid style lockdown in a huge record store on Oxford street. A bank across the road had been robbed by armed men. The perpetrators were on the run on foot. A thoroughly unsuccessful enterprise, the robbers having arrived after the money had already left the bank. The police thought they might have run in amongst the music and video tape shoppers. Yes, dear reader, the police potentially locked us in a shop with desperate, disappointed gun men. After hours of sitting on the filthy floor, while the police searched every inch of the displays for hidden firearms, we were still not allowed to leave via the front, side or back exits. We were escorted off the premises in small groups over the roof top fire escapes. Eventually we made it out through offices on Brook street.
Exciting, full of tension and suspense? No. It was inconvenient and in turn, ridiculous, and boring, mostly it was boring and uncomfortable.
Real life drama isn’t all that dramatic……or is that just me?
fat tart 