Tonight:
4°c
I’m being preyed on by the boys in blue
Deborah Maby19 Mar 2009
Being a child of the Sixties I have a healthy disregard for authority. Nevertheless, I have always felt the police are on my side.
I've never stolen anything, never carried an offensive weapon and I don't break the speed limit. So why is it that the only occasions in my life when I have felt the police are my enemy are when I'm on my bike?
At 5.45am last Monday I was cycling through Marylebone on my way to the early shift at work. I have cycled the same route for years and know it backwards. In Melcombe Street there is a junction where the light is invariably red and I know that at that time there is never, ever, anything coming the other way. So I did what
I always do: stopped, looked, then cycled slowly across. I was posing no danger to anyone. Yet a few streets later, a police car drew up alongside me. I stopped.
“Tell me, madam,” said one officer, in a nasty, faux-ingratiating tone, “what do you think a red light means?” He got out of his car — and very quickly became rude and aggressive. His sidekick tried to interrupt and speak to me himself more reasonably but my man was having none of it.
I told him I was late for work, and please could I go — at which point he threatened to arrest me. He started filling out a form and asked for my name and address, taking them down as slowly as possible to delay me further, even making me spell the word London for him. It's not the £30 penalty notice I minded; it's that I felt genuinely scared that this bully now had my home address.
Police priorities seem badly skewed. Several years ago I was involved in car crash in Stoke Newington which involved both my car and the other driver's being written off. It was entirely my fault and I told the police so. Yet they couldn't have been more charming; and a few months later a nice, polite letter arrived telling me they had decided to take no action against me. I was a car driver, someone with whom they could identify.
A year ago, by contrast, I was knocked off my bike by a skip lorry, which then ran over my bike. When I asked the police to come over, they refused, saying that if I wasn't badly hurt they weren't interested. I filed a complaint about the skip-lorry driver to my local police station but never heard anything back, despite receiving £3,000 damages from the driver's insurers.
Every year 3,000 people are killed on the roads by cars, while an average of one a year is killed by a cyclist. Yet it's the middle-aged woman cyclist who gets harangued at dawn for a minor infraction that endangers no one. You can't blame cyclists for getting the feeling that the police simply don't like us.
