Asking for Trouble

The Innocent Policepersons' Consolation Commission has been called upon to determine what degree of blamelessness is compatible with shooting fifty thousand volts into a blind man's back. Police in Chorley had received reports of someone walking around with a samurai sword (such a person was in fact arrested later on), and officers apparently mistook the blind man's white cane for the weapon. Once they'd sat on him for a while, it became evident that he was not the man they were looking for, and Lancashire police have issued an apology. The Metropolitan Firearms and Headbangers' Club, of course, would have handled the matter rather differently, especially given their new-found powers of legal unlawful death over the citizenry: by this time, five days after the event, we would have been told that the blind man was a drunken oaf who had no business on a public pavement, that he had been attacked by anarchists and saved by police, that he was a dusky drug addict, illegal immigrant and rapist who had leaped over barriers and ignored repeated warnings, and that nobody in the force had ever laid eyes on him. The Lancashire force has launched an urgent investigation into the lessons of the incident; clearly, it has a great deal to learn.