Sunday, May 8, 2011

Unfair Cop

YOUNG Master Bunyip, camping at the Billabong for the time being, ventured into the CBD on Saturday night to celebrate a friend’s birthday. One drink led to another, as it often does with today’s youth, and by midnight he was in no fit state to find his own way home. Taxis were scarce, and a pair that heeded his pleas to stop also declined to take him aboard, which may, or may not, have been illegal but is certainly understandable. Which Silvertop pilot wants to spend the remainder of his shift extracting bits of someone else’s dinner from the seams of the back seat’s upholstery? Fortunately no alcohol – well, just a little bit – had been consumed at the Waterhole, so there was no legal impediment to a doting dad's mercy dash to the corner of Elizabeth and Flinders streets, where the sozzled scamp was holding up a lamppost. That was not, however, the most disconcerting spectacle of the evening.

In 25 minutes of crosstown driving the following sights were observed:

1/ The young bloke who stepped off the footpath, approached the driver’s window and announced, “Your mum’s a slut. I [had relations] with her after the footy.”

2/ The young woman on all fours and throwing up in the gutter as her girlfriends held her hair to the side, lest it be chunked with carrots and vodka smoothies.

3/ Two gents in their twenties, one naked to the waist, trading insults and waving fists. The lights changed before it was possible to determine if blows would be exchanged, but it seems likely they were.

4/ Another young bloke urinating on a tree near the Flagstaff Gardens as a circle of friends looked on.

And finally, the most unsettling thing of all:

5/ Not a single policeman, in a car or otherwise, spotted anywhere inside the CBD.

Victoria’s Police Commissioner Simon Overland is currently embroiled in all sorts of strife, but whatever his other shortcomings the one that most condemns him is the sorry state of Central Melbourne on a Saturday night. If he cannot keep order in the CBD, he does not deserve his considerable salary.

5 comments:

  1. You missed the six blokes on the corner of Studley Park Road and High Street (at the Kew junction outside the pub) who were imitating the Kew Dancing Man. Very funny.

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  2. I downloaded and watched the first episode of "Police Academy UK" last night. It's a real eye-opener what the cops have to put up with these days. If you're stuck for something to watch on a quiet Saturday night, give it a go. They get a cop each from Samoa, Colombia, WA and Zambia to spend 5 weeks with pommy cops cleaning up drunks etc. The sad thing is that Victoria and NSW have both previously imported poms to be the top cops, or their ideas, and that has led to the gutting of policing as we used to know it.

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  3. If the coppers were patrolling in the CBD they might have to arrest and charge God knows how many no-hopers and what would that do for Simon's Crime Statistics? You have to remember,if a crime's not recorded it just didn't happen.

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  4. Don't forget that drink driving is accounted statistically as a major offence, one which enjoys a 100% clean-up rate.

    As a result, your major offence (rape, murder, armed robbery, riding in lycra) statistics are significantly augmented by the 100% drink driving conviction rate.

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  5. Just last Saturday, at 10 in the morning, I watched as a lout leaned halfway out the passenger door of a moving car to throw eggs at the car behind, being driven by a middle-aged woman. I rang the cops, in case the woman lodged a complaint and needed a witness. When I mentioned that the eggs had not made contact with the car, the cop basically snorted and told me that in that case, no offence had really occurred and they could do nothing.

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