Monday, October 05, 2009

War Stories Part VIII - The police negotiator

Continuing the sagas and stories of my working life, up to now anyway. If you want to read the preamble, click here to go to the first posting in the series, which contains a short version of my CV.

The (almost certainly apocryphal) story goes that a number of years ago on a Saturday afternoon in Glasgow City Centre there was a report of a housebreaking in progress (i.e. the offender was still on the premises) in the upper floors of a shop in Buchanan Street (right in the busiest shopping part of Glasgow). Several officers were dispatched to try to catch the suspect who had by now quit via an upper window onto some scaffolding and had climbed up onto the roof of the building, from which there was no escape although there was no way police officers would go onto the roof to try to arrest him as it was considered too dangerous.


As the suspect peered over the edge at the growing crowd who had gathered to see what the police were doing, and the police and public stared back up at the roof, one of the officers, who I'll call Roo, decided that if a prolonged stand-off was to be avoided someone should take swift decisive action, so he went to the police van and retrieved a megaphone.

Making his way back through the crowd of shoppers Roo put the megaphone to his lips and addressed the guy on the roof (and thousands of innocent bystanders) with the immortal line, 

"It's the polis, if you give up and come down right now we'll no kick yer cunt in!"

No comments:

Post a Comment