Fixing the fixers

On Tuesday and Friday evenings I clean an office after my regular job which means that I’m still in the building after 9pm. The office overlooks a busy main road and there are the usual sounds of sirens and traffic. Last night, at around 9.15 I heard what sounded like a large amount of scrap metal being dropped onto the ground.

Almost. It always take a while for my brain to work out what I can see before me in these situations. It seems that a small black car had pulled out from the car park of the neighbouring building when another, almost identical small black car had swerved to avoid it and had run into a lamp post on my side of the road. By the time I got to the window the first car was in the middle of the road pointing in the opposite direction to the other.

There is a fire station a few yards from where this happened and several firemen were on the scene within seconds. Within minutes two fire engines were blocking the traffic off in one lane while police from a station that is also close by directed it around the damaged cars. The driver of the second car was injured badly enough for it to take half an hour for him to be removed from the vehicle to the waiting ambulance.

This was all dealt with and cleared up within an hour. The two damaged cars were deposited, for the time being, in the car park next door. Sand was spread across the oil spill by the lamppost. Broken bits of car were swept up. What struck me was that I had seen all three emergency services acting in a calm and coordinated manner, comforting uninjured passengers, shepherding pedestrians out of the way, making things safe.

From the fifth floor I had a clear view and felt rather detached after the initial shock, as if I was watching a play. For those directly involved, who had to see and hear the shock and pain close up it must have been very different. It is easy to forget that these men and women often attend situations like this daily, even hourly, and are expected to take it in their stride. The rest of us can walk away and forget about it but it does not surprise me that some in the police, fire and ambulance services crack under the strain or behave in a way that doesn‘t meet our expectations.

Hours before the traffic accident I had watched a video recorded in Nottingham of police officers trying to handcuff a man. A cab driver had begun recording the event because one of the officers had repeatedly tazered the individual even though he was already on the ground and vulnerable. He was simply trying to avoid having his hands cuffed. He was also punched in the head a number of times. This went on in front of a crowd of people who were clearly angry about what was happening but the police concerned carried on regardless of their comments. I suspect that they were unaware of the fact that this was being recorded (which seems a bit naïve these days) and would have stopped it if they had known.

It has raised questions about the use of tazers which were regarded as a non lethal option for subduing potentially dangerous suspects, better than guns. I am more interested in why someone is prepared to obviously and repeatedly inflict pain in a way that seems unnecessary to most of us. Have those involved become so hardened by what they have seen and experienced that they do this sort of thing without thinking twice about it? Did any of them question for a moment what their colleagues were doing and consider stopping them? Was it just the end of a long and difficult shift?

Personally I feel that we expect rather too much of our emergency services. We are not there when a drunk vomits in the van that is carrying him to the police station, we aren’t the ones who have to clean it out. Ambulance personnel increasingly face attacks when they attend a situation and firemen go home to their families and act as if nothing has happened, having seen the consequences of a fire. For the police in particular there are no second chances if they get it wrong.

I am not excusing the behaviour of the police in that video and I have concerns about the way some have dealt with demonstrators over the years. It worries me that they are being deliberately wound up to be more aggressive ahead of these events by some of those responsible for managing them. However I believe that we should become as understanding and respectful towards them as we are now expected to be towards military personnel. It is clear that there is a link between the stress of serving in a war zone and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We are often shielded from the war zones that some places in our country have become and I think that once the dust of this most recent example of police brutality has settled, we need to look at how we are dealing with the people who clean up the mess so that we don’t have to.