Here’s a lovely little vignette from yesterday’s Andytown News, subsequently picked up on Talk Back. It isn’t very significant in the scheme of things, but it does add a little colour.
The gist of the story is that Broadway woman Deirdre Morrison got a phone call at seven in the morning on Wednesday. It turned out to be the police. Apparently they had got a report that there was a dead body lying in the street, and they wanted Deirdre to go and take a look at it. She initially thought the caller was taking the hand, but it turned out that it was in fact Woodbourne barracks and their request was quite serious. Luckily, when she went out and took a look, it turned out it was just some woman passed out drunk.
“The cop seemed relieved when I said it was just someone drunk. A couple of minutes later an ambulance and police patrol arrived,” she added.
“But it was really cheeky of them to ask me to do their job. Imagine if it had been a dead body, I would have been traumatised. This has just proved to me that the cops are incompetent and lazy.”
Actually, when I first heard this I too thought it might have been a joke. But no, the cops have admitted it happened. Which is all too plausible, in fact. Here’s the conclusion of Ciarán Barnes’ article:
The Broadway dead body debacle is not the first time the PSNI has found itself caught up in a self-inflicted farce. During the summer officers refused to chase vandals over a fence because of “health and safety issues”, while in January they refused to respond to an emergency call in case they were attacked with snowballs.
One might add the peeler who was quoted last week as blaming the credit crunch for an upsurge of armed robberies in Derry. The question is, what does this tell us about the new middle-class intake of PSNI officers?
ejh said,
October 17, 2008 at 5:34 pm
What would a large vignette be?
Phil said,
October 17, 2008 at 7:50 pm
A vigne.
splinteredsunrise said,
October 18, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Yes, I knew it was a diminutive but what of? Vigne would make sense then.