So this young fellow I know was in a club with his friends. As he leaves, another young man comes up behind him and hits him down the side of the head with a beer glass. It shatters along his skull and tears a bit into his neck. The first young man goes down and stays there on the club floor. There's blood everywhere. He's unconscious at best. The second young man walks away nonchalantly. He doesn't even try to run away. It's all caught on the CCTV.It might not be the CCTV, you know.
It might be because he knows there’s little chance of him being caught, and an even smaller chance of him ever getting a realistic penalty for it…
So, my young friend in the club? He is valiant. He didn't particularly want to have the police prosecute but he let himself be talked into giving evidence. It had been the way his attacker had walked unhurriedly away from his bleeding body (and it might easily have been his bleeding corpse).Aaaaaand that’s where it all starts to go wrong:
The police took it seriously. It was grievous bodily harm. You can get five years for that, can't you? We have to show that casual savagery like this has consequences. It's the essence of civilisation. It was a great endeavour he started on.
But then they lost the crime number. And then they found it again. And then they couldn't get the accident report from the hospital. And then they still couldn't get the report from the hospital. And after asking for it a couple of times over two or three months, my valiant young friend felt he was presuming on police time and gave up.And anyone who knows about this will think twice before putting themselves through the same ordeal.
So, those crime figures, eh?
I know detective resources are thin and great demands are placed on the police service. Also, we all know the NHS records system is impenetrable to outsiders. But the police are trained investigators, that's also true isn't it? And they do have powers we hear about. They can enter your house to seize documents, can't they get into the hospital somehow?Or, not.
Maybe they couldn't find out which hospital it was. And then there are the directions. Multimap is only available to people with the internet. These things are always more complicated than we think.
Related.
3 comments:
Finding those hard to solve violent crimes a drain on canteen and blogging time?
Available at most book shops now -Inspector Widget's "100 ways to lose a crime", including the lesser known Crematorium and Hospital dodges.
Heh!
The police have always found it difficult to get info from the NHS.
I was once trying to help Special Branch track down terrorists who had been renting one of my buy-to-lets. I gave them dozens of letters than continued to arrive after they had left, which clearly pointed to them having generated to fake IDs, one such item being a letter from the local maternity hospital announcing that a health visitor would like to come round to visit Baby Mohammed (I assume that a baby had been born, but neither he nor his mother had lived at the flat).
They said it was no good to them, despite the fact the maternity hospital was two hundred yards up the road, as the NHS simply would not hand over any info to third parties.
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