Thursday, September 25, 2008

Motorway Cops

You know, I like to think I generally try and keep (for when I get the time to post!! ha) things topical and serious on here. There's a still unpublished musing on the whole Mark Saunders affair loitering in the draft posts section- just what is up with the Independent On Sunday?- and I'm sorry but I think this whole Tarique Ghaffur shambles rumbling on in the big smoke is little more than grown ups acting juvenile and throwing their toys out of the pram, with this whole racism malarkey as a smokescreen. I hope I'm right, but won't gain any pleasure at all to be proved so.

But I've just watched Motorway Cops on the beeb and thought nah balls to high brow blogging lets be populist! Poor wifey has retired early to bed suffering with this cold that everyone has either had or is closely related to someone who has had it (it was my turn last week)- so I've got a bit of time to spare.

So just what were those two Danish girls on? Must have been cocaine if you ask me, to be that plain barking bonkers and aggressive on the carriageway (I've got to admit, I did not see that coming) to relatively normal in custody. Heh I did sympathise with the custody skipper asking the standard issue question of "Have you ever tried to harm yourself" with the mumbled afterthought of "apart from running into moving motorways (twice)!"

What got me though was those two illegal immigrants picked up off the motorway. What kind of ridiculous policy is not arrest them but just send them off to the immigration centre? I acknowledge that should they be arrested, immigration officers would do exactly the same thing of taking no further action, and would simply tell them to attend a walk-in immigration centre. However, entering the country illegally is a criminal offence which means that if they are arrested and sent off toHome Office centres from custody we can get their fingerprints and DNA first. This would help catch out in future the odd one or two who come here with less than honest intentions- and get a concrete date for when they were in the country!

Those two who walked off happy as larry from the two motorway cops, should they ever get stopped again- if they've got any sense at all they'll say they've only just entered the country. That other bloke arrested on the programme had overstayed his visa for 10 years for goodness' sake.

Immigration whinges aside, I would quite like to join traffic and one of these days may get round to making serious enquiries about it. No custody, a decent job car, and the science of accident reconstruction interests me. It's really rather frustrating traffic departments (I still refuse to call it roads policing) are out of favour with politicians and top cops making my chances of joining their ranks somewhat slimmer.