Griffin Close #2: So Many Police…
This is a crime I didn’t witness. Partly because it was less a crime than a misunderstanding; partly because I was asleep. But I was nearby, and it did involve many, many police.

Griffin Close was home to close on 1000 freshers from Birmingham University, and I have mentioned before that I used to be a PG supervisor there. There were four supervisors’ flats, and we would have one week on duty followed by three off. There was usually five people per flat, and we’d take it in turns to be the one who slept with the duty mobile phone next to us.

One morning, I wandered into the kitchen for breakfast to find R looking drained. He had had the mother of all duty calls. I pulled up a chair and he recounted his story, which he had pieced together as best he could from the various witnesses.

Having gone to the union one evening, one of our charges returned home in the small hours drunk, frisky, and dragging some poor unfortunate with her for a bout of genital judo. As is often the way of these things, the unfortunate in question was not to be identified with her extant boyfriend, who turned up at her flat a little while after she and her newfound spunkmonkey. As spunkmonkey began to bang her, her suspicious, angry and drunk boyfriend began to bang at the door.

Spunkmoney decided – rather wisely – that it would be wise to get out of her and her flat as promptly as possible. But, with only one door, this would be tricky. Rather less wisely, he decided that jumping from the window would be a good idea. From the ground floor flats, he would certainly have got away with it. But he was on the second floor. The odds of avoiding injury were not in his favour.

Nevertheless, he pushed at the window. The pane dislodged and embedded itself, excalibur-like, in the turf below. Spunkmoney followed and, from the dent in the ground, missed the glass by the tiniest of margins. Yet he was unhurt. Naked, but unhurt.

Now: this is where things get interesting. Apparently, one of the factors that the police use when determining what kind of response to send to a reported incident is a function of the number and kind of calls that they get about it. Suddenly, they started to get a lot of calls from Griffin Close. Some were in relation to events at the flat, where shouting, damage to a front door, damage to a window and a vicious fight between an apparently wronged boyfriend and his erstwhile partner had alternately entertained and terrified the neighbours, and where and assorted death threats to assorted people had been issued. By all accounts, the boyfriend looked to be in the mood to make good on those threats. Other calls were in relation to a naked youth who had been seen hiding in various bushes around the site. The police, not unreasonably, decided that they had to respond in some force.

So it was that we were visited by several riot vans with an armed tactical response unit on its way in respect of an attempted murder believed currently to be in progress, and a helicopter with a bright spotlight searching the area for a sex pest.

And I slept through it all.

Length? Well, the entry in the duty log went over a number of pages…
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 15 Feb 2008, 13:01, Reply)