Go set a fucking watchman

I’m not going to pretend I’ve ever had any real run-ins with the police. As a young-ish looking white middle-class woman from Kent, my encounters with the police started with Brownies and ended with watching some poor kid get arrested at Lovebox when the dogs sniffed his stash. I’m as hardcore as a cabbage patch kid before their nefarious siblings arrived out of a trash can with an American accent and a cock eyed drool. I’ve never even been pulled over for a driving offence, despite the fact that I’m a pretty rubbish motorist.

So much, for the best, it seemed, having yesterday, for the first time, in my life, attracted the ire of Her Majesty’s Policeforce. No, I’m not on David Cameron’s watch list for dangerous conspiracy theorists (well I probably am). No, I got in the way of the blues and twos on my bike.

I’m a flagrant cycling rule breaker. In a city like London, my fragile body up against rumbling trucks, roaring motorbikes, yes and police cars trying to beat the rush hour (there was no real emergency, but I’ll come to that later), my one responsibility, in a city with upwards of 12.5 cycling accidents a day) is to stay alive. And for me that means staying ahead of the traffic at all costs, even if that means jumping the odd, well-calculated red light. And I actually have science behind me. Women are far more likely to be killed on bikes because they are not as aggressive cyclists as men. Rule breaking on a bike is self-preservationary, and it is so well known, you are very unlikely to get stopped for it, unless you happen to be an idiot and do it on Liverpool Street where they are trying to fill their offers by doling out £50 fines. One day, I guess my time will come, but I’m ready for it, and when it does, I’ll happy pay up for all the other times I’ve sailed on through and stayed alive – my biggest run-ins with death have always happened where I haven’t been able to stay ahead of the traffic and have nearly been dragged under a lorry. But that’s an aside. The reason I had a run-in with police car yesterday is because I didn’t stop, and I didn’t stop because had I done so, it would have run me over.

Cycling down Bethnal Green Road, I heard the all too familiar wail of sirens. I was cycling down a narrow stretch, cars parked either side, with a narrow pseudo cycling lane delineated from the pavement by a slight difference in tarmac shade. It’s not an official cycle lane. People walk in them all the time. They are there because the pavement is flanked by Boris bikes, so some people use them to cycle in, as the edges of the pavement have been sloped down in line with the road. Yesterday, because the road ahead was clear, and someone was walking in the pseudo cycle lane, I chose to stay on the road. I was also sick and desperate to just get home and collapse and it meant not taking a two second detour. I felt the police car up my arse.  The road ahead was clear, either side were parked cars, I was cycling pretty fast, and as soon as I got to the bit of path where the cycle lane sloped down into the road, I pulled over. The police car pulled up next to me.

“Do your brakes work?” said the bearded Asian driver, probably no stranger to police brutality (or at the very least overzealous stop and search) himself, winding down the window.”

“What?” I said, half expecting to have been caught for some minor transgression, but for once, entirely innocent as to what.

“You heard me,” he snarled back. Actually I was flustered, as one tends to be when one is approached by an authority figure. “Do your brakes work?  You should have stopped love.”

“I was trying to find somewhere to pull over,” I spluttered back at him, incredulous. There had been nowhere to stop. And if he was on an emergency call, what the fuck was he doing fannying around ticking me off? The car swept off, lights blaring, and I was left, hot, bothered and not a little bit pissed off.

Bikes being by far the most effective form of transport in the city, I soon overtook the police car at the lights, no longer blaring, or sirens wailing. Just trying to beat traffic on the way back to the base behind the Museum of Childhood. I sauntered in front of the car, confident now I was no longer breaking the law, and glaring behind me through the windscreen, shaking my head in disgust. As the light turned amber then green, I took my time about kicking off, knowing they would have to wait behind me, and in any case, surrounded by other cyclists. Where was the hurry now?

The lights switched back on, the sirens sounded up. Obviously I had annoyed them, and they pulled rank, clearing the road ahead and shooting off back for, no doubt, their tea (they tend to congregate at the top of my road where the fish and chip shop is.)

I got home fuming, before lying on the sofa like a dying duck to watch ‘The Simpsons’. I’d only been back at work for show (and a training session) having gone home early the previous day where I read Go Set A Watchman cover to cover whilst sweating buckets and aching feverishly – much more than just a Lovebox hangover. As an arbiter of corruption, social injustice, and the lone voice of an innocent, ignorant white girl railing against unfairness, it was as engaging as any GCSE text I’d been forced to literarily criticise as a youngster. I loved it, but there was no way I was going to weave it into a blog like I know what I’m talking about race or segregation or the Deep South any of that stuff, save for projecting myself onto the character of Scarlett O’Hara as a romantic teen in Gone With The Wind.

And then, this morning I watched this, (no seriously, just watch it) and it made my blood literally boil (I’ve still got a fever ya know, so I’m more highly strung than usual).  I’m not going to say a lot about the arrest and subsequent death of Sandra Bland. I’m not qualified.

But my little nothingy show-of-cheek police encounter yesterday says everything you need to know about white privilege. I got to go home. Sandra Bland did not.  It also goes to show that keeping police power in check in this country is vital to ensuring trust. For me, this trust, instilled by officers teaching road safety in infant school, eroded just a little bit yesterday. But by and large,  in the U.K. we have it, much more so than in the U.S., where, in particular, an all out race war is clearly taking place, which I understand just that little bit better having read Harper Lee’s prequel to it yesterday; and where Sandra Bland, like so many other black people before her have died, or been otherwise appallingly treated for a crime no worse than mine, that of standing up to a policeman when he’s fucking wrong. I like to think it’s better in the U.K. We all do, us blinked members of the “law abiding community.”But then many of us aren’t a minority under scrutiny like so many of my neighbours here in the East End of London, so what the fuck would we know, anyway?