Posted on 06/13/2005 4:03:53 PM PDT by Pokey78
What is "Thames Valley"? Where is she? To those of us who do not gambol within its borders, "Thames Valley" seems ever more of a fantastical fairyland. I hasten to add I don't mean "fairyland" in the eighty-quid-fine-for-homophobic-hate-speech sense, though I'll come to the matter of the "gay police horse" in a moment. Rather, "Thames Valley" seems a state of mind - like Neverland: "It's not on any chart / You must find it in your heart."
Yes, yes, I know there's a river called the Thames and the strip of land running along each bank qualifies as a valley, but as a legal entity "Thames Valley" appears to have been conjured out of thin air. Back in 1968, some fellow abolished the constabularies of real places like Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire and decreed that henceforth these ancient counties were now mere provinces of the "Thames Valley Police Authority": "It's not on any map / You must enter its speed trap."
The ambitious Home Office bureaucrat is very partial to these fictional jurisdictions. One thinks of "West Mercia", which is around the Welsh border somewhere, just west of "East Mercia" presumably, which they're keeping in reserve for the next pointless constabulary reorganisation. Everywhere else I've ever lived, the police forces bear some approximation to reality: the New Hampshire state troopers don't patrol Vermont, the Surete du Quebec don't do drug busts in Labrador.
When you want to call the cops, you don't need to think, "Hang on, am I in South Mercia or West Avon?" The invented identities of British administration seem to be part of a conscious decision to emphasise their remoteness from the citizenry, if not their wholesale secession from the real world.
Secure in their fairyland federation, "Thames Valley Police" patrol a wild fantastical landscape of the imagination that intersects only fitfully and awkwardly with reality. Exactly a year ago, thousands of Royal Ascot racegoers were stuck in sweltering heat for hours on end due to Thames Valley's new improved state-of-the-art "traffic management".
Royal Ascot's been going on same time, same place for a couple of centuries, but in Thames Valley's capable hands it was transformed into one of those freak natural disasters no one saw coming. This year's meeting, due to building work at Ascot, will be taking place at York, beginning today. But no doubt Thames Valley Police will still lock down the whole of Berkshire all week as a security precaution.
When they install speed cameras, serious accidents increase. When an estranged husband threatens his wife, they send round helicopters and "armed response vehicles" and contingents of officers in full body-armour, and then let them sit around at a safe distance until the estranged husband has finished killing everyone in the house.
That's what they did when Vicky Horgan and her sister were shot and bleeding to death in Highmoor Cross, declining even to enter the village, never mind the house. And that's what they did when Julia Pemberton called 999 at 7.10 one evening, racing round in response, arriving at 7.50 and then waiting until 1.20 in the morning before deciding it was safe to enter. It was: Mrs Pemberton and her son had both been dead for some hours.
As we now know, if you require a less desultory response from Thames Valley Police, the best advice is to speculate about the sexuality of the officer's horse. As my colleague Sam Leith reported yesterday, late in the evening on Bank Holiday Monday, Sam Brown, an Oxford University undergraduate, inquired of a mounted policeman on Cornmarket Street: "Do you know your horse is gay?" Also, "I hope you're comfortable riding a gay horse."
Within minutes, young Mr Brown was surrounded by six officers and a fleet of patrol cars, handcuffed and tossed in the slammer overnight, after which he was fined £80. A spokesperson for Thames Valley Police told the student newspaper Cherwell that the "homophobic comments" were "not only offensive to the policeman and his horse, but any members of the general public in the area."
"Offensive to his horse"? Well, you never know. If any constabulary is keeping a full-time equine psychologist on staff, it's bound to be Thames Valley. Even now, the horse may be on one month's stress leave at home on full pay, with his feet up listening to Judy Garland on his iPod. Whoops, sorry. We don't know whether the horse in question is, in fact, gay. It may be just the way he trots. Whoops, there goes another 80 quid. What I'm getting at is that, even under a generous interpretation of "homophobia", it's hard to see why simply identifying the horse as gay should be a criminal offence.
Mr Brown didn't say: "Tell your gay horse to stop coming on to me" or "I couldn't get near Royal Ascot last year because those gay horses were queening around and backing up traffic." Few of us would appreciate inappropriate speculation about the sexuality of our mounts, yet even in Thames Valley the offence of hippophobia is surely a stretch.
Caligula made his horse a consul but only Thames Valley has made its horses' sexuality a hate crime. Had Mr Brown gone on to slur one of the police cars as obviously homosexual, would Thames Valley's spokesperson have complained that the homophobic comments were deeply offensive to the officer and his vehicle?
Pondering Mr Brown's query about whether the copper was "comfortable riding a gay horse", Sam Leith wondered whether the Balliol man was suggesting the officer was an "unreconstructed homophobe". But the point is that, though the "homophobes" and "systemic racists" of the constabulary have metamorphosed virtually overnight into the most gung-ho celebrants of diversity, they are indeed "unreconstructed" - thus, the somewhat unpleasant heavyhandedness that has long been a feature of British policing is now deployed in the service of zero tolerance homophobia crackdowns.
In these touchy times, are Thames Valley Police really the people you want enforcing the more nebulous sections of an already poorly drawn "Incitement to Religious Hatred" Act? With that in mind, remember that the mounted section use mostly Irish Draughts. Things could have gone a whole lot worse for Mr Brown if he'd said: "I hope you're comfortable riding a gay Arab."
Totally disagree! Laugh-out-loud hilarious.
#9...You don't have to be a New Yorker ...(or over 50) to know about the Kitty Genovese case.
I have a question concerning grammar for the general Freeping public. Does anyone know the "why" behind the divergence of certain matters of punctuation between citizens of Great Britain and her former colonies? Specifically:
at 7.10 one evening, racing round in response, arriving at 7.50 and then waiting until 1.20 in the morning
We Yanks use a colon (:) as a delimiter between hours and minutes when marking time, whereas Brits, Canucks, and Aussies seem to prefer a period (.).
A similar difference exists when denoting values greater than 100. i.e., in Britain, you would write 1.000.000, whereas we would think that odd, and prefer a comma to separate our hundreds, thousands, and millions.
It's just something trival that I don't really know the history of. Are there any Freepers who would like to hit me on the head with a cluebat?
It is just different. In all of Europe large numbers use a period, whereas we use a comma. On dates and times they use periods also. To make it more confusing the Euros write the date with the day being first and month second. Today is 14.6.05. Also million and billion mean entirely different things.
Yes, I love Steyn.
"LOO-iss". Yep, Chief Inspector Morse, Sargent Lewis, Supervisor Blunt. You'd better not call Endeavor's horse "gay".
Obviously the horse was hot to trot.
Ping
Okay, it appears that Mr. Steyn owes around 640 quid...
I think in the Kitty Genovese case, the police were not called even though many people heard her screaming.
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