An Incidence of the Dog not Barking in the Night Time

Or "The Policeman who Mistook a Cane for a Sword". 

I have just been reading about the blind man tasered by police because they mistook his cane for a Sammurai sword. And I have, of course, been saddened by those who have commented who appear to imagine this could be a natural mistake.

Or that after all, like the 'bad people have wedding parties too' excuse for not quite being sure as to the innocence of people being blown up by a drone missile,  even that, of course, who knows, a blind man with a white cane might have been a criminal who might have been carrying a Samurai sword in his other hand. Or even that the victim may have been dressed to look like someone who might have been wielding a Samurai sword. 

And that it is not a problem of attitude. Or, as one commenter wrote, of someone who saw someone he could bully and thought he'd get away with it.

So I'd like to tell a little story. But it happened in the years 'BT'. (Before Tasers.) Or, perhaps, the ending might have been very different.

Once upon a time (all the right kind of stories begin like this, after all) there was a young man who was lame and walked with a nice walking stick. On the way home from a club, dressed in a posh trench coat because it was raining heavily, he slipped stepping off a kerb and fell flat onto the road.

Just as he was trying to get up (which was proving rather difficult because he couldn't see his stick which he needed as a lever, cf basic Archimedes) a police car turned the corner and the driver got out.

He stood over the young man (whose trench coat, a Burberry, in fact, was now badly stained and marked, along with his Farah trousers) and said: "If you're not away from here in five minutes, when I drive round here again, I'm going to arrest you for being drunk and disorderly." And got into his car and drove round the young man, leaving him on his hands and knees crying with pain.

(This was somewhat surprising to the young man, as only a couple of weeks before, he'd lost his balance the same way in a supermarket and none of the people, including one of the store security men, who came to help him up again, thought of accusing him either of being drunk, or of being disorderly.)

As luck would have it, the young man, finding his stick on the pavement just an arm's reach away, managed to hop to a railing along the pavement, and, even more luckily, given the state his coat and trousers were in, successfully hailed a cab. As the cab drew away from the kerb, it was followed by a police car . . .

All the way home. And stayed with the driver watching from the street corner while the young man, paid the cab driver, limped the couple of metres to his door with his walking stick, and opened it without even fumbling the keys once. 

The young man, of course, was me. And that incident is why, in London, I stopped using a walking stick and began using a crutch if I was going out in the evening, even though, then, it wasn't strictly necessary. In the hope that if that happened again, the fact I was disabled might be just a little more obvious even to the thickest fucking bully of a bloody cop.

And obviously, there is no happy end to this story. Still. After many years.


But these days, I'm as likely to be found wearing jeans, a hoody and trainers as a trench coat  and designer trousers. And as often, for the time being, anyway, in a wheelchair as on my crutches. Can anyone tell me if an aluminium crutch, or an aluminium wheelchair,  is a good conductor of 50,000 Volts to earth?

Not that I'm planning on having a night out in Chorley, but it would be reassuring.