In September 2014 PC Alice Nicholas and one of her Devon and Cornwall police colleagues responded to a call in St Austell where they were met by a man who proceeded to chase the two officers with a machete, threatening to cut their throats. He eventually put the machete down and was arrested without inflicting any injuries with the weapon. After pleading guilty he was given a suspended sentence of eight months in prison, suspended for two years.
In response PC Nicholas has begun a campaign calling for mandatory prison sentences for people who assault officers and more than 18,000 people have signed her online petition, meaning it will now be considered by the government.
There are two reasons why I hope she does not succeed in her campaign.
Thanks for bringing this issue to my attention -I had not heard of this attack and sentencing by the Court. Once again, you have argued your case lucidly and I agree with your point of view though I don’t feel *morally aghast*.
Morally aghast? If Alex Cavendish’s blog is the Guardian – he had Nick Hardwick in the back of his cab a couple of days ago – then you are in mortal danger of becoming the Express, which is rather shame because you were making a very good case until you went OTT.
When I took the trouble to google the reputedly delectable PC Nicholas I was stunned by the sheer number of images that popped up: this lady sure loves a camera. In fact, as I happened to be using my computer in a shopping mall at the time, I was obliged to quickly log off for fear that the the little old lady sitting next to me might get the wrong idea about what I was up to. I must confess that my initial impression of the ex-beauty queen was that she was suffering from a classic example of the Princess Di complex, though hopefully this is not case.
It was Tom Jones who said, never have your photograph taken with Elvis because he knows how to look good in a picture, and this is a lady who has certainly mastered that particular art (trust me; I’m a photographer by trade; I know about these things). Like Elvis she has learnt to eliminate the double-chin, and like Princess Di she has opted to emphasize the eyes. In the Miss Cornwell glamour shots she is a pleasant looking girl with a double chin and dull looking eyes, but in the later images she a large eyes, pouting lips and a neatly pointed chin, she also has the good fortune to be blessed with high cheek bones.
So how was the girl in the back garden transformed into super-cop? Firstly, she has spent a long time in front of the mirror getting the big-eye and lip-pout down to perfection in addition to getting the make-up just right, and finally she has discovered the best camera angle: high up and looking down does wonders for a chin and really brings out the eyes. I feel that the effort she has made deserves some respect.
If you really do feel a need to bang on about the tabloids obsession with glamour then you must lay the blame firmly at the door of two men, one long dead and the other about to marry a supermodel. It was Guy Bartholomew, between the wars, who built up the Daily Mirror’s circulation to the world’s largest with the growl, ‘What this edition needs is a good pair of tits.’ But by the late sixties the Mirror had become a staid though profitable old lady under the control of Hugh Cudlipp, a man who thought he was being rather clever in unloading the Sun onto Rupert Murdoch for the princely sum of one pound. The rest, as we all know, is history: nipples galore and the Sun became the cash cow on which the Empire was founded. Thus, the only way to remedy the current situation would be to go back to the future and strangle Murdoch at birth.
Having enjoyed a pleasant ramble about nothing in particular, I supposed I’d better get down to pointing out why the police sometimes feel that they are a special case. Possibly because you take it for granted, you have ignored the fact that the police in Britain are not armed. Consequentially, realpolitik has frequently dictated trade-offs with them in the past to compensate for the fact that they do not carry guns. (Over the cat-o’-nine-tails and capital punishment for example.) I happen to live in France, and I have never seen a butcher, baker or candlestick maker carrying a gun – but have yet to see a cop without one. If you really are “morally aghast at the the idea that anyone in the police would think that they should be treated any differently” then you should be prepared to allow them to be treated the in exactly the same way as the flick loitering at the end of my street – or for that matter, almost every other police force in the world.
From a personal point of view, I would hope that PC Nicholas’s campaign ends in failure, purely on the grounds that sentencing is best left to judges, but I am at least grateful that the lady is not lobbying for the police to be armed. “Beauty Queen Cop Shoots Axe Wielding Maniac and Saves Kids” is not the sort of headline I would like to see any time in the near future.
Sadly for her, the project will probably fail for precisely the reason she made it into the papers in the first place: she will not be taken seriously simply because she is an ex-beauty queen; the powers-that-be will just pat her on the head and say, ‘Now now, little girl, don’t you go worrying your pretty little head over such things.’