Casual gang life

Violence! Feral gangs of youths roaming the streets. Warzone London.

It was all very exciting, having the opportunity to phone emergency services. Although for the second time, I was a useless witness to crime.

I saw five local hoodlums knock an innocent food delivery driver off his motorbike, give him a quick kicking to the head, before stealing his machine.

Like all good citizens, I immediately rang the police – not before hiding around a corner with my head poking out, for fear of being seen and ritually decapitated. I didn’t want to be another tabloid news headline.

This is where the problems started. In all the excitement, I didn’t really know what to say.

Sure, I got the street name right – but it’s quite a long street. I then tried to go on Google maps to find an exact location but struggled with the whole speakerphone thing – wasting precious seconds.

As you can probably realise, there’s some pretty important details missing – like a description of the gang members. An agitated operator was trying to prize these details out of me.

“They’re all wearing motorbike helmets, and tracksuits” – which isn’t very useful information when this is probably the standard uniform of most gangs in London.

“They’re all black males” – oh no, I’ve brought race in to it, I thought.

“Men of colour” – I tried again.

By the time I had got to this part of the conversation, the local gang had completed their task and were on their way to steal some mobile phones or play video games, or whatever they do later in the day after a hard shift at work.

A crucial bit of information which might have helped was the number plate of the motorbike they were on, and the one they stole - but I had failed to spot this.

I blame it on my eyes decaying a little, but in truth, I was too caught up in the excitement of the moment, instead being busy titting about on Google maps.

The operator then told me she would be ending the call – which was her polite way of saying I was bloody useless and wasting her time.

A few moments later, a police car drove by – surprisingly quick I thought, given all those public spending cuts.

Aside from being a dreadful crime witness, I’m now not entirely sure I even saw things accurately. I can’t be certain there were five individuals involved. And I’m not even convinced it was a delivery driver getting his bike stolen – you see, I just saw a guy on the floor getting a bit of a kicking and a few motorbikes. Very unreliable.

This reminds me of an incident many years ago where a friend got jumped by another of London’s finest residents. On this occasion the police turned up and arrested the chap.

Fast forward a year, and I was in the witness box at court. The problem was, I couldn’t actually remember much from the year before. In fact, I probably couldn’t remember much the morning after either – I think my friend was being attacked, but he might just have been chatting up the guy.

Needless to say, the criminal was found not-guilty and free to once again cause mischief on the streets of Mogadishu. Sorry, London, easy to get confused.

So, I’ve realised I’m not only a deeply unreliable witness, but also not very good at calling emergency services –succinctly reporting key details isn’t easy you know.

In an ideal world, I wouldn’t need to have 999 on speed-dial to report warfare, but that’s what you get for living in crime infested areas.

Incidentally, on this point, I saw a chap getting searched by the side of the road a few months ago. He looked about 13 years old and had a sword down his pants which was longer than my thigh bone.

It does make me deeply worried about what the heck is happening at schools nowadays. I thought the strangest thing I experienced was getting taught heterosexual technique, aged 11.

And while I found this delightfully exciting, it was taught far in advance of needing to know this. And then, when I did come to require that knowledge, I had clearly forgotten the lesson, given the feedback.

Anyway, I hope they now teach a class on how to call emergency services as it was clearly lacking from my curriculum.