It’s 2019 and most people in the UK have mobile telephones. Most of those phones are smartphones, and most of those smartphones have cameras built in. Now, almost everywhere you go, someone will have access to a camera that is connected to the Internet. While this can be fun, it can also be very wrong.
A number of times I attended incidents where some onlooker felt the twisted urge to film the emergency services in action. Often the focus of their attention was the victim(s), on occasion these jobs were fatalities. It is a fair assumption that this filming was not for personal usage and that it would make its way onto the public domain at some point. Usually, once spotted, the police would move the individual on, sometimes after ensuring the footage was first deleted. Other times the camera person would run once rumbled.
One of my fondest memories of payback occurred during the summertime. A small village by the sea was having a music festival in it’s small harbour area. The area was busy and an outsider had got caught in the crowd in their car. They had decided to attempt to negotiate their way out of the village and drove very slowly through the crowd. The crowd were in good spirits and happily moved out of the way…..except for one.
A small group of teens decided it would be funny to push one of their own in front of the car. Being a hot day, the tar of the road had softened and the unfortunate teen’s trendy trainers became quite grippy. The car driver reacted quickly and stopped the car, but, not giving way, the grippy trainers held the poor teen’s feet to the ground and both bones in their lower leg snapped.
We rocked up to a huge audience, all in a party mood. It took a couple of blasts of the sirens to clear the crowd. Happily, the band on the other side of the harbour kept playing, so there was a bit of a distraction. The police arrived just behind us, but they encountered little resistance.
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