Holmes & Moriarty? Dream on. Most cops are thick as thieves
Everybody loves a good detective story – or a James Bond kind of movie, with master criminals trying to conquer or destroy the world and heroic detectives or secret agents thwarting the villains only in the nick of time.
Unfortunately, in the real world our criminals are hardly ever that obliging. Most of them are, to be honest, incredibly thick.
In stories all true villains get away with murder for most of their careers – ot at least till the dying pages of the book or movie. In life, some of these criminals have trouble getting away with a bloody bus…:
A Zimbabwean man stole a bus because he needed transport to pick up his driving licence, state media reported.
The Herald newspaper said Stead Mashushire waited until the driver of a bus parked in a central Harare rank had gone to buy food before ordering all the passengers out and driving off in the vehicle.
The court ordered Mashushire to undergo a psychiatric test.
Still, even though master criminals may mostly be fictitious, there still are the so-called career criminals. People, as the saying goes, with only a nodding acquaintance with decency or morality – if they’re not just simply nodding off, that is:
Dozy raider Mark Smith proved he was as thick as thieves when he fell sound asleep under his victim’s bed.
He had crept past Heather Stephenson while she was ironing.
He rifled gems from a jewellery box and helped himself to a cheque book, but the vodka and valium he had already downed that morning was taking its toll.
And when stunned Mrs Stephenson came upstairs, she found Smith fast asleep under her bed.
Mind you, it is a good thing most criminals are that stupid. For while it’s true that you might not find many master criminals in real life, the same goes for Sherlockian detectives. Policemen who aren’t fantastically thick are quite thin on the ground.
You know, how even the best fictional detectives sometimes have to stumble over a clue – when they find, for instance, one of the whiskers of a very rare Siamese cat in the half-emptied food bowl of a common tabby.
(From which they conclude that the gorgeous blonde has in fact killed the diamond necklace which slept with the Maltese falconer during the raid on the nuclear station – but that, as they say, is another story.)
In real life, this stumbling over a clue goes more like this:
Cambridge, Mass. police have arrested a man after finding 123 stolen parking meters stashed away in his home.
Police say they went to Thomas Gannon’s apartment on Plymouth Street to arrest him on Monday night because he was wanted for larceny in Everett.
As they were about to handcuff him, officers say they noticed the parking meters.
So, the police go the apartment, talk to the suspect, have a nice cup of suspect tea, talk about the weather, read their host his rights, after beating him up a bit… and then cuff the guy… and then, and only then one of the more discerning coppers somehow notice that there are also 123 bloody parking meters lying around the place.
Oh, such bliss when the penny dreadful finally drops! And what amazing and glorious powers of observation…
On the other hand, there are some cops who are very good at noticing even the smallest and silliest things.
Which doesn’t necessarily make them great detectives though. Moral incompetents: yes. Bloody morons: indeed. Wannabe Mussolinis: quite.
Great detectives? Well, you be the judge of that…:
Eight-year-old Samuel England was left in tears after a police officer ordered that his toy gun should be broken in front of him.
The family say the officer called at the family’s home and said it was an offence for Samuel to play with an imitation firearm in a public place.
Samuel’s mother’s partner John Standen, 34, was told to destroy the gun or face the boy being taken to the police station.
Five minutes after the police officer had witnessed the destruction of the gun, he returned to complain about sister Sophie’s Barbie car. The six-year-old was travelling on the pavement in the battery-powered car at three miles an hour and the officer said it is only allowed in the garden.
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