Policing as it should be done

It was great, for the young foreign couple in Valencia, to see an ad on a local website for a second-hand kitchen island. It was exactly what they’d been looking for. All they had to do was pay the money and collect the piece of furniture.

Alas, that turned out to be less easy than they’d imagined. The thing had been firmly glued together. There was no way to take it apart without breaking it. So they couldn’t carry down the five flights of stairs in disassembled pieces. It would have to be carried down bodily, as a whole

They tried the lift. But it didn’t matter which way they turned the piece of furniture. It was two centimetres too big. The lift doors wouldn’t close.

So they started on the massive job of manhandling it down the stairs.

Unfortunately, their progress wasn’t unobserved. A neighbour decided they must be burglars, stealing the prized possessions of the family on the fifth floor. No sooner had he had the thought than he acted on it. The police were summoned.

They arrived as the couple had finally reached the second floor. She was done in. She couldn’t have carried the colossal piece of furniture down another floor if her life had depended on it. When the police arrived, she made no attempt at all to resist what was coming next.

What was coming, however, surprised her. The police took a look at her, exhausted on the landing, and her husband, drenched in sweat and gasping to get his breath back, and decided no one less like a pair of burglars could possibly be imagined.

“Wait here,” they said, an injunction which, in their weary state, they had no trouble at all obeying.

The police climbed up the stairs to the apartment of the man who’d phoned them.

“What on earth do you mean by wasting police time in this way?” they asked him when he opened the door.

With a few neatly constructed sentences they expressed to him the extent of their displeasure at being summoned to deal with people who were clearly not engaged in any kind of criminal endeavour, but carrying out an entirely legal and understandable task. Then they returned to the second floor.

There they metaphorically rolled up their sleeves and helped the couple get the kitchen island down to the ground floor and loaded into their car.

Local police in Valencia
They can be tough but they can also be helpful

Our own experience in Madrid a few weeks ago was similar. Danielle had her purse filched from the backpack. We flagged down a police car to report the theft and, not only did they take a note of the event, they offered us a lift to a police station where the city has someone on duty to help tourists make their statements about crimes they’d suffered.

This contrasted to an experience I had as a student when I was stopped while heading home from a film-showing in college. I was carrying the three canisters of film for, if I remember, The Battleship Potemkin.

It was midnight. The cops had seen a young man with a heavy rucksack. There had been a lot of breakins recently. They were clearly just doing their job when they stopped me and I didn’t resent it at all.

What I did resent, on the other hand, is that once they’d established my bona fides, including my address – another ten minutes’ walk up the street where they’d stopped me and were interrogating me in the back of their van – they asked me to get out and drove off – straight past my front door.

To this day, I’ve never understood why they didn’t at least run me up the road in the van. What skin would it have been off their noses? And they knew how heavy my bag was.

Two styles of policing. And I know which I prefer.