Incredibly the chair of the National Farmers’ Union’s
livestock board east says the police 'probably did the right thing' because apparently the only alternatives would have been to either shoot the cow or using tranquilliser darts.
“While the whole thing looks horrendous, and it is for everyone, they probably did the right thing at the time. God forbid it had gone the other way and the animal ran off and bumped into someone, sent a child flying, sent any person flying, [which is] perfectly possible, and they were seriously injured or worse. People would be saying: ‘Why wasn’t the animal stopped?’”
Surrey police
say they received reports of a cow running loose in Staines-Upon-Thames at 8.55pm on Friday. The Independent
report that police arrived 'on the scene' around 9pm,
and attempted to capture the cow, which was feared to have the potential to cause a road traffic accident, for two hours.
When these attempts failed, the decision was taken to incapacitate the animal at around 11 pm by ramming it with a 4x4.
For all their apparent concerns about people being hurt by the cow, they do this as a man is jogging/running past. There's a stationary police car with police officers outside but he seems shocked to see the other car hit the cow - it doesn't seem like they gave him any warning and didn't care that they were ramming the cow into his general direction.
- Before cow is hit.jpg (16.04 KiB) Viewed 2435 times
- After cow is hit.jpg (14.82 KiB) Viewed 2435 times
Part of me thinks it's silly to focus on this story rather than, say, the paedophilia, harassment or yet more officers sharing images of dead people. But I think it encapsulates a lot of what's wrong with the current approach to policing. They take a situation that isn't dangerous, but could be, and end up inflicting disproportionate violence because they lack the skills to resolve it any other way.
Cows are domesticated. I know we hear reports of people being injured and killed by them from time to time but they're usually mothers with calves
being protective and generally they really aren't that dangerous, just big and intimidating especially if you're not used to them. This cow is walking along largely empty streets. It's more at risk of getting injured than it is of injuring someone.
Enter the police. They spend two hours trying to apprehend this cow. There's no detail of how they attempted this, but it seems that two police cars and an unknown number of officers are involved. They claim they couldn't get hold of a vet. As someone who's had pets and required an emergency vet a couple of times I can tell you this doesn't pass the sniff test. Every vet I know has a recorded message with a number for an on-call vet who will answer out of hours. I can see why it would have been harder to find out who owned the cow but again, I find it incredible that the police couldn't track down a single farmer for advice on how to approach the situation. I've just stuck 'farm' into google maps when centred on Staines and come up with loads of hits. You'd have thought someone could have gone and knocked on a door or found a phone number and called for help. They are, after all, supposed to be good at investigating stuff.
So, after two hours of doing who knows what but likely behaviour that has just got the cow more distressed, the only thing they can think of doing is ramming her with a car.
It reminds me of that Simpson's quote, "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".
I'm not expecting suburban police officers to know how to deal with a runaway cow. What I
am expecting is that they have some ability to use the resources available to them to find a solution that doesn't involve injuring - potentially fatally - an animal who isn't really a risk to anyone. I've been able to find vets and farmers on Google in less than a minute. These people have databases and god knows what else to hand. I can't even find myself that angry at the driver because I don't believe that they took the decision to ram the cow by themselves, there were other people around and not one of them could come up with any better ideas. Even just encouraging the cow into a cul-de-sac and then using police cars to trap it while waiting for a vet would have been something.
From what I can tell, the cow was hit
here. In less than a third of a mile there are three cul-de-sacs that could have been used to trap it.
- Cul-de-sacs (red dot - where cow was hit; black dots - cul-de-sacs).jpg (12.75 KiB) Viewed 2435 times
The police have taken a potentially but likely not dangerous situation and escalated it, using violence unnecessarily because these people who we task to do things like find criminals are incapable of finding a vet or a farmer.
And now the excuses come.
The police issue a
statement the following day in which they said,
...officers were extremely concerned about the public’s safety, and over a period of a number of hours tried a number of options to safely capture the cow.
Unfortunately, these were unsuccessful, and the decision was made to stop it using a police car.
...
With support from a member of the public, the cow was moved to a nearby farm in the early hours of this morning (15 June). The owner has been located and the cow’s injuries have been assessed by a vet.
It's interesting that this statement makes no mention of them not being able to get hold of a vet before the cow was rammed, it makes me wonder if they did actually try or whether they started saying that they did after the fact when questioned on it. It's also worth noting how they underplay the violence of the decision. They decided to 'stop it', even though a better description would have been 'run it over' or 'hit it'.
The
Commissioner also made a statement, which included this gem,
“There is much speculation on social media, which does not necessarily reflect the situation, which was ongoing for a number of hours, or the difficult decisions facing officers on the ground at the time.
Again, see how they are making things sound worse than they were to justify their actions.
It was a 'situation', which is a word that could mean anything from 'the swan's escaped' to 'armed attackers have raided a bank and taken staff and customers hostage'. They want you to think it's at the more severe end of the scale but honestly this could have been a scene from Hot Fuzz if it weren't for the fact they ended it in the least funny way possible.
It was 'a number of hours' - that makes it sound like they'd been going for ages and hadn't got anywhere. It was 2 hours - they arrived on the 'scene' around 9pm and hit it around 11pm. That's barely the length of a film these days.
The officers faced 'difficult decisions'. It was a cow, on deserted streets in the middle of the night. If they can't handle that without resorting to 'let's hit it with our car' then how on earth are they supposed to handle actually dangerous situations?
The statement is trying to make you think that the officers were under a lot of pressure and risk and did what they needed to do to end a potentially life-threatening situation. What we actually have is a bunch of officers who were seemingly outwitted by a 9 month old cow and couldn't think of anything other than hit it with their car.
