Mrs Carroll, who is a sales director at Carroll Cleaning Company in Halifax, West Yorks., has been a member of the Bradford Catholic Players for 26 years and attends the same rehearsal room up to four days a week. Their rehearsal venue is set in the red-light area that 'Crossbow Cannibal' Stephen Griffiths scoured for his victims. She said: "I drove up to the venue the same way I have for 26 years and parked up outside it, I wasn't slowing down regularly or acting suspiciously. We were there for about three hours and I didn't think anything of it at the time. It wasn't until December 19 that I got a letter through the post telling me I may have been committing a kerb crawling offence.
Photo from here.
"I was flabbergasted. If the police had been doing their job properly they would have seen that I was a woman on my own and after I had parked I went straight into the rehearsal room. It is lazy policing. If they had even bothered to ask me what I was doing they would have realised it made sense. What makes it even more ridiculous is that a year ago another person from the company got a warning for the same thing. He was stopped and taken into a van to explain what he was doing. He told the police and they said as they had now been made aware of the rehearsal room they wouldn't stop anyone else for parking in the same area."
The mother-of-two, who lives with husband 42-year-old husband Matthew, an account director, in Bingley, West Yorks., said the matter could have put a huge stain on her character if she was a man. She said: "My concern is with innocent people who, like me, drive company cars, a letter will go to their employers. Being a woman, it removes 90 percent of the doubt that I was actually kerb crawling but if I were a man I could protest my innocence until I was blue in the face and people wouldn't believe me. To send it to someone's workplace, not knowing who might see it, is irresponsible. It casts aspersions immediately and once that aspersion has been cast there would always be that cast of doubt as to what they were doing." Mrs Carroll has now launched an appeal after being told that she would have to formally object to have the issue removed from records.
1 comment:
I feel very strongly for this lady, because this, to me, is police behaviour antithetical toward our code of justice.
Our law enforcement officers should assume innocence in any person unless they have evidence otherwise. This letter implies that any person visiting certain city areas will be considered guilty of a crime.
Some years ago, when I was a self-employed heating engineer, I'd had a call to fault-find and repair a central-heating system in Bradford, not far from the city centre. Street lighting wasn't good, and I was driving slowly, looking for the address (before sat-nav!).. when suddenly a man jumped out in front of me, and another tried to open my door. I threw the van into reverse and set off backward down the street. A car shot out of a side street, and stopped broadside across the road. Only then did a blue light start to flash as a marked police car raced down the road in front, toward me. The same dangerous looking man who'd tried to open my door was now shouting "Police! Get out of the vehicle!".
Suffice to say, I was terrified.
I was accused first of kerb crawling, looking for prostitutes.
Then of seeking a drug dealer. It took some time, during which I had plastic cuffs applied "for my protection", for them to even begin to listen to me, to see that the back of my van was indeed filled with plumbing tools and boiler parts, that there was a work diary and a street atlas on the passenger street, with the caller's name, address, and number, that there was a call from that number to my phone within the last hour.
I was breathalysed, even though I'd had no alcohol. An officer checked all my van tyres.. they seemed to be desperate for something to charge me with, despite the fact that they'd just expended all that energy on scaring the shit out of an innocent man, a man with no police record whatsoever.
My crime was that I'd driven into a trap, a police sting obviously aimed at someone or something else, and I suppose, after all that activitity, everybody in the neighbourhood must have known that it was swarming with plain-clothes cops and unmarked cars.
To add insult to injury, the customer called back, angry that I hadn't shown up on time, telling me they'd get someone "more reliable" in the morning.
It was some years later that the same police force tried to accuse me of murder.
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