Cooler than real cops
IN OUR youth there were many, many “cool tools” that made playtime more authentic, and more fun. One such “cool tool” that immediately springs to mind – which may bring a judgemental “tut-tut” to many lips – is candy cigarettes.
“Sweet cigarettes” as we called them, was at the top rung of the cool tools. You could get the simple white sugar stick with the red tip, but even cooler than those were the chewing gum cigarettes; these were normal rods of gum, but they were wrapped in authentic-looking paper … you could save these wrappers and wrap it around a pencil – just so that you would always have your “fags” handy.
Even the packaging was impressive; your sweet cigarettes would come in branded packets. It was so supremely cool to – whilst interrogating a suspect – tap your packet of Gold Dollar 10s on your finger till a cigarette popped out of the pack, then to coolly place it in your mouth, “light” it and draw on your cigarette, before saying something … well, cool, of course!
The cops in our cops and robbers games were uncompromising. We always got our man – we’d be sure to wrap up the game before the streetlights came on, but at least the city knew that when the sun set, all the bad guys were safely behind bars; we were better than real cops!
I so wish that those sweet cigarette cops were around, when I was mugged back in 1981.
I will never forget the experience of the two thugs taking my watch off my arm and then telling me to simply walk away or they would stab me … Since then I have been cautious, jumpy and on edge, because the perpetrators were never caught, and knowing that they were out there left me traumatised; and the lectures that followed the incident didn’t help much.
Trauma counselling back then came in the form of phrases like: “You shouldn’t have”, “Why didn’t you?”, “But you were stupid to walk there alone”, and so on.
When one has been the victim of crime it unsettles you – I am speaking from my perspective. Different people react differently, but there can be people who lose sleep because any sound wakes them. Others become hypervigilant, unable to relax or enjoy a moment; still others become obsessive, getting up every few minutes to check if doors are locked … no wonder we are such a stressed nation.
Recently a friend of mine, with the aid of a security company, found a trespasser on his property. The trespasser had a key to the property’s security gate. When the criminal was taken to the authorities, my friend was told that there was not enough evidence to prosecute.
Bye-bye Mr criminal, see you next time, when – in the dead of night – you’re standing at the foot of my bed with a weapon in hand … you have a nice day now.
Many people I speak to (South Africans tend to speak about crime a lot) agree that the police are understaffed, under-resourced and not committed to the fight against crime.
It’s so unfair – just recently our finance minister sliced up the trillion-rand pie, and taxpayers will have to fork out more hard-earned rands to fund, amongst others, our police force.
Shouldn’t these taxpayers then have the right to feel safe when walking through the streets of their cities and while sitting in their own homes?
As long as the authorities merely react to crime – without putting concrete plans in place to prevent and discourage it – criminals will always be three steps ahead of them.