QI facts to knock you sideways
WHEN the president of the borough of Brooklyn was 15, he was arrested for a minor offence and taken to a small room in the basement of a local police station, where officers kicked him repeatedly in the groin.
The attack was so violent that for the next seven days, every time he went to the toilet he saw blood in the bowl.
Eric Adams, who is black, grew up to become a police officer, hoping to bring about change from within the ranks of the New York Police Department. Instead, sometimes he found himself discriminating against black people.
‘‘I would find myself treating people unfairly because of their race, because of their economic situation,’’ he said. ‘‘I had to catch myself.’’
Adams has become a leading voice for the reform of a police force that has faced furious protests since the killing of an unarmed man, Eric Garner, during a violent arrest in July. Fresh protests began on Christmas Eve after Antonio Martin, a black teenager, was shot dead by a white police officer in Berkeley, Missouri. Officials have indicated that the officer acted in selfdefence and that Martin had pulled a gun.
The beating Adams suffered as a teenager was brought on by an arrest for trespassing. ‘‘I was arrested for a reason, I’d done something wrong,’’ he said, ‘‘but nowhere in the laws of New York State does it say that the penalty for that is you should be assaulted.’’
He has said that he joined the police force because ‘‘I didn’t want any more children to go through what I endured’’. Yet he found that his own high-minded intentions, and police academy training on how to serve and protect all communities equally, were effectively ‘‘wiped out by six days of being taught by veteran cops on the streets’’.
He watched his fellow officers touch the lockers of fallen colleagues as they left the station. One told him it would be better to be tried by a dozen jurors than to be carried by six pallbearers.
He thinks officers began their patrols with this defensive stance and forgot they were also bound to protect the public. A white officer once told him that if he faced a white man with a gun, he would try to protect both himself and the man, but if he saw a black man wielding a gun he would protect only himself. Officers, he said, ‘‘become influenced by all these stereotypes and fears’’.
Adams believes that part of the solution lies in training officers to speak out when they witness wrongdoing in the ranks and for those with records of abuse to be kicked out. He believes that cameras could help – not only body cameras and cameras on police cars, but mounted on officers’ guns.
He credits the protests over the police killing of Garner, arrested for selling loose cigarettes, with helping to initiate genuine reforms. ‘‘I believe that after years of talking about reform, that change in culture is being materialised now.’’
He is confident that reforms will now be instituted by Michael Julian, the new deputy commissioner of training at the NYPD. Julian has expressed the hope that he can also stop officers from landing ‘‘the extra kick or punch’’.
‘‘New York City cops are not brutal,’’ he told reporters, saying that they had not exhibited ‘‘the Rodney King type of force’’ – the violence inflicted by officers in Los Angeles on a construction worker after a high-speed chase in 1991. ‘‘We can control it. We’re going to teach them a lot of techniques to change their behaviour.’’ THE team behind the hit BBC television panel game have compiled their annual list of extraordinary facts. How many of them did you know? The lawnmower is the most dangerous item in the garden. The second most dangerous is the flowerpot. Sir Bruce Forsyth is four months older than sliced bread. Iceland has 25 puffins for every person. On D-Day, JD Salinger fought with six chapters of The Catcher In The Rye in his backpack. In space you can cry but your tears won’t fall, they just puddle up under your eye. A cat’s brain can store 1000 times more data than an iPad. An ‘‘acersecomic’’ is a person who has never had a haircut. The smell of freshly cut grass is a plant distress call. There are enough empty homes in China for everyone in Britain to have one each. The more rivers an area has, the more languages will evolve there. Cheese is the most food in Britain. 95 per cent of the spiders in your house have never been outside. The original Kitkat was an 18thcentury mutton pie. More wine is drunk in the Vatican City than any other country on Earth. Email is a 16th-century word meaning ‘enamel’.
shoplifted Nachos were invented by a man named Nacho. Deliveries by pigeon post during World War II were 95 per cent successful. Picasso painted house paint. Guinness isn’t dark red. Elizabeth I invented gingerbread men. The most difficult tongue-twister in English is ‘‘pad kid poured curd pulled cod’’. In 2006 the most popular name for cows in Switzerland was Fiona (and a cow with a name will produce 450 more pints of milk a year than one without a name). Rats can feel regret. Winston Churchill was a druid. Falling in love costs you, on average, two close friends. Misspell is one of the most com-
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very monly misspelled words English language. The terms ‘‘Tory’’, ‘‘Labour’’ and ‘‘Prime Minister’’ all began as insults. Barry Manilow’s No 1 hit I Write the Songs wasn’t written by Barry Manilow. The Daleks were Nazis. Everyone has at least 50,000 thoughts a day but 95 per cent are the same as the day before. Dry cleaning was invented when someone knocked over a kerosene lamp and noticed it removed stains from their clothes. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s time a ‘cockney’ meant a spoiled child. St Lucia is the only country in the world named after a woman. The most common occupation for the wife of a millionaire is teacher.
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the Lenin owned nine Rolls-Royces. The dark side of the Moon is turquoise. Before he became a spy John le Carre washed elephants for the Swiss National Circus. Not one of the Star Trek shows or films contains the words ‘‘Beam me up, Scotty’’. ‘‘Sexpert’’, ‘‘cushy’’, ‘‘freebie’’, ‘‘makeover’’, ‘‘comfort zone’’ and ‘‘dream team’’ all date from the 1920s. People in Britain who wake in the middle of the night are most likely to do it at 3.44am. Prisoners on Alcatraz always had hot showers so they didn’t get acclimatised to cold water and try to escape by swimming. Sheep can see behind themselves without moving their heads. A one-year-old baby is 30% fat. 9000 books are listed as missing from the British Library. If you ate at a different New York eatery every day for 12 years, you still wouldn’t have visited all of the city’s restaurants. There are 177,147 ways to tie. For 500 years from the 13th century, 70 per cent of Englishmen were called Robert, John, Thomas, Richard or William. In 1986, Michael Foot’s appointment as chair of a disarmament committee prompted The Times headline: ‘‘Foot Heads Arms Body’’. The only desert in Britain Dungeness Nature Reserve Kent.
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