Curious appeal of a uniform
After Shannen Cox was sprung pretending to be a police officer, the real police raided his house and discovered a veritable cornucopia of police paraphernalia. Items included a police-style tactical belt, handheld radios, handcuffs and an extendable baton. Cox, who pleaded guilty to impersonating a police officer, obviously felt plausible with an arsenal of props to flesh out his bogus persona.
But it was his props that proved to be his undoing. Dressed in black and wearing a GoPro camera on his helmet, Cox followed a driver into a parking building and claimed to be an officer with the authority to apprehend.
When Cox flashed a Land Transport badge at the driver, the victim of the hoax thought, ‘‘Hello, hello, hello, there hasn’t been separate Ministry of Transport officers since they merged with police back in 1992.’’ Even with all the bells and whistles, Cox’s act still needed work.
After appearing at the Waitakere District Court and pleading guilty to impersonating a cop, Cox told the assembled media to get lost, or he would call the police. Oh, the irony.
He had previous form posing as a medic at a Christchurch rugby game, where he grabbed a first aid kit from the back of his car to administer to a player with a neck injury.
Perhaps if Cox, 24, hadn’t been sprung, he would have gone on to become New Zealand’s version of Frank Abagnale, the notorious scam artist and fraudster, who at the tender age of 17 passed himself off as an airline co-pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer. His outrageous antics were celebrated in the entertaining 2002 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
I have some sympathy for Cox, having never worked in a job that had any props or a uniform. Back in the day when I flatted with nursing friends, I coveted their crisp blue and white outfits of starched white apron and cap, and have always regretted never joining the army to do a stint in the territorials, camouflage being so flattering to blondes.
When the nurses fell sick in our flat, it was muggins who emptied their sick buckets and fetched for them as they egged their resident sucker on, saying how she’d missed her calling. When I recently visited one of these nurses, still heroically in harness, she presented me with a registered nurse’s lanyard, slinging it round my neck in retrospective recognition. Don’t panic, it isn’t a New Zealand one, so I won’t be showing up at a bedside near you any time soon (though you do look a bit peaky, if I must say so myself).
During the Christchurch earthquakes I knew people who boasted of donning hard hat and clipboard to pose as officials in order to enter offlimit properties to have a nosey.
I’ve always thought it curious that one could impersonate all manner of professions – doctors, nurses, cops, firemen etc – in order to have the most fun clothed, as long as the clobber was worn behind closed doors. Take it outside and that’s when the trouble starts.
What a pity there’s no uniform available to wear while in the act of making a citizen’s arrest, which dates back to medieval England when sheriffs allowed ordinary citizens, without a warrant, to apprehend law breakers.
Methinks a clip-on citizen’s arrest cape, so that jumped-up Johnny-on-the-Spotters can uniform up, strut their stuff and feel legit as they go about keeping our streets safe.
If Cox had said he was making a citizen’s arrest, perhaps he might have avoided his own arrest.