The Summer months are well known as a slow news period and whilst this has clearly not been the case on an International front this year, perhaps our newspapers are too inflexible to try to expand their  International news to take advantage of the apparent domestic vacuum. This means that some of the stories that get through are frankly nothing

special. On Sunday lunchtime according to a story in our local newspaper, The Argus, a father was walking along the Shoreham Flyover with his young children and it began to rain. The unnamed man dialled 999 and asked the police for a lift, he apparently threatened to complain to Katy Bourne, the PCC, if the Police refused to help him. By the end of the week versions of the story had appeared in the Daily Mirror and the also this piece in the Metro newspaper. As I wrote earlier in the week Sussex has no Motorways and very few miles of dual carriageway that come close to Motorway standard tarmac, but the Shoreham flyover is one of those stretches.

The 999 emergency service is intended for emergencies only and this was clearly not one of those. The Newspapers all pointed this out and used their articles to criticise Sussex Police who have attracted a disproportionate number of column inches in the last few days due to the climate camp at Balcombe. However in my view the Police are to be commended for their response. They did not divert any resources to this, but nevertheless a passing patrol car stopped to pick the family up, to set them down a mile or two down the road where they would be able to get a taxi to take them home. As several of the people who responded to the web based version of the Argus pointed out, this is not the sort of road that people should walk along due to the high speeds of the traffic and the lack of safety protection for any pedestrians. By picking up the family the police officers were able to assess and one imagines question the father to find out how he got onto the road and why. One imagines and hopes that they made it clear to him that he should not use that route again, just as much as pointing out that the 999 service was not for this sort of use. Also  by picking up the family, bearing in mind that the road surface was bound to be more liable to skidding due to the Summer rain, the police officers may have helped to prevent a major tragedy.

Of course many people do not see this incident in such a benign manner. Several writers on the Argus website suggested that the father should have been obliged to pay for the  financial cost of this call and response. The Police Officers involved apparently felt that he was lucky not to be charged for wasting the time of the emergency services. Both of these perspectives are perfectly valid. According to the Metro article, the poor use of resources [by Sussex Police] has been widely condemned. One of the critics is Matthew Sinclair,

chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, who has been reported to say: ‘It’s ridiculous that this essential service was used for such a trivial issue. Taxpayers expect police to spend their time protecting the public from crime, not act as a taxi service.’ I rarely find myself in agreement with Matthew and his pals at the Tax Payers Alliance. I have written about them previously here. Matthew presumably spoke without finding out the facts, he is in any case missing the point that we as a nation have got used to our Police helping to keep us all safe where this can be achieved. Had the worst happened and a car skidded in the rain, killing this young family, that may not have been a criminal act, apart from the decision by this man to expose his children to risk. The newspapers might have decided that the Police were at fault, failing to pick up the family when they had the chance to do so. The accident would have cost us all many 10’s of £1000 in NHS and other emergency service costs. Perhaps it is time for the TPA to take responsibility for their  statements with the same level of scrutiny they imply they have applied to organisations like Sussex Police.