They shouldn't have dragged him along the ground and they should've listened when he said he'd been stabbed and told them that he couldn't breathe. It takes two seconds to check. Why not check when he told them that he'd been stabbed? You can't get much more serious than that. You don't mess around with it - in the slightest. You check.
My interactions with the police had been positive up until last year. You never think it will happen to you until it does.
I was driving in a posh part of Cheltenham and stopped to take a phone call. I'm talking a street with multi-million pound houses on it. Quiet, leafy street. No one about.
As I went to drive off the police pulled up and asked me to get out of the car. I got out and asked what was wrong. As I was talking to the policewoman the man was searching my car and shouted "weapon". Before I knew it the woman put her knee in the back of my knee and literally threw me HARD onto the road face down. She had her knee in my back and pushed my arms up behind my back and my face was pushed into the floor from the force of it into the concrete and dirt. I am underweight and have had several knee surgeries and was in pain. It bruised my knees severely. They were really badly messed up. It ripped my clothes (my coat) and cut my hand. I kept twisting my head to the side to try to breathe but couldn't really twist it to the side. I was face down and held there.
I had a small DIY hammer in my car that I had used to put up some pictures for a friend ages ago. I'd forgotten it was there. I told them it was for DIY. They didn't seem to give a sh/t about anything I said.
They brought out some weird big fixed handcuffs and tied my hands behind my back with them on EXTREMELY tightly. I sat in the back of a wagon and went with them. When we got to the station there was no explanation and I sat in a cell with nothing in it but a camera, a toilet and bed. It was freezing. Many, many hours later I was told all charges were dropped and that I could go. I left. They had taken my SIM out of my phone and obviously gone through it and fcked it up by wiping some stuff (don't know if they're allowed to do that without asking permission). I have a second phone and I didn't get that back and have never seen it again. I found out I was 20-30 miles away. I left in such a hurry I didn't check my belongings.
I phoned a general helpline days later and the police officer said it was "all a fuss over nothing".
Maybe so but my issue was with how they threw me onto the floor. I was nothing but calm and polite to them and did EXACTLY what they said. Why react like that to a woman you are talking standing outside to? They put the handcuffs on EXTREMELY tightly and it left extreme bruising and cuts with blood pooling below my skin. When I said they were way, way too tight they just laughed and if they had been on much longer I don't know if I would've lost circulation or sustained any kind of permanent damage from them. Why put them on so tightly apart from to inflict pain?
They destroyed the hammer. They reacted like it was a w/apon of mass d/struction not a small DIY tool for putting tiny nails into a wall.
So I guess the moral of the story is don't sit on a street in Cheltenham. And the person who called the police over this was a paranoid fcking idiot. I was sitting in a road. That's it.
Funny how they took 5-10 minutes to turn up for something like this yet when someone is assaulted they turn up eight hours later.
There was no need for it.
It was a very bad experience.
Obviously it's 1000x less bad as what happened with Nowak but they obviously didn't care with regard to him. Maybe his life... it could have been saved. We will not know now. If someone tells you they've been hurt you look. You assess their wounds properly. I feel so sad for his family. They laughed at him... while he was dying. Needless, completely unnecessary and sad. RIP.