A woman in the United Kingdom has pleaded guilty to a public order offense after she was accused of leaving what paramedics called a “vile” note on an ambulance that was responding to an emergency call.
[…]
After the call, when the paramedics returned to the emergency vehicle, they discovered the handwritten note on the windshield, according to a statement from the West Midlands Ambulance Service. The message read: “If this van is for anyone but Number 14 then you have no right to be parked here. I couldn’t give a s— if the whole street collasped now move your van from outside my house.”
Okay, she’s an asshat. Asshattery over parking is indeed annoying, but…
“We will not tolerate abuse or intimidation of our emergency services. This kind of behavior is totally unacceptable and we will take appropriate action against offenders,” Chief Inspector John Owen, commander of Staffordshire Police’s Stoke North Local Policing Team, said Monday in a statement.
If you’re imagining a quaint little village where everyone knows everyone else and an insult is a crippling social catastrophe, don’t; Stoke-on-Trent is the size of Jersey City. If a crew of first responders is intimidated by a note, then get new first responders.
The story makes some mention of “breach of a restraining order” but stubbornly refuses to explain it. (British legal news has these kinds of blank spots fairly often.) If there’s any substance to that charge, it’s the only thing that keeps this from being a garden-variety lese-majeste case of the kind we’ve all seen too many times.
Before we go, let’s consider the headline:
A British woman left a nasty note on an ambulance. Turns out, that’s a crime.
A more naive charitable reader would assume that the headline writer’s snideness was aimed at the legal system and the festering sore thereupon that is lese-majeste and contempt-of-cop laws. It’s more likely, though, that we’re meant to point and laugh at the criminal… whose crime was writing the word “shit” at a government employee.
Ray of Infamy 
Leave a Reply