Law and order … where did it all go wrong?

GIVEN the increasingly crude world in which we live, when he asked a motorist who had parked a car on the pavement – thus forcing pedestrians on to a busy road – to move it, Derby Telegraph reader, Dave Orford, might have anticipated a mouthful of abuse. He wouldn’t have expected to be thrown down a flight of stone stairs. He certainly wouldn’t have thought that, three months later, Derbyshire police would be telling him that they would be taking no action against “the known assailant”.
Now rewind a little over half a century. It is a Saturday afternoon in November 1956. Derby County are playing away, and I am passing a loose hour by kicking a football against the wall of our house on the corner of Gerard Street and Webster Street.
Traffic wasn’t a problem that day. Webster Street was a dead-end, and, anyway, no-one who lived there owned a car.
On the opposite corner there stood a little grocer’s shop, run by Violet Craven. I got on well with Violet, who liked a gamble. I often took her bets to an illegal turf accountant in Wilson Street. Off-course betting wasn’t allowed in those days, although the police turned a collective blind eye to the bookies’ offices that then proliferated in back street Derby.
What they didn’t turn a blind eye to, however, was a 12-year-old boy kicking a football in the street – even if the only person likely to be really annoyed was his mother, whose afternoon of classical music was no doubt being interrupted by the steady thud of the ball rebounding off that wall.
I’d been there for about 20 minutes, wondering how the Rams were doing at Accrington Stanley, when two figures in blue turned the corner.
A few minutes later, having seen my details go into the pocket book of one Constable Robert Bromelow of Derby Borough Police – funny, I can still remember his name after all this time – I was standing crestfallen before my mother as PC Bromelow familiarised her with the by-law that I’d just transgressed. There was the possibility of a criminal charge, he said. After he had reported back to Full Street, it would be up to his superiors.
Just after the policemen had departed, leaving me quaking in my pumps, Violet’s husband, Ernie, appeared. Fed up with hearing the muffled sound of my football smacking against the wall opposite, it was he who had called the police. Strangely, I never held it against him, even though he could have simply stuck his head out of his door and told me to shove off.
That teatime, my father returned from his job as a Derby Evening Telegraph linotype operator. On the assumption that I might yet have my collar felt, my mother thought it best to tell him of his son’s brush with the law. Happily for me, he seemed more concerned with the Rams’ failure to take both points at Peel Park that afternoon.
Nothing more came of it. But when I read Dave Orford’s letter last week, I wondered how, in the intervening years, life had been allowed to lurch from one extreme to another. Fifty years ago, a call to the police to tell them that a small boy was kicking a football in the street was enough to bring the boys in blue running. Nowadays, you hear tales of people with burglars in the house being told that an officer might be round in a fortnight. And that throwing a man in his late 70s down a flight of stone steps doesn’t even warrant a caution.
Where did it all go wrong?