YOU’VE HEARD ABOUT about “good cop, bad cop”. It is when two police officers work on you to get a confession or at least an admission of guilt or accusation of someone else. One is the “good” cop who offers you the coffee and cigarette and who is the exact opposite of the “bad” cop – the one who threatens you, yells, screams and gets you totally scared.
Well, believe it or not, there was an unexpected variation on the “good cop, bad cop” in Hong Kong recently and what emerged was a “good cup, bad cup” situation when a woman who was part of a protest was sentenced to three and a half months in prison after being found guilty of using one of her breasts to assault a police officer. Clearly the Hong Kong police still think of them as “knockers”.
There is a kind of irony in this that most West Indians would find delectable were it not for the injustice meted out to the woman, Ng Lai-ying, 30, who claimed that chief inspector Chan Ka-po had groped her left breast when he tried to grab her bag. In other words, he was trying to cop a feel. In Trinidad and some of the other countries, breasts especially when the owner is using them to suckle her young, are known as “bubbies” but pronounced by some as “bobbies”, which is what the British call their police and in the former British colony of Hong Kong might still be used by some people.
In the same context of “wet” nursing babies, breasts are also called “tut-tuts” or “tot-tots”. “Tot” might be one infant and “tots” two or more but in England and its former colonies, “tut-tut” is also an expression for disapproval or annoyance. So here we have a bobby and a “tut-tut” in an affray and I have taken it upon myself to keep my readers abreast of the situation. The whole incident and the police version would be as funny as the comic opera The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan were it not for the precedent set by the Hong Kong police in deeming a woman’s breast an instrument capable of assault with or without battery.
It reminds me of an incident that took place many years ago when I was a schoolboy. Every year the Catholic boys of Presentation College in the southern city of San Fernando made a pilgrimage north to the town of Laventille by train. Even then Laventille had a reputation for crimes against the person or persons, known or unknown, mayhem, violence with or without weapons, and during the Carnival when its steelband, aptly named Desperadoes, crossed paths with any other from a different community, the use of weapons of Mas’ destruction. In other words, that was the end of the carnival for many people.
Our principal, Brother Jerome Kelly, an Irishman from the Presentation Order, insisted that for the journey, which included climbing up the winding, pot-holed Laventille road to pay homage to the statue of the Virgin Mary at the top of the hill, we must all wear long white pants, shirts, school-ties and blue blazers. We disembarked from the train and toiled up the hill in the blazing sunlight, sweating, panting and tripping over the garbage and pot-holes, while being jeered by the urchins and their parents. It was not your most salubrious neighbourhood or your most neighbourly.
One of our teachers decided to go into a little teashop, what Trinis call a “parlour” to buy something to drink. He was a short, fair-skinned gentleman whose passion was reciting poetry. As he stood waiting to be served a huge man pushed him. Then the man pushed him again, harder this time. When our poor teacher shrank quietly back, the man decided enough was enough. He stood on our teacher’s foot and shouted angrily, partly to the gathering crowd and for our benefit, “Look at my crosses! I stand up here good, good and this man come and put his foot under mine! Mister what wrong with you? You looking for me to slap you up?” A five-dollar donation did the trick and our teacher staged a miraculous escape.
I suppose this explains how a woman could be accused of assaulting a policeman with her breast but, as one protestor who was appalled by the case said, “We better watch out as one day police might accuse us of attacking with our penis or buttock.” The court saw it differently a court saying that the woman had used her chest to bump against the policeman’s arm and “used her female identity to trump up the allegation that the officer had molested” her.
What did not help was the crowd calling the policeman and the judge “boobs”.
• Tony Deyal was last seen saying that Caribbean police forces are thinking of applying the decision in their countries and are getting help from the FBI (Federal Breast Interdiction) for a full, frontal assault.
