TAXI! POLICE!
AMBULANCE!
Marina Salandy Brown was assaulted by
a cabby, but the police and Public Carriage Office did nothing
I AM nervous now about approaching my street on foot. I walk in a huddle at a fair lick, blaming myself for not having had the foresight to disguise myself in the magis- trate's court. Every passing taxi makes me jumpy. I stare obsessively at the carriage number of every cab, unfurling slightly when it isn't the four digits I dread.
I have got into this paranoid state because a cabbie recently attacked me. On 5 February, while driving down the Fulham Palace Road, I tried to move ahead in the left lane to turn into my street and that upset a black-cab driver. He thought I was trying to make progress over him so he tried to carve me up a few times. Just as I got to my road he swung his cab so violently across the front of my car that I had to overshoot the turning. I was shaken up, and about to become more so. The cab stopped in front of me, the door opened and a raging red-eyed lout charged me. Once before a male motorist had raged towards me like that and he had cracked my windscreen as he beat against it, spitting out obscenities about my colour. This time I thought it would be safer to be out of the car than cowering inside. After all, what could happen in such a busy well-lit thoroughfare at 11 p.m.?
Quite a lot was the answer. Cursing and shouting insults, he grabbed me hard by my wrists and upper arms and repeatedly threw me against my car. Finally, he put me down. Trembling, bruised and angry rushed to his cab and asked the passengers — a young couple — if they had seen the driver attack me. The woman insolently suggested that he couldn't have beaten me 'I wonder if any of the new ladies' singles competitors are heterosexual.' up if I had stayed put in my car. Fortunate- ly not everyone in the vicinity was so unmoved. Two men caught up with me after I had parked outside my house, a couple of hundred yards away, offering to be witnesses and pressing me to make a complaint. They both insisted that cab drivers were licensed by the police and had to behave as we might expect the police to behave.
So I telephoned the police. Two friendly young PCs came round within the hour but informed me that since I wasn't bleeding it was not a criminal assault. (On this mea- sure a fractured skull would be less worthy of investigation than a bloodied nose.) They could and would do nothing. I pointed out that with fewer clothes on I might well have been bleeding, but that apparently was immaterial. They told me that the Public Carriage Office were the people to contact and that if I felt suffi- ciently determined I could bring a civil suit against the cabbie. The witnesses would be crucial regarding the assault.
I phoned up the Public Carriage Office complaints department. They were unsym- pathetic to the point of obstructiveness. My complaint could not be discussed ex- cept by letter. The identity of the cabbie could not be passed on, even though I had his number. They could not guarantee me any redress or indicate what steps might be taken against the man, nor give any time span within which they might act upon the complaint. Yet, bizarrely, they wanted all my details, name, address and so on. I was suspicious. It was clear that they were more interested in protecting their own than the public. I did not want the expense and trouble of going to law. I had no vendetta against the brute but some sort of disciplinary action clearly needed to be taken to prevent him from doing some- thing similar, or worse, again. At the BBC, where I work, taxis are relied on to provide safe havens, especially for female staff working late or unsociable hours. It was more than a personal matter. And if anything were to be done it had to be done at once. So I took myself to the West London magistrate's court next morning and sat amongst all the delinquents and drunks in a haze of smoke, waiting to perform my civic duty.
Without a named assailant, the court could do nothing and, probably realising this, the Public Carriage Office were ex- tremely reluctant to reveal the identity of the cab driver to the court clerk. It took her 15 minutes on the telephone and conversations with five people before they gave her the driver's name. Finally, I was granted a summons by the magistrate and a date was fixed for the hearing.
Sheer persistence and several hours of frustration had been necessary to get that far. The cosy relationship between the police and the cab licensing body seems designed to thwart victims of wrong-doing from obtaining redress. Instead there is a lot of flannel, like the standard print-out letter sent to me by the local police. 'Sorry to hear you have been a victim of crime, details of which are recorded at this sta- tion'. Yet when I wrote to the same station asking for a copy of that record for legal purposes I learned that the price would be £15.30 and since the PC had not made a statement it would cost a further £35.85, paid in advance, to interview him. I could have afforded it but why should I? Isn't it the duty of the police to aid the pursuit of criminals whether or not the victim can pay? In my case, the police had been no more helpful than the Carriage Office. I went to court without the £51 piece of paper.
Of course, the cabbie was pleading not guilty so I appointed legal advisers and on 15 June I met my attacker again, this time in the magistrate's court. He was decked out in his Sunday-best suit but I would have known him anywhere. Our eyes met briefly. I felt nauseous and wished, not for the first time, that I had let the matter drop. I stood in the box in the oak-panelled room and swore to be truthful. Retelling the events was upsetting. Worse were the counter-allegations that I was in fact the attacker, launching myself with clenched fists at a 6'2" stranger. I had kicked and punched him and tried to drive his tank of a cab off the road with my tiny car. His witness was a real revelation: she was the woman in the back of his cab. She swore she had seen me about to slap him and had told me so on the night. Why on earth was she perjuring herself in this way?
Only one of my witnesses turned up. In spite of a two-hour wait his testimony was truthful and accurate, and unlike the fool- ish woman, he withstood cross- examination. Without him, the outcome would almost certainly have been diffe- rent. The cabbie was convicted of common assault, fined £50, made to pay £30 com- pensation and my costs. But he may have won in the end because we the tax-payers will be paying for his legal aid. Since when has a London taxi-driver been so short of funds?
Worse still, there is no guarantee that the Public Carriage Office, whose business it is to maintain standards and keep its cabbies in line, is going to do anything about it for quite a while. They would not say on the telephone, even after the court hearing, whether the convicted man had informed them, as he is supposed to, of the impending case against him. I would have to write to them. They would then inform me by letter if they had a record of my initial complaint, and whether the police had reported the incident to them in February. The court might or might not pass on details of the conviction, `depend- ing on how efficient they are'. Which means that this thuggish individual might well carry on plying his trade until he applies for a renewal of his licence, which happens every three years. Only at that point will the standard police check turn up in his criminal record. Then he will either have his licence revoked altogether or lose it for up to six months.
What I did glean from the Carriage Office last week is something about the complaints procedure: they 'might' in simi- lar circumstances supply you, in writing of course, with the name of the driver, but if you call in the police then it becomes entirely a police matter. The catch, as I discovered, is that the police are reluctant to take action. The whole thing is a bureaucratic absurdity, or worse. Mean- while, taxi drivers everywhere can do more or less as they please. Attacks on the general public may be rare but refusals to take passengers to inconvenient destina- tions are commonplace. And in all this they enjoy both the protection of a monopoly and the shelter of a slack licens- ing authority, confident that only very few people — not including the police — will spare the time, energy and expense to pursue them.
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