Misunderstood Backwards

On Wednesday afternoon I watched two police officers arrest a woman for carrying a hatchet in her grand-daughter’s pram. As they held her hands behind her back she started to wail and begged to be cuffed with her hands in front of her chest. One of the officers asked her why she had a prohibited weapon in her pram. She said that a man had chased after her the previous day and threatened to kill the baby. She sobbed and demanded to know why she was the one being arrested and not the guy who was the reason she’d been carrying the weapon. The officer didn’t give her an answer, because there isn’t one—at least not one that can be given quickly and easily with a hatchet in one hand and a screaming felon in the other. He read out her rights from his notebook; when he asked if she understood, she stayed silent. She was too old and malconditioned to understand the difference between how you perceive the world and how the world perceives you.

A crowd had gathered in the carpark. A man called out to the police and told them to be gentle—for the benefit of his own ego, it seemed, rather than the well-being of the woman. A middle-aged lady began to step towards us but her sensible husband held her back. She was requesting that the pram be rotated so that the baby inside wasn’t watching her grandma be arrested. “Kids remember those things,” she said, which I doubted, considering that it was no more than a year old. Nonetheless, my co-worker rotated the pram ninety degrees and began waving and smiling at the baby, and the lady called out “Thank you”.

It was about this time that the offender’s daughter emerged through the shopping centre auto doors, pushing a second pram carrying a child about the same age as the first, possibly a twin. She didn’t look frightened, or angry—not even surprised. With breathtaking nonchalance she glanced at the scene and said, “For god’s sake, Mum, why do you have an axe on you?” Then she continued at a casual stroll across the carpark and called out, “I’ll see you at home.”

“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,” wrote Kierkegaard. Though I don’t agree with him, I understand what he means.

First, as Einstein proved, life isn’t lived forwards, or backwards, or indeed with any movement at all, but in all timelines concurrently. Second, no one understands it; memories are distorted, fabricated, rationalised, projected, weaponised, and deflected. But never understood.

Having said that, I do have a clearer comprehension of why this disadvantaged malefactor was locked into the back of a police wagon than, say, the crowds in the carpark, who didn’t see the half-hour of prior events. All they had was the alliance of ignorance, speculation, and morbidity, commonly referred to as “human intelligence”. That night over their dinner tables this poor woman would have been arrested a hundred times over for a thousand different reasons.

I’ll tell you what happened, backwards and forwards.

I was paged to a department store due to a repeat-offender sighting. The doorman told me that there were two women in the store, mother and daughter, both pushing prams, who had been in every day since Monday and stolen several hundred dollars worth of stock, and upon exit refused bag checks by the store guard, who is notoriously passive and let them go without confrontation.

I did a walk-through of the shop floor and saw the two likely offenders. I could tell by the way they dressed, the bags they were carrying, and a certain expression that you begin to recognise when you work in my industry, a flicker of fear and guilt and self-consciousness upon sighting an authority figure, while they internally ask themselves the question, “Is he here for me?” a question which innocent people don’t have to ask.

After establishing my presence I stood at the exit. The daughter dumped some items in the adjacent aisles and proceeded to dummy-scan a few others at the self-serve checkouts. It’s a common modus operandi: they continue to masquerade as legitimate shoppers by scanning the items they have collected in the store, and then tell the shop attendants that their card has been declined so they regretfully have to leave the items behind, abandoning most of their haul but getting away with a couple of lesser-value items in their pockets.

While she played this game with herself, her mother exited through the gates and stood half a metre away from me, hoping I’d address her, which I didn’t. Eventually she said, “What’s your problem, mate?” I didn’t speak, didn’t look at her, didn’t move. So she said it again, louder, stepping towards me. She got so close that I could smell her breakfast and the cheap bourbon she’d used to wash it down. I told her I didn’t have a problem, which is untrue—my grandmother is dying in a nursing home and I’m estranged from two of my abusive relatives and I have a big utility bill to pay and I’ve been working overtime and drinking more heavily as a result. But none of those related to any specific issue with her.

Even as she bared her teeth at me and shouted in my face and prodded her index finger into my chest I still wondered how it was that I had become the tiger and she the lamb. The only difference between our circumstances were the names of our abusers and the quality of the whiskey. I had too much that I wanted to say to her and too little time to say it.

She called me every name except my own. She asked to fight, and I declined. She demanded to know why I checked her daughter’s bag, which I didn’t, and why I was targeting them, which I wasn’t, and why I’d been following them around all week, which I hadn’t. She was trapped in an alternative reality. Someone she loved had shrieked at her when she was a child and though they were long gone she could still hear their scream.

When her daughter emerged from the checkouts I told both of them that they were required to leave the premises. They asked “What for?”—not because they wanted to know but because they wanted to contest my answer.

“Disorderly conduct,” I said.

“But we haven’t been stealing,” they said.

“I’m not telling you to leave for stealing,” I said, “I’m telling you to leave for aggressive and threatening behaviour.”

“But we haven’t been stealing,” they said. And on it went, ad despairum.

About an hour earlier a man had spat on me. He is a serial offender. Though it was Wednesday I was following him for an offence he’d committed on Monday, which he’d committed as a result of something that had happened to him at some other nondescript moment in the fractured concurrency of spacetime. He is known to retailers for trolley walk-outs, and to security for disturbances and vandalism.

He recognised me immediately. He’s small on the inside but six feet tall on the outside and when he got close to me my nose almost touched the logo of his puffer vest. He threw a shadow punch, and called me, of all things, a “silly goose”. He once threatened to throw an Italian doughnut at my face, and about a week ago he was tossing handfuls of Twisties at parked cars. Today was the angriest I’d ever seen him, probably because I spotted him before he’d had a chance to do whatever he’d come to do.

After threatening me and my co-worker and shouting, “Touch me again and I’ll knock your f***ing heads off!” he strutted through the fluorescent snake of corridors from the food court to the farthest exit, snatching a bag of potato chips from a shop display on his way out. We continued to follow him through the exit and into the bus interchange, where he gave us multiple birds. He then decamped on a bus bound for the third-lowest socioeconomic area in the state.

All of this had been captured on bodycam. Because my co-worker and I were in uniform, the male’s threats were sufficient for him to be charged with aggravated assault. When I was paged to the department store regarding the two females, police were still on site, upstairs in the management offices, copying the footage to a USB and taking a report. My team leader was watching the CCTV monitors and noticed the woman pointing at me, and radioed me to ask if I wanted the police to come down and assist.

When the two females saw the cops approaching they immediately abandoned their imaginary feud with me and veered in the opposite direction, as if leaving the officers’ line of sight would make them forget they were there. The daughter then stopped at the Chinese takeaway to order some sweet and sour chicken while her mother hurried towards the nearest exit. My co-worker and one of the cops stayed with the daughter while I pursued the mother.

When she got through the auto doors she made the mistake of standing on the pavement, taking out her phone, and filming me and the police officer who’d accompanied me. As with many offenders, the instant she felt threatened by law enforcement she spontaneously acquired a legal degree. I told her to leave the site. She refused.

That was the biggest mistake she’d made that day, because the cop beside me hadn’t yet noticed the weapon in her pram—it wasn’t until the second one arrived that she got herself arrested. From the bottom of her pram he took the hatchet and a screwdriver, clutched her arm, twisted it behind her back, and with the assistance of his colleague, cuffed her and gently lowered her into the back of their wagon.

If she hadn’t remained on the premises … If she hadn’t poked my chest … If she’d stayed quiet the first time I’d ignored her … If she and her daughter hadn’t re-entered a store in which they’d already committed an offence … If a man she has never met hadn’t called me a goose … If another man hadn’t chased her the previous day and threatened her daughter’s baby … If the officers had been tasked an hour earlier to a more serious incident and weren’t on site the moment she and her daughter were … If that person she loved hadn’t screamed at her fifty years ago … If I hadn’t been transferred from my previous workplace to this one due to disagreements with the operations manager …

It’s as undisentanglable as a mouthful of spaghetti already digested. It can’t be understood. It can only be observed and reported. It is both true and false that what happened to her on Wednesday wasn’t a result of her own actions. The true part will reinforce her victim mentality and incite further anti-social activity; the false part will go unnoticed. What happened yesterday influenced what happened today which will influence what happens tomorrow. And somewhere, someone else she has never met is being adversely affected by the moment of her arrest. Somebody I too will never meet.

Michael Passaniti lives in South Australia.