Officially: Not a terrorist

The other day when I jumped off the tube at Victoria, I was approached by a Metropolitan Police officer who asked me to stop. Actually at first I almost just walked away as I was still listening to my ipod on “tube volume” so I didn’t hear him!

Anyway, I stopped, and old mate very politely explained to me that under section blah blah blah of the terrorism act of blah blah he could legally stop anyone he wants, for no reason whatsoever, and perform a search to check for articles related to terrorism. “No worries” I said, thinking “random bag search, whatever” – and handed over my bag.

“Oh no sir” he said, “we need to move over here, out of sight of the other passengers”. Well, “out of sight” actually meant, “slightly to the left, but right in front of the machine where people buy their tickets” so not really sure what the logic was there. For some reason, old mate then explained himself again, at length, and repeatedly asked me, “do you have any questions?”.

It was probably a good 10 minutes between when he first approached me and when he actually started to search my bag, which annoyed me somewhat as he was making me late to work. Finally though, he started looking through every single compartment of my bag, which took a long time in itself as it’s a laptop bag with a lot of zippers. Old mate at one point even struck up a conversation about my PSP!

Finally he finished, and I thought I could go… but nope, there was more. Next he had to search through my wallet to make sure my credit cards were all in my name. To be honest I was a little worried, as there are credit cards in there from Australia, USA, and the UK, which may have looked a little bit sus. But apparently not, he was happy (since they were all in my name) and handed my wallet back.

“Finally!” I thought; “surely I can go now…?” – but no, there was one more step. “I just have to fill out this form now sir” he said. So I stood there for another 5 minutes whilst he recorded all of my details, even asking me which category of race I fell under! Since I didn’t see “black Jamaican” on there I went with “Caucasian, non-UK”. Finally he was finished, so he handed me my copy of the form, and sent me on my merry way.

All in all it took almost 20 minutes for what really could have been a 1 minute job. I mean, I’m glad that they’re making an effort with security and all, but really – a bag search is a bag search, there’s no need to make it take so long!