Kippered Kirsty: a lesson to us all

On Sunday 18 February a woman called Kirsty Sharman from Tunstall in Staffordshire, Great Britain, left a note on a parked ambulance attending a 999-call from her neighbour. The note objected forcefully to the ambulance being parked in front of her house.

Most of us will find her request to be somewhere on the scale between unreasonable and unhinged. 'Bloody-minded' might spring to mind, or 'pig-headed'.

In modern terms the note she left was relatively mild – calling it 'foul-mouthed' because it contained the expression 'I couldn't give a shit' seems remarkably thin-skinned.

In fact no paramedic was harmed during the display of the note. The prosecution lawyer told the court that 'A neighbour saw that note being deposited by the defendant and they took it from the rear windscreen and posted it back through the defendant's address, having torn it apart.' However, 'the paramedics were later made aware of the note.'

It appears that when Kirsty discovered that her note had been taken down and shoved through her letter box she made her feelings plain in robust language to a male paramedic as the team was leaving. Somehow a photo of the note made its way to Katie Tudor, a 'Paramedic Mentor'(?), who published it on Twitter with an added a dogwhistle about how upset it had made her, and copied her tweet to the police.

Victims of burglaries, muggings, assaults and all the other unpleasant crimes to which the citizen is exposed should stop reading now. Kirsty was arrested and charged on the Monday, the day after the offence, and appeared in court on Tuesday. You see, the justice system in Britain can work like greased lightning when it cares to.

It may come as a surprise to some Rip Van Winkles that Britain no longer has police forces or courts. Instead we read of the 'Stoke North Local Policing Team' and the 'North Staffordshire Justice Centre'. The aforesaid Stoke North Local Policing Team hauled Kirsty up before the beak in the aforesaid North Staffordshire Justice Centre, where she was fined £120 and had to pay a victim surcharge of £30 (presumably to the 'Paramedic Mentor' for her psychological wounds) and costs of £135. She had been charged with 'using threatening words or behaviour'.

In court, Kirsty's lawyer, Hayley Keegan, rolled over without a fight. Kirsty pleaded guilty and Hayley said Kirsty was sorry for her behaviour.

What Kirsty actually wrote was:

If this van is for anyone but Number 14 then you have no right to be parked here. I couldn't give a sh*t if the whole street collapsed. Now move your van from outside my house.

Kirsty's message clearly contains no 'threatening words or behaviour' – it is a simple, if forthrightly expressed appeal for the ambulance crew to move their van off her parking space. Since the paramedics involved never even saw the note until someone else showed it to them, one has to wonder just how shocked this hardy band of lifesavers could have been, made up as it is of people who presumably see gruesome, shocking and harrowing things quite frequently.

Others choose to differ. Kirsty was soundly kippered by the tabloid media for her note; the Chairman of the Magistrates described her behaviour as "despicable". The copper in charge, Chief Inspector John Owen, Commander for Stoke North Local Policing Team, was outraged – as only a pompous, sanctimonious, self-rightous copper can be:

This type of behaviour cannot be tolerated, and I know my view is supported by 99 percent of our community. Paramedics are there to help those in absolute need, and for them to feel threatened or intimidated whilst potentially saving a life is just not acceptable.

How he knows that his view is 'supported by 99 percent of our community' is not specified.

However, in case you didn't know already, it appears that being unreasonable and expressing your unreasonableness in appropriately robust language is a criminal offence these days.

This crime was so heinous that no police were called to the scene, no damage or injuries were sustained, no one suffered financial loss, no investigation was needed and the police were able to make an orderly, unresisted arrest on the following day.

From the police point of view that sounds like the perfect crime for them to deal with: half a shift on Monday spent arresting Kirsty in Tunstall and bringing her to the station then letting her find her own way home, followed by a shift on Tuesday waiting to give evidence in a 25 minute hearing. After her conviction she had to be taken home under police protection.

Now Kirsty Sharman has been convicted she can be even more soundly kippered with complete impunity by the tabloids and the Twitter-mob. We learn that she is a horrible person, a single mum with two children living off benefits, who has been terrorising her [neighbours/street/town] for years.

Having now stoked up the coals under this despicable wrongdoer, the coppers are probably having to keep her house under round-the-clock observation, since if one of her many enemies now sets fire to her house in the middle of the night the police will get it in the neck (quite rightly) for the resulting suffering. All this because a 'Paramedic Mentor' was upset by a note she never saw.

If citizens want to avoid self-destruction it looks as though they are all going to have to learn to be reasonable and polite to the powers that be and their agents. Whatever happened to that bastion of civil society, the bloody-minded Briton?

Update 24.02.2018

Kirsty Sharman is definitely one of us.

On a roll after being legally whacked by the powers-that-be she has now turned her Twitter-gun on the Envy of the World™ a.k.a the British National Health Service. What her tweet lacked in reasoned argument it made up in forceful precision: 'Got to admit though the NHS service is w*** though.' For the benefit of the slow of understanding she added 'three laughing emojis'.

For the Daily Mail, currently using her as clickbait with moderation turned off, her observation gave them a good headline: 'Jobless mother-of-two, 26, who was fined £120 for telling paramedics to ‘move your f***ing van’ risks more fury with vile tweet about the health service'. Criticism of the NHS is 'vile' now, it seems.

Keep up the good work, Kirsty, we're right behind you, dear lady (albeit at a safe distance).