news watchers will, by now, have gathered that a wpc was Shot in nottingham last night, just a few hundred yards from where i live. i was completely oblivious to the fact until i woke up this morning thinking "it's very quiet today" and found our flat behind lines of Crime Scene tape with radford boulevard and the surrounding area cordoned off. Police evidence gathering teams in their puffy white suits have been up and down the street out the back of the house all day, and i have to ask police permission to get in and out of my street whilst taking ridiculously long roundabout journeys to uni. news teams with huge white vans with satellite dishes are parked at the end of lenton boulevard, and adverts for local papers scream "WPC SHOT IN CITY".

having read the few facts that seem to be available at the moment it seems like a burglar was interrupted by police who were then shot at as he did a runner. they're saying lenton boulevard although a bigger area has been cordoned off up at the radford boulevard end. perhaps the gunman ran off in this direction. what is interesting to me about all this is the difference in response when a policewoman gets shot compared to previous shootings in this area.

nottingham has a bit of reputation within the uk for violent crime which even makes it into the summary of the city on wikipedia. radford, the area i live in, has a particularly bad rep, although in my view this is largely a racist thing. the area is predominantly populated by afrocarribeans and asians. nonetheless, there was a shooting round here a few years ago, of a local person. i don't remember seeing anything in the news about that. large areas of the city were not shut down and a massive police evidence gathering operation was not initiated. after an initial crime scene investigation centring on one small residential street there were more police on the beat for a while, and that was it. this morning local people were getting quite pissed off with the police not letting them into their own streets. it's hard not to see local people's treatment as discriminatory.

does it matter that the victim was a police officer? i would say not. the same treatment, by both the police and the media, should be given to any shooting. does it matter that she was a young woman? once again, the same comment. a potential murder is a horrific crime and it doesn't matter who's on the end of the bullet. why do poor black people getting shot not make the news in the same way as a young female police officer, who has essentially given consent to be placed in potentially life-threatening situations? it seems we only care about certain kinds of victims. it's just not newsworthy when working-class afrocarribeans are the victims of crime.

will doubtless blog more about this event as more info emerges.