PLASTIC HANDCUFFS

(pictured above: say goodbye to this sort of thing)

I love those new plastic handcuffs the cops use in America. They make people look like some of the products you see in the shops, you know with the little plastic bands attached to seal things up with the barcode on them. You also see them binding cables together at the backs of computers and tellies and so on. I reckon plastic handcuffs hint at the future of law enforcement going forward. Just think, we’ll be able to arrest upstarts and criminals and put them up on shelves in a kind of supermarket jail. Then people can come along with bail money and take the arrested people down off the shelves and scan them on a kind of self service counter and bring them home. The jails won’t even need to be staffed. Well, there’ll be a couple of people there to help out if the scanner goes wonky. It’ll be a bit like the 24 hour Tescos near me at three in the morning. It’ll be a grand set up.

Cutting down on jail staff will save a bit of cash and the cuffs themselves will be cheap which means we can make more of them and therefore make more arrests. In fact, we could hand the whole jail thing over to some company and not have to worry about having to pay tax for it anymore. The company could profit by keeping the bail money. We’d all be quids in!

Come to think of it, we could sell off the whole law enforcement gig to private interests too. No more exchequer cash would have to be spent on cops. The cops could pay for themselves by having adverts on their uniforms, like logos and that, the same way soccer players do.

Yeah, I’m on a roll now. I’ve just thought of a way we could also save money on surveillance, gathering intelligence and all that sort of thing. To pre-emptively ensure there’s no funny business, everyone (all of us, me, you, the mother, the lot) could be electronically tagged and monitored by a private company. The company could also use the data they gather for personalised targeted advertising purposes. That way the nation is not only kept safe but also kept informed about new products that might be of interest to them. Everyone wins.

Not everyone would be happy though. The usual crowd (hippies, students, the gays, the blacks) would be whingeing about conflicts of interest and all that. I suppose kinky types wouldn’t like the new cuffs either. They’d probably miss the whole shackles element. If the plastic handcuffs were furry the kinky lobby would probably be queuing up to be arrested. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of police time is wasted arresting kinky sorts who just want be put in the old style metal cuffs. Plastic handcuffs will put a stop to that I suppose. That’d be another bonus. No one wants to be bound in a pair of plastic handcuffs. It’s kind of insulting. Fucking undignified really.