Well this post will be a bit unusual because I had a bit of an unusual night a couple of weeks ago. It started out pretty normally; me and a few friends planned on going out to a house music night at one of the clubs in Durham but somewhere completely different. It’ll be a short post but I thought I’d share a different side of what can happen on exchange.

It all started out as a normal night, we had a few drink at our building before heading off to the club. We tried to dress a little edgy which meant my friend was wearing a white tank top with a borrowed shirt over top and I was in a pink tank top with a pink shirt over it. We got to the club and it was pretty dead (the house music night is known for being pretty disappointing and in that sense it didn’t disappoint). I said hey to the few people I knew there and we spent a bit of time there before deciding to leave. We’d managed to pick up a couple of police hats before leaving the building.

We didn’t really want to go home so we figured we’d finish the night in a different club that we thought would have more people and be generally better. We got out of the club and were a bit excited so we ran down the street and my friend decided to ‘parkour’ (jump) of a couple cars as we went. Big mistake apparently. I was ahead of him and wondering where he went and so turned around to see him on the ground with a big guy grabbing him. One of the cars he had jumped on belonged to a bouncer who had run after him and punched him in the face, dropping him to the ground. The bouncer held on to him and walked him back to the club.

At this point my other friends and I were very confused – we weren’t sure what had happened and stood around waiting to see what was going to happen. Shortly a bouncer walked over and grabbed me and told me “the CCTV said to get you” but refused to actually tell me why he was grabbing me or what the CCTV showed. Police arrived (4 at first but later another 4 would show up) and chatted to him while I stood around in my costume police hat waiting for someone to tell me what was going on. A bouncer kept telling the police that the CCTV said to get me but never told the police what it showed. Eventually my friend was arrested and taken away in a police car while I was given a ‘dispersal notice’ that meant I needed to leave the area.

I went home and sent a quick email to my family who would be visiting soon to let them know what happened, just in case it wasn’t fully resolved when they arrived. It would be the next morning, when my friend was released, that we would find out what happened. He had been shown the CCTV footage and apparently after he jumped on the car, the camera had zoomed in on me slowly for whatever reason and so they thought I was involved.

And that is the story of my first police encounter. I won’t claim to be an expert on dealing with police encounters but I will say this – cooperate, be calm, don’t freak out. And hey, you might end up with a story to tell.