I was in a police line up once!
Well in truth I never actually got to stand in the line though.
It was all rather odd really, the story was that one day at work the Town Hall received a request for help from the police for men at a certain age, height, build, hair colour, ethnicity and so on, to attend the police station for a hastily arranged police line up. The council circulated the message to staff and give permission for people to take time off and go.
I broadly matched the profile given and thought it would be fun to go.
When I got to the station, I told them I'd been invited to an identification parade they took my details and showed me to a room were other men were waiting to go on the line up too.
I thought they must have taken me to the wrong room!
Everyone looked vastly different to each other and to the criteria that I had match to?
After a wait, a police officer asked me and two or three others to step through to another room and told us we didn't quite match the specification they had been looking for (God knows what it most have been as there was a complete physical randomness of the people I saw waiting there), thanked us for volunteering and give us £20 or something like that for our expenses.
A bit of a strange experience really.
Do they even do identity parades anymore?
Fwiw I've had to go down to police stations occasionally over my working career to give statements, a few of which have led to prosecutions.
I've always found the police personnel I've dealt with to be somewhat different to other people, I guess it must be the culture they work in as part of the job they do?
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