The big man. Avenger or bully? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKKADFIEX84
The “Big Man”, 35-year-old Alan Pollock, who threw an apparent fare dodger on the 9.33pm service from Edinburgh to Perth off a train, has been charged with assault by the British Transport Police. The incident was filmed and placed on YouTube, where over 2 million people saw it. Now the teenager involved (and hurled off by Pollock) has come forward: Sam Main, 19, a student surveyor at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University. He says that he wasn’t a fare dodger at all, but had been sold the wrong tickets.
The video shows Main being asked, repeatedly, to leave the train; then Pollock stands up, asks if there’s a problem, and ejects Main. Another passenger then throws Main’s bag off, and Pollock prevents the teenager from getting on again. The latter now claims to have suffered cuts and bruises; also that he was diabetic, and was afraid that his bag, with his medicine, had been left on the train. Both Pollock and Main must now report to the local procurator fiscal. Commentators have largely portrayed Pollock as an old-fashioned hero winning the fight over an unruly yob. Pollock, who works for an investment management company in Edinburgh, is remaining silent about the incident. At least ticket collectors are happy – they claim that since the video, passengers have been behaving impeccably.
“I brought my children up to know right from wrong and that’s all my son was doing,” said Alan Pollock’s father, quoted on Deadline News.
“I don’t condone the way I spoke to the conductor. But still there’s no way that anybody possibly who has seen the video can condone the way the passenger chose to handle the situation,” said Sam Main, quoted on The Daily Mail.
Bad news for the public-spirited. I knew it, sighed Tom Utley in The Daily Mail. “The wrong man would end up in trouble with the law.” Pollock, a “public-spirited banker”, now faces Christmas “under the shadow of prosecution,” leaving public-minded people “groaning in despair.” The very fact that the video was seen by so many says “something profound about the psychology of modern civilised man.” Surely, we all “seethe” at the fare dodger’s anti-social behavior. And we know, too, that most of us wouldn’t have the guts to do what the “big man” did. Utley himself would have abided by the “watchword of the modern urban commuter: ‘Don’t get involved.’” But Main’s reaction is “depressing.” In charging Pollock, the police have given “cowards like me yet another excuse for refusing to get involved: don’t stand up for the silent majority, don’t do what you know to be right – or the law will throw the book at you.”
But things need to be taken in context. Perhaps we should stand back a little, said Vicky Allan in The Herald Scotland. We shouldn’t be too quick in making Main a “symbol or scapegoat”; perhaps, too, we should be wary of deciding that Big Man represents “the revenge our society needs on the young.” The problem with these YouTube videos is that we only see tiny fragments – and then fill them out with our own “sometimes unfounded” fears. But there are “real people” in these dramas. If you actually look at the video, the response of passengers is “fairly mixed.” And the same can be said about the “virtual trial” that this Youtube video has triggered.
Watch the video below
