I like the police. They perform a highly demanding, stressful and dangerous function: keeping nasty violent reality from impinging too much on the daily lives of normal folk who like to build cosy walls of illusion around themselves.

But sometimes they can be a bit silly and try to scare you into believing that they possess godlike powers of crime detection. Like with this new televisual advertisement:

Yes, apparently the British police are now able to detect if you’ve been taking illegal drugs from a mere glance as you pass them by. At night. While you drive past in a car. Impressive stuff isn’t it.

Hilariously, the advert seems to suggest that taking drugs gives you the lamp-eyed appearance of Gollum from Lord of the Rings, which would indeed make you liable to being stopped and searched.

Now obviously the police are trained to recognise possible indications of illicit substance use like pupil dilation and throwing up all over yourself and what not. But the idea of the police having some kind of bionic night vision only serves to make them look a wee bit stupid, not scary.

Maybe next time you try to make an intimidating advert to strike fear into evildoers, just have a bunch of riot police beating up badly dressed civilians for no apparent reason (google Ian Tomlinson, folks), they’ll respect you more after that I guarantee.