Police have released the dash-cam footage of the man who wriggled out of his cuffs in the back seat of a police cruiser, maneuvered into the front seat, stole the car and led officers on a two-county chase.
Riverdale police were called the morning of June 15 to Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft Store, 4978 S. 1050 West, on reports of a male and female who were possibly intoxicated. When they arrived and found the pair stumbling around, appearing to be high on drugs, they handcuffed Gordon Graham, 35, and placed him in the back of a police cruiser while they searched his vehicle.
After Graham complained of heat, an officer opened the sliding window separating the back and front seats.That’s when Graham seized his opportunity. As the dash-cam footage shows, Graham gets his hands in front of him by working his hands underneath his body and sliding his legs through his arms. Pausing every so often to check that the coast is clear, he then somehow works his hands free from the cuffs.
Near the end of the video, Graham dives head first through the sliding window. Within 30 seconds, he drives away, just as officers saw that he had slipped into the driver’s seat.
As Graham drives off, another angle in the rtls, he narrowly misses hitting an officer, who lunges out of the way of the vehicle at the last moment. The video ends as Graham takes the car over a steep berm and onto the road.Graham lost the police, who had to scramble to get into another police car, but was later spotted in the Clinton-Roy area, where he’d abandoned the police cruiser. After a roughly two-hour search, police finally caught and arrested him.
“I thought I would have to sell a kidney.” That’s how Dean Hawkins describes the sense of trepidation he had when he approached his bank, NatWest, for ￡120,000 to purchase new premises for his CCTV business, Vistec Systems. He was shocked when the application went through “without a hitch”. “It was quite easy – a couple of phone calls, some forms and a meeting.”
He believes Royal Bank of Scotland, which owns NatWest, when it says it has ￡20bn ready to lend to small firms, but can’t find the demand. “There is an assumption among business owners that you won’t get bank funding, but my attitude is, don’t ask, don’t get. I think the media have blown up the 'banks aren’t lending’ thing.”
He admits that his long track record with the bank – he’s been with them for 20 years – helped, and younger businesses might have a harder time securing credit. The key, he says, is “transparency” and keeping the lines of communication open with the bank even when “you don’t need anything”. “I’ve told others about my experience so hopefully more people will try making applications.”
Many business owners will recognise Tim Ewington’s experience of talking to the bank about a new facility. “We did look at securing [a conventional loan] but we quickly ended up where we are – invoice discounting,” says Ewington, who is co-founder of Shortlist Media, which publishes and distributes free weekly lifestyle magazines.
This form of finance, which sees cash advanced against unpaid invoices, is becoming increasingly popular among banks as an alternative to the humble overdraft. It provides banks with security against companies’ debtor books, so the loans don’t have a negative impact on a lender’s capital position, unlike an overdraft, which is unsecured.
For those with slow-paying customers, it can be a useful way of quickly getting your hands on your cash. Ewington is happy with the facility, but he says he’s sceptical about the ability of companies like his to access more significant chunks of bank
debt to finance ambitious expansion plans. “A lot of my friends run small businesses, too, and banks are not being generous to say the least. They’re very careful – which is why they prefer to offer invoice discounting, because it’s safe for them.” When Rupert Lee-Browne, chief executive of Caxton FX, wanted to raise money to hire staff and upgrade IT at his foreign exchange firm, he was offered bank funding. But it fell woefully short of what he felt his business needed.
He politely declined the offer and instead turned to an unusual source for the funds: his own customers. At the end of 2011, he secured ￡3.9m by offering a retail bond which pays an interest rate of 7.25pc. He saw it as a “great way to sidestep the banks”.
“Banks are lending money, but not enough, particularly to fast-growing businesses,” he said at the time. Has his view changed? “Banks will only lend a certain amount to certain customers – they are very restricted because of regulatory pressures.
“They want to lend money that is risk-free, so they don’t have to use their own capital to back the loan.” That means security demands on entrepreneurs. “I’m not prepared to give a personal guarantee to the bank. The bond was an effective way of raising money without any one organisation having a lien over the future of the company.”
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