A pool of blood outside the pub: Our acceptance of brutality makes us no better than criminals, says Andrew Brown

IT WAS the blood that stopped me crossing the road. I had been walking home from a west London Tube station when a couple of young men lurched out of the pub behind me. A stocky white man held a taller, thinner black man around the neck in the crook of his elbow. They might have been doing a very clumsy dance for five steps or a couple of seconds, until the white youth threw the black one to the pavement. He lay on his back for a moment, completely limp. The other bent over him and with a windmilling motion punched him hard in the head once with each fist. Then he straightened, and kicked him behind the ear so that his whole head jumped with the impact.

By this time there were three or four people watching from the door of the pub. The attacker ran back among them, and into the depths of the pub. The audience returned to their seats indoors quietly.

The man on the ground was completely still. A leather satchel lay on his chest. The fight had been over so quickly that I hardly registered how much violence was involved until another man walked up to the victim and said: 'Call an ambulance] There's blood.'

There was a great deal of blood. The victim's head had by then produced a puddle about twelve inches by three.

The samaritan marched into the pub in search of a telephone. Everyone inside must have known who the attacker was, but he had vanished. The only person who looked remotely like him was the barman, who had gone very white in the face as he rang for an ambulance: he moved around the corner of the large central bar so the samaritan and I could not hear what was happening. The life of the pub continued undisturbed.

When we emerged into the street a small crowd had gathered around the injured man. Someone was holding him in a sitting position, with an arm round his shoulders, and cradling his bloody head: he lolled speechlessly, but groped towards the satchel, and tried to close it.

I decided to ring for an ambulance from home, just round the corner. The idea that it had been the barman who had injured the man in the street was now fixed in my head: I could think of no other explanation for the silence of the pub crowd about the commotion in the street outside.

The first thing that happens when you ring 999 in London is a very prompt and courteous operator asks which emergency service you want: after you have asked for the ambulance, a machine tells you your call is being queued and will be answered as soon as possible. This message repeats every minute. After I had heard it seven times, the operator dropped in to ask how I was doing. I asked if these delays were normal. 'Someone might be dying while I'm in this queue.'

'I know, she replied. Often you have to wait 10 or 15 minutes.'

I asked her to put me through to the police instead. Their operator was extremely prompt, and told me I was the fourth person to report the incident. When I said that I had actually seen it happen, he took details and promised someone would be round to talk to me later.

In due course a policeman arrived in a Mini Metro, with his notebook. He asked if I could pick the attacker out at an identity parade. I said I'd be happy to try, but could not guarantee success.

But we both knew nothing would come of it.

It was just another minor incident in the gradual collapse of our cities. A drunk gets thrown out of a pub, and as a matter of routine is punched senseless; the emergency ambulance doesn't work; the police hardly bother to pretend there is anything they can do. Later that night, a neighbouring pub was raided for drugs, among them crack and Ecstasy: a hundred policemen were used, and 17 arrests made. It made a paragraph in the Evening Standard.

The incident I saw would never make any sort of news. But in some ways it is much more shocking because it doesn't involve an obviously criminal subculture. The victim was kicked in a district where you can pay pounds 1,300 a term for nursery education, about 300 yards north of the cutting edge of gentrification, outside a pub that used to stage theatre performances in an upstairs room.

The casual acceptance of brutality in the streets, and the automatic reluctance to get involved, has spread until we all behave like members of the criminal classes.