Confessions of a Police Constable

by Matt Delito

  I guess if there’s anything to learn from this, it is: don’t take your kid’s Blackberry away from him if you’ve got a gun in the back of your car. And if you do, don’t call the police on him yourself.

  Or, you know, don’t hold weapons for gang members. That might be even easier.

  A pinprick is nothing like a paper cut

  ‘GET BACK!’ I screamed at the top of my lungs, as I slowly shuffled away from the man standing opposite me on the seventh-floor landing of a council estate.

  The staircase I had just ascended was behind me. To the right of me, there was a low black railing and a 70-foot drop. In front of me was a Customer14.

  The man seemed dazed, not entirely with it in general, and absolutely, feather-spittingly furious.

  Something had happened to him. He had completely lost the Ordinance Survey maps and headed out into the deepest, worst-lit corners of incoherence. He was sobbing, shouting, mumbling, drooling, spitting. The words ‘Elise’ and ‘I’m going to fucking kill him’ kept being repeated.

  My adrenaline boost was giving me tunnel vision and aural exclusion. I was aware of it, but I wasn’t able to use it: I couldn’t hear or see anything apart from the man I was facing. He wasn’t a very tall man – about five foot seven, perhaps. He was around 40 years old, IC1, with a build that suggested a long, hard life of substance abuse. He was hunched forward, holding onto the railing with his left hand.

  I reached for my radio and pressed the button – the orange one, right between the volume dial and the stubby antenna on my Motorola personal radio. Officially, it’s known as the Emergency Assistance Button. Frequently, it’s known as the ‘whoops’ or the ‘shit has hit the fan button’ too. In this case, it was the ‘I need some bloody backup, bloody quickly’ button.

  As I pressed down, the other transmission that was in progress (something about an RTC15) was cancelled, and I could speak for ten seconds without having to clutch my radio’s transmit button.

  ‘Urgent assistance required,’ I said, as calmly as I could, without breaking eye contact with the man, who was edging closer to me very slowly. I told the radio where I was, and followed up with the words that I knew would catch everyone’s attention: ‘IC1 male with a knife.’

  I took a firmer grip of the GFLB16 I had in my right hand, and crept back until I felt my foot touch something behind me. I realised with a jolt that the only direction I really wanted to go – further away from the addict in front of me – was blocked by a wall.

  The man didn’t have an actual knife. ‘Knife’ is what you say over the radio to convey ‘sharp weapon’. Samurai sword? Knife. Bayonet? Knife. Stanley blade? Knife. Surgeon’s scalpel? Knife. Similarly, all bat-like weapons are ‘sticks’, and any projectile weapon is a ‘gun’. If that sounds a little bit backwards, well, I’d urge you not to worry about it too much. When you are dosed to the eyelids with adrenaline in an extreme situation, it’s a lot easier to say ‘knife’ than trying to decide whether you’re facing a madman with a foil, a sabre or an épée. From our point of view, if it cuts, slashes or stabs, it’s a knife.

  This particular madman, however, was holding a whole different class of ‘knife’. In his hand he had an injection needle of some sort. It was tiny. The only reason I knew he was clutching it was the occasional flash of surgical steel in the overhead lighting.

  I’ve faced suspects with a baffling array of weapons. Guns, of course. Bats, knives, tyre irons, rolling pins, cast-iron pans, and even a chainsaw once. Nothing scares me as much as a hypodermic needle. When you’re against somebody with a bat, it’s a fair fight: they have a stick, you have a stick, you both have a bit of a tussle, they get arrested, job done. You may walk away with some bruises, perhaps even a broken bone, but ultimately it’s a situation you’ve been trained to handle. Guns are slightly worse, of course, but there’s a solution for that too, and over my years in the Metropolitan Police, I’ve perfected the art of running-away-very-fast-and-waiting-for-the-cavalry-to-arrive.

  When faced with a needle, you have a huge problem: if they come close enough to be wrestled to the ground and arrested, they’re close enough to give you a tiny scratch. It seems strange to be completely out of your head on adrenaline because of a weapon you can barely see, and yet a million statistics back you up. For example, in England, injecting drugs causes 90 per cent of all cases of hepatitis C and 6 per cent of all HIV cases. I’ve had my hepatitis jabs, of course, but a cure for HIV is still far enough away that I’d rather not have to deal with it.

  The man took a step closer just as my radio jumped back into life. ‘Mike Delta five-nine-two. Status update?’ I briefly touched my PTT17.

  ‘Could do with some help here, guys. He’s armed with a hypodermic needle.’

  ‘Received. ETA one minute,’ the operator fired back.

  I tried talking to the man again, interrupting his incoherent tirade: ‘Mate, let’s get you some help. We’ll find out what’s happening, and I’ll help you. I promise.’

  He took a step closer still, but some of the wildness seemed to have been extinguished from his eyes; a sign that I was getting through to him, I hoped.

  ‘Mate, I know you’re hurting. I can help you. I don’t want anyone to get hurt,’ I said, and involuntarily moved my baton side to side a little. My knuckles were white from gripping my 21 inches of extendable stainless steel. The movement caught his eye. He straightened up slightly and, in the process, slumped lightly against the railing.

  Behind him, I spotted two of my colleagues. They must have gone up the wrong stairway into the estate and ended up behind the man. Or perhaps they knew the layout better, and went around on purpose?

  Whatever the reason, they held an advantage by being behind him and it suddenly became my job to keep that advantage. I started talking, careful not to stop. I knew that I had to keep his attention on me.

  ‘What’s your name? Can I call you Simon?’ This is an old trick of psychology: call someone by the wrong name, and they will be rattled enough to give up their real name.

  ‘Matthew,’ he barked back.

  ‘Matthew? That’s great. My name is Matthew too. We’re like brothers, you and I. You’re not that much older than me. Perhaps you could have been my bigger brother, and we could have been Matthew and Matthew. That would have been confusing, wouldn’t it?’ I forced a laugh. Matthew looked confused; he started to laugh, but then remembered whatever it was that was bothering him in the first place, and a look of determination came over his face.

  My colleagues advanced behind him. Our tactics worked. Matthew was oblivious to the impending attack. Craig grabbed his arm and Tim put him in a headlock.

  ‘Drop the needle,’ Tim shouted.

  Immediately Matthew did as he was told. For a brief moment I thought he might try to throw himself off the balcony, but the three of us held him back, and minutes later he was led downstairs in handcuffs.

  When we finally had Matthew under arrest, we ran him through the PNC. His PNC record had warnings for drugs, violence and for being a known carrier of hepatitis A and C.

  The three of us looked at each other, and a shiver ran down my spine.

  ‘I’ll take a knife fight over this any day of the week,’ I half joked. Instead of laughing, my colleagues nodded silently in agreement.

  We had all walked a little bit closer to the edge than we were comfortable with.

  Sudden Death

  My Ticket had expired.

  The ticket I’m referring to is my police driving licence. As well as a standard DVLA driving licence, in order to be allowed to drive any police vehicle, you need to have a special driving licence. To receive this licence, officers do a course, followed by theoretical and practical exams.

  Police driving licences come in different levels, starting at ‘level 4’. This is the ‘boring’ ticket that allows you to drive from one place to another, but not on blues and twos18. You can do a ‘compliant stop’ – which means that you can drive behind somebody and turn you
r blue lights on to pull them over – but if they drive off, you have to call off the pursuit. This happened to me once when I had only the basic ticket, and I felt pretty daft having to let the guy drive away. Thankfully, in London there’s never a helicopter far off. The helicopter followed him to a petrol station, where I was able to go and arrest them. It transpired that he had a sizeable amount of drugs in the car. ‘Sorry, I didn’t see you, officer,’ the driver had said. Nice touch.

  There are dozens of different driving courses you can take. I have a solo ticket (that’s for riding police motorbikes) and the advanced driving qualification. The advanced course is rather interesting, and includes all sorts of high-speed pursuit stuff. It’s a shame that my end of the borough has 40mph limits (or less) everywhere, so I never get to open the cars up properly.

  Much like normal driving licences, police licences expire. Unlike normal driving licences, they expire rather quickly. When I’d realised mine was almost up, I’d gone to the driving school at Hendon to have it renewed, but the instructor I was meant to go out with had had to break his appointment when he was called off to something or other. You’d be surprised how often that sort of thing happens; I have a feeling he moonlights for the DPG19, which would explain a lot.

  An expired ticket isn’t a disaster. It normally means you end up ‘operating’ on a Panda – a term still in use despite police patrol cars having not been black and white for several decades – or one of the area cars, with someone else driving. However, on one occasion, I also managed to make it to work late. As a punishment the skipper20 decided to send me out on foot patrols through some of the shopping centres and markets that had recently been plagued with drugs and shoplifting.

  Whilst assigning the job, the skipper explained it would ‘help build character’. I had pretended to be insulted and grumpy as I left. ‘Pretended’ because, honestly, I don’t really mind foot patrols all that much. It does mean you’re not on response duties, but it’s actually quite nice to have an opportunity to stroll around the borough for a day. You talk to people, you get some exercise, and it’s a completely different experience to spending all day flying, tyres a-screeching, from call to call.

  The morning’s foot patrol, however, had turned out to be less than pleasant. Heavy clouds were sagging with the weight of grey depression, ready to ejaculate their heavy, sleety load all over my freshly washed overcoat. January will always be a dreadful time to be on foot patrol.

  Thankfully, I’d managed to spend a fair bit of time getting to know the café owners around my sector of the borough. A chat and a coffee here, a quick vandalism report and a cup of tea there – it all makes the world spin merrily on.

  Lunchtime came along eventually and, since it was a Friday, I decided to treat myself to a greasy delicacy from Burger King.

  Just as I finished the last bite of my double whopper, my radio interrupted my daydreaming.

  ‘Five-nine-two receiving Mike Delta?’ it squawked.

  ‘Retheifsglowblead,’ I replied, with my mouth full of burger and my last two fries.

  The couple sitting on the next table glanced over momentarily, before hunching over their trays, laughing so hard I briefly thought they might do themselves an injury.

  ‘You broke up there, say again?’

  ‘Receiving, go ahead!’ I repeated, smiling at the couple, with a shrug. I ended my transmission.

  ‘Hey, they don’t like waiting, what can I say?’ I said to the giggling couple, and winked.

  ‘We have a Code Zulu up on Eastern Terrace. Are you free to deal?’ the CAD operator asked.

  It has been a long time since you were able to buy an off-the-shelf ‘police scanner’ to listen in on police conversations, like they do in the movies, but there remains a rather obvious security flaw: as I sit there, finishing my lunch, the couple at the table next to mine will be able to overhear everything my colleagues talk about. Mostly, it will be boring stuff: a shoplifter, a colleague needing an Op Reclaim recovery of an uninsured car, or CCTV reporting some youths drinking in the park. However, occasionally, much more serious matters will be transmitted over radio.

  As a precaution, our Airwave radios are encrypted. Not as heavily as elsewhere, though. On American cop shows, you often hear them say things like ‘10-4’ (we’d say, ‘Received’), ‘10-23’ (we say, ‘Stand by, please’) or ‘417A’ (we say, ‘Suspect with a knife’). You don’t really want to have to look up all sorts of inane codes for every thinkable situation (apparently ‘10-41’ means ‘Will you be requiring an ambulance?’ What’s wrong with saying, ‘Will you be requiring an ambulance?’). However, in the UK we do have a few codes that we use, even over the military-grade-encrypted radios. We’d use a code like ‘Code X-ray’ for a sexual assault, for example; ‘Code Yankee’ could be a bomb threat.

  The situation the operator was asking me to attend was a Code Zulu – a Sudden Death.

  Sudden Deaths are the bread-and-butter of policing; whenever a ‘sudden death’ happens, police are called as a matter of course. I’m actually a little bit fuzzy on what defines a ‘sudden death’, but I believe it is any death that doesn’t happen as the cause of an obvious accident, and to someone who has not seen a doctor in a couple of weeks.

  ‘A few weeks? Oh my, I haven’t been to my GP in over a year,’ you might say. That was certainly my reaction when I first found out what a sudden death was. However, the two-week rule means that anybody who has had recent medical issues – heart attacks, late-stage cancer and so on – isn’t automatically classed as ‘sudden’, because, well, they’re not technically sudden.

  As a police officer, I sometimes fear I have become a little bit blasé about death. I see dead bodies relatively routinely as part of my job. Whether a person expires through a traffic accident, work accident, suicide or violence, they will end up across our desks sooner or later, and as a response copper, I’m sent to deal with all of it first-hand.

  Sudden deaths are always eerie, though, because they are unexpected. I suppose being side-swiped by a lorry is also unexpected, but at least there’s something oddly honest about a traffic death. One particularly memorable sudden death I attended was at a cinema. We had received a call from a very distressed cinema manager. Apparently, a 25-year-old girl had bought a ticket to a matinee showing and quietly sat down in one of the back rows of the cinema, where she remained seated until the credits had finished. The cleaners poked her to wake her up, and she flopped over, dead as last week’s kebab dinner. At first, we thought she was a suicide case (either that, or she simply lost her will to live halfway through M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, which, to be fair, is a conclusion any coroner worth their salt would accept). However, it turned out that she had had an obscure type of heart failure.

  Today’s case was at a residential property a short distance from me.

  ‘Yeah, I’m free. I’m on foot, but I’ll stroll over. I’ll be about ten minutes,’ I responded (much sooner than the length of the digressing monologue above would indicate).

  ‘Great. Please liaise with thirty-four and seventy-one, they are en route,’ the CAD operator concluded. I slowed my pace a little. No point in getting to the party early.

  Just as I walked through the front doorway of the property, Jeff, one of the newer members on our team, burst out of the living room and launched himself full-speed into the toilet. I suppressed a giggle. I could hear him throwing up his lunch as I walked towards the living room. I noticed immediately that the house was in absolutely meticulous condition. Every photograph was so perfectly straight that I suspected the owner had used a spirit level. The carpets looked crisply shampooed, the windows were spotless; apart from an incredible swarm of flies, the house was practically a model home. It was a far cry from some of the crack dens we have to wade around, some of which are so bad you feel obliged to wipe your boots on the doormat on the way out of the flat, so that you don’t make the street dirty when you leave.

  I turned the corner into the living room
, and the sight that met me was, put simply, grim. A man, who must have been quite obese, had died sitting on a chair in his living room. As he’d drawn his last breath, he’d fallen from his seat, and his ample body had come to rest against the radiator. Of course, seeing as it was January – and a pretty nippy January at that – the radiator had been at full blast.

  The combination of the radiator heat and the dead body was not a good thing: the man had probably only been dead for about a week, but the warmth meant that the flies had bred much faster.

  I am not sure what in particular had made Jeff bolt from the room to the bathroom. It could have been the sight of the maggots boring their way through the skin on the man’s face and neck. It could have been the large stains where his gas-bloated skin had burst, spilling flies, maggots and bodily fluids on the carpet. My money would have been on the smell, though. The aroma of somebody who has been dead for a couple of weeks is something that stays with you for days. It is such a distinctive, persistent and piercing stench that I swear I can smell it now as I type this – even though I haven’t had the misfortune of attending a sudden death in weeks.

  ‘You all right, Matt?’ I heard a weak voice behind me. It was Jeff.

  ‘Yeah, bud. You feeling better?’ I asked

  ‘Man … I can just never get used to seeing people like that.’

  ‘You will, eventually. Trust me. Who called it in?’ I asked.

  ‘A neighbour smelled him this morning, and called the landlord to complain, of all people.’

  ‘Hah, the landlord, eh? You’d have thought people would have the sense to call us.’

  ‘I spoke to the neighbour. He was in a state of complete shock,’ Jeff said. ‘He apologised so many times I thought for a moment he might have killed the guy himself. Turns out he’s never seen a dead body before; he thought it was the smell of cat litter. The complaint to the landlord was about his neighbour having pets!’