Confessions of a Police Constable

by Matt Delito

  ‘Yeah, no worries. Turns out Kees and I have friends in common, and to be honest, I’d punch anyone who got in the way of stealing my pride and joy as well,’ he said, laughing.

  ‘Just for future reference,’ I said, ‘I probably wouldn’t say that to a police officer if I were you. What he should have done is to dial 999 himself; that would have solved the whole incident without anyone getting any black eyes.’

  ‘Yeah, of course. Of course,’ the shopkeeper said, as he signed and dated my pocketbook. ‘Keep up the good work, officer!’ he added, and walked off.

  ‘Get some ice on that eye,’ I called after him. He raised a hand and waved a thank you, as he strolled back to his shop. I doubted he would actually bother with the ice.

  ‘Kees,’ I said, turning to the young man, who was leant against the police van, flirting with Kim.

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘We’ve got a bit of a problem,’ I said. ‘The shopkeeper showed me some CCTV footage of what happened in the shop. You took a swing at him with a bike lock and hit him across the face.’

  Kees nodded gravely.

  ‘That’s assault. Given the bruising on his face, I’m guessing you could be charged with ABH – actual bodily harm. That’s pretty serious stuff,’ I said, keeping my eyes locked in his. ‘Serious enough, in fact, that if you were convicted, you could face several years in prison.’

  Kees went notably paler as I was talking to him, and started stuttering an apology.

  ‘Please just listen to me. In this case, the correct thing to do would have been to call the police, and tell them that you had found your bike. We would have been there in a flash, and we’d have gotten your bike back. See it from the shopkeeper’s side: he was protecting the property that he thought belonged to a customer. From his perspective – no matter what you said to him – you were trying to steal that bike. Instead of solving this like an adult, because of the choices you made, you ended up hitting a man who hates bike thieves as much as you do. You’re very lucky that he is refusing to make a statement. Things could have been very different; that D-lock is heavy, and you could have easily broken his jaw, or even killed him if you had been even less lucky. Or he might have given a statement and given us the CCTV. And there’s no way you could have claimed self-defence or anything like that either, because it was your fault that the situation escalated.’

  As the gravity of the situation dawned on Kees, he got more and more pale. I opened the door of the police van and asked if he would like to sit down on the step. He accepted.

  ‘I’m going to do a “street bail”, which means I’m going to let you go, but you’ll need to show up at the police station so we can give you a formal warning,’ I said and explained to him how much trouble he would be in if he missed his appointment, and that he would have to come to the police station to pick up his bike anyway.

  ‘Come to the station the day after tomorrow at three. We’ll sort out your caution. That’s going to go on your police record, by the way, but it’s not a criminal conviction. I’ll explain all of that to you when you come to the station,’ I said. ‘Bring the receipts for your bike as well, and we’ll make sure you get your bike back. Do you have any questions?’ I finished.

  He shook his pale face slowly.

  ‘Right, let’s get these cuffs off you, then,’ I said, and freed him, before passing Kim’s cuffs back to her.

  ‘Off you go, and see you the day after tomorrow,’ I said. Kees nodded, but seemed to be in a complete daze.

  ‘First time you’ve talked to the police?’ Kim asked him. He nodded.

  ‘Well, second, actually,’ he said. ‘The first time was last week, when I reported my bike stolen.’

  ‘Don’t worry too much about it,’ she said. ‘Assault is serious, but I’m guessing you’ve learned your lesson, right?’

  Kees nodded vigorously.

  ‘You’ll get a warning out of it, but it could have been much, much worse. Just remember for the next time, that violence probably isn’t going to solve anything, all right?’

  Kees nodded again.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said to Kim, before turning to me. ‘Thank you,’ he repeated.

  ‘No worries. See you the day after tomorrow,’ I said. ‘And stay out of trouble, all right?’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ he said.

  To my confusion, he did a military-style salute to both of us, before he walked off, dialling a number on his phone.

  Is that a baton you have in your pocket?

  One of the most common questions from civilians is: ‘What do you carry around with you when you’re on duty?’

  The simplest answer is: ‘Lots!’

  I carry general first aid stuff, a lot of gloves, my Police Pocketbook, a stack of Fixed Penalty Notices, my Collision and Accident Report Book, Evidence and Action Book, stop-and-search forms, domestic violence process books, and about half a dozen other pieces of paper, forms and booklets.

  In addition to being three-quarters of a walking filing cabinet, I carry plenty of gadgets with me; unsurprisingly, it appears that people tend to find the technological baggage more interesting than the half-tonne of dead trees.

  My Personal Protection Kit consists of:

  My Metvest – A slash and ballistic vest that is designed to protect us against slashing and stabbing attacks and small-calibre gunfire. It’s also good as general impact protection; one of my colleagues once received the business end of a cricket bat across her back, and she walked away from it. Without the Metvest, she would, at the very least, have spent a long night in A&E. But as far as I can tell, the Metvest’s primary purpose is to make you sweat like a randy otter, and provide some nice big pockets you can use to carry the 600 forms you need on an average shift.

  The ASP – Back in the mists of time, the Met only used one brand of baton, made by a company called Armament Systems and Procedures. These batons had ASP written on the side of them. Today, even though the current-issue batons are made by a completely different company called Monadnock, everybody still refers to them as Asps. My baton is a 21-inch telescopic friction-lock extendable baton – or a GFLB (the G in GFLB refers to ‘gravity’ – as opposed to spring-loaded friction-lock batons – and the FLB is a Friction-Lock Baton).

  It’s a clever piece of kit; it stays out of the way most of the time, but when you need it, it’s reassuring to have 21 inches of steel at your beck and call.

  When it comes to the batons, every six months we do a fair bit of training with them, as part of our OST26. I’m glad to report that, whilst I won’t hesitate to ‘rack’ my baton if the situation calls for it, I haven’t had to use it all that often.

  CS Spray – In addition to the Asp, we’re issued with a small canister of CS27 spray. Under English law, it is technically defined as a firearm, as is ‘any weapon designed for the discharge of any noxious liquid’. Our canisters don’t fire the thin mist you’d expect from, say, a spray deodorant; instead, they project a stream of liquid, much like a water pistol. CS is a curious weapon to issue us with: roughly ten per cent of the population have very little response to CS gas. At the other end of the scale, ten per cent react extremely to it.

  In training, we all have to ‘get gassed’ ourselves, so that we understand what the effects are, how long they last, and what you have to do to make it wear off as quickly as possible. It turns out that my reaction to CS is at the extreme end of the scale, a situation that is not helped by the fact that I wear contact lenses when I’m on duty. Whenever CS is used on duty, everyone on scene is likely to be subjected to at least a little bit of the stuff as well, and when I am, I’m on the floor with tears, snot and sweat flowing everywhere. Not very dignified, and perhaps the main reason I have never discharged my own CS – I know that for me it is a rubbish tactical option.

  Handcuffs – Finally, I’ve got a set of lovely Hiatt Speedcuffs. As I explained earlier, these are rigid handcuffs (as opposed to the ones with a chain between each wrist), and they’re rather nifty. T
hey’re quite clunky to carry around with you, but they are solid enough to be used as a weapon if required. If I’m approaching a suspect holding a set of handcuffs and they suddenly turn violent, it’s more economical, time-wise, to give them a couple of jabs with my cuffs than to have to take a step back, put my cuffs away and reach for my baton.

  I’d say that my handcuffs are probably my most oft-used piece of PPE28; I use them several times per week, whereas I might draw my baton only a few times per month, and my CS has stayed in its holster for as long as I’ve had it.

  It stands to reason that, since I carry a good 15 kilos of paperwork and other crap with me, it’s pretty hard to run in all this equipment. Even the fastest, fittest of police officers will not stand a chance against a 17-year-old in his physical prime weighed down by only a tracksuit and a pair of running shoes. And, it saddens me to say, I’m neither the fastest nor the fittest police officer on the Metropolitan Police payroll …

  Not long ago, I was on holiday in the United States. I ended up in Chicago, in a rather, well, ‘authentic’ café. In the corner, there was a table of city officers, fresh from a shift.

  I’ve always been a little curious about how real-life policing happens in the colonies. Feeling bold, I asked the gentlemen if I could join them for a bit.

  ‘Uhm …yeah,’ one of them said, uncertainly. I could see in his eyes he was considering telling me to eff off in a manner becoming of a Man in Blue, Chicago-style.

  ‘It’s okay, I’m a cop back in London,’ I said. They seemed relieved, asked me to join them, bought me a beer and we got down to the business of comparing notes.

  They got the ball rolling by telling me a little about the computer systems they use in the police cruisers. Suffice to say, they use laptops that are a damn sight more advanced than the stuff we have. These cops are able to do full-on police reports right there in the car, without having to go back to the station. Of course, our MDT29 computers are useful, but they’re not exactly fast to use; they are mostly just used by the CAD30 dispatchers, plus the odd PNC31 check.

  So whilst these guys can finish up their paperwork on scene, at the end of a long day, I’m stuck waiting for a free computer in the writing room. There are eight computers, but five of them will invariably be out of service and the rest are old. The writing room also frequently reeks of weed – not because the coppers smoke it, but because people find it hilarious to bring the weed into the writing room in evidence bags to show off their haul, letting the smell seep into the pores of all their colleagues. All good and well, except that sniffer dogs at tube stations keep singling us out. It’s just our sense of humour, I suppose.

  Once I’d finished my grilling of the American officers, it was their turn to ask me a few questions. After confirming I worked in London, the first question was: ‘So … when was the last time you shot anyone?’

  I won’t lie to you. I was completely stunned by the question. I have never been an authorised firearms officer (AFO) – in fact, I’ve scarcely even touched a handgun, never mind fired one, and I’ve certainly not shot one at somebody.

  I must have given away my confusion pretty quickly: I think I may have been opening and closing my mouth like a fish on dry land, because the US coppers burst out laughing.

  ‘Well …’ I countered. ‘Have you all shot someone?’

  ‘I haven’t,’ one of the younger cops said, with a look of regret on his 20-year-old face.

  ‘But I’m the only one,’ he added, with an embarrassed glance around the rest of the table.

  What followed was a game of one-upmanship with tales about gun-drawn bravado in the line of duty. It was a very informative, interesting and entertaining afternoon. I explained to the Chicago officers the kind of kit I usually carry around on a day-to-day basis.

  ‘So, you have a stick, a set of fashion faux-pas bangles and some particularly nasty deodorant, basically?’ one of them had asked.

  In short: yes. Still, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m rather glad I am never faced with the choice of whether or not I need to shoot a suspect.

  I do have one more ‘weapon’, however, which comes in handy every now and again: my radio. It has a red button on it that I can press when it all goes a bit Pete Tong; for example, if I’m facing a psycho with a pistol, a nutter with a knife, or a madman with a machete (it has happened). A quick press of that button and a shout for Trojan (armed police) assistance, and the guys with the guns come flying in their BMW 5-shaped ARVs32.

  The radios we use are Motorola MTH800 units, operating on the Airwave network. They’re generally pretty good, apart from the fact that they don’t work very well indoors. They are particularly useless in some of the lovely council-provided habitation facilities on my borough. Pretty unfortunate considering this is precisely where things have a tendency to go wrong.

  As far as weaponry goes, I know that a lot of coppers are in favour of us being armed with Tasers, or even that more constables should be routinely armed with firearms. Personally, I don’t really see the point. If all police start carrying weapons, I imagine the criminals we are up against are going to escalate their side of the arms race as well. As it is, I don’t think I’ve been in many situations where it would have been helpful for me to carry an oversized bug-zapper with me.

  Tinker, Tailor … Spy?

  In this job, every once in a while you come across cases that are just plain bizarre. There was the 12-year-old I arrested for sexual assault, the 80-year-old that got nicked for stealing fully-inflated party balloons (he’d tried to do a runner with his Zimmer frame), and the car thief I completely failed to arrest because she flashed her boobs: she caused such a stir amongst a group of bystanders that I was distracted for long enough for her to simply leave the car where it was, saunter off and get on the tube.

  From the moment I spotted Jamie, I knew there was something just a little bit odd about him. I just wasn’t able to pinpoint what. He drove meticulously, with both his hands on the steering wheel, and he seemed to drive to ‘the system’, much like they teach us in our advanced driving course. And then there was his demeanour when I pulled him over for talking on his mobile phone whilst driving …

  It all started after I had just finished taking a burglary statement. Usually, it would be the Burglary Squad who dealt with burglaries, unsurprisingly (I’ll leave it to your imagination what the Licensing Division or the Robbery Taskforce do … ). However, this particular theft victim had been so desperately upset, the operator had upgraded our response and sent me over to take an initial statement. It was a relatively QT33 shift, and the Burglary team were swamped thanks to a spate of non-residential burglaries on the borough.

  As I was pulling back onto the main road, I spotted somebody doing something they shouldn’t be doing whilst driving, and since I was officially ‘on patrol’, I figured I’d pull them over and have a chat.

  ‘Please turn off your ignition, leave your keys in the car and join me on the pavement,’ I asked the driver, after walking up to his passenger-side window. He shrugged, killed the engine on his car, took his keys out of the ignition, looked carefully to see if there were any cars coming, then got out, walked around and leaned against the slightly battered but overall well-maintained Audi A4 saloon.

  ‘Do you know why I stopped you?’ I asked him, in that fishing-for-self-incriminatory-information kind of way that I seemed to perfect the day I graduated from Hendon.

  ‘I believe I do,’ he said, to my surprise. ‘I was talking on my mobile phone, contravening section 26 of the Road Safety Act of 2006 and, I suppose, regulation 104 of the Road Vehicles Regulations of 1986, officer.’ He flashed a half-smile at me, which I wasn’t quite able to ascertain the meaning of.

  Surprisingly, it isn’t often I stare into the face of a man who knows exactly what he has been stopped for down to the act and regulation. Usually, people pretend to not have spoken on the phone (a daft move, it’s pretty easy to see when you’re driving behind somebody). When that defenc
e fails, they pretend they didn’t know it was illegal, and when that doesn’t work, they usually tell me that they’ve never done it before, that it was a really important call, and that they will never do it again if they please, please, please don’t get a ticket because their insurance is going to go up if I issue one.

  It’s not that I’m not sympathetic to these things. Over the years, the Black Rats34 have caught me for a small yet illustrious menu of motoring offences, including speeding and being on the car phone whilst driving (car phones! Does anyone even remember those?). After I started this job, I put a swift end to silliness behind the wheel. Part of what I do for a living is attend traffic collisions, and it is easily my least favourite part of the job – and, indeed, of my life as a whole.

  The truth is, traffic ‘accidents’ are caused by technical failure only in extremely rare cases. The two biggest reasons for accidents in traffic are stupidity and complacence. The combination of these two things is a particularly nasty cocktail. Just because you’ve driven yourself to work every day for the past three years without an incident, it doesn’t mean that a cyclist isn’t going to be on your left as you turn without looking. It doesn’t mean that you can text your friend about your plans for the weekend because there wasn’t a kid playing in that particular part of the road the day before. It doesn’t mean you can put in your contact lenses whilst driving because you didn’t have time before you jumped in the car. I’ve seen all three of these things happen.

  Normally after I ask someone whether they know why I stopped them, I explain all these things to them: nobody likes being stopped by the police, nobody likes to get a ticket, and I understand it when people get grumpy about being caught out. Nonetheless, I won’t apologise – endanger my roads where I can see you, and you’re fair game.