Confessions of a Police Constable

by Matt Delito

  ‘Right. And then what happened?’

  ‘He paused for a second, pointed at me, and without saying anything, started beating me up.’

  ‘And this is the instructor?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I see you’re wearing a green belt.’

  ‘With a blue stripe,’ Chris replied, holding up the limp, blood-splattered end of his green belt, to show off a thin length of blue fabric that was attached.

  ‘Whatever. What does that mean?’

  ‘Er?’

  ‘Does having a green belt with a blue stripe mean you know what you’re doing?’

  ‘I suppose it means I’m about halfway to my black belt,’ Chris replied.

  ‘And the instructor … he is a black belt?’

  ‘Yeah. I don’t know what dan, though.’

  ‘Dan?’ Jay turned to me: ‘Matt, you know this stuff, don’t you?’

  ‘I dabble,’ I said. ‘Not in this sport, though.’

  ‘Are injuries common?’ Jay asked me.

  ‘Not in jitsu.’ I reply. ‘Bruises, mostly.’

  ‘Yeah, same here,’ Chris said.

  ‘So, he just went for you?’ I asked Chris.

  ‘Yeah. I hit him in the front of the shoulder. I suppose I may have hit his clavicle. He just lost his shit and went for me. I think he only got about six strikes in before the others dragged him off, but the doc here thinks he has broken my arm. He broke one of my teeth, too, and I’m definitely going to have a bit of a shiner as well. He kicked me in the head.’

  ‘Did you fall down?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I was standing the whole time.’

  ‘But he still kicked you in the head?’

  Chris laughed. ‘Kicking someone in the head when they’re standing up isn’t that hard,’ he said.

  In jitsu, we don’t really bother with kicks above the belt level: if you’re going to give up that much balance, you may as well get in close and break one of their joints. I suppose this is one of the philosophical differences between our two martial arts.

  ‘And the instructor’s name is John?’ I checked.

  ‘Yeah. He’s the tall bald guy,’ Chris said.

  Jay and I stood at the window briefly, and watched the action on the other side of the glass.

  ‘Let’s do this,’ he said, glancing over at me.

  He unfastened the pushbutton that secures his CS gas and loosened his baton in his holster. I shook my head and did the same, before we both walked into the main arena.

  ‘What is this?’ John the instructor bellowed. ‘Get those filthy shoes off our mats!’

  I completely understood where he was coming from, and I felt genuinely guilty about tromping straight onto the mats. In martial arts, this is a place of respect: you bow to enter the dojo itself, then you bow again to walk out onto the mats, then you bow when you face an opponent – and you do it all again, in reverse, when you leave. In the context of most martial arts, wearing your shoes on the mats is quite spectacularly rude.

  However, when we both hurriedly stepped back onto the solid ground, the instructor made no move to come join us.

  ‘Can you come over here for a moment? We need to talk to you,’ Jay said, resting his right hand on his handcuffs, beckoning for John to come closer.

  ‘Can it wait?’ John said, glancing at the clock mounted above the door we had just entered. ‘We are finished in about forty minutes.’

  ‘’Fraid not,’ Jay said. ‘Now, please.’

  ‘Seriously, forty minutes,’ the instructor said, visibly annoyed.

  ‘No.’ Jay said. ‘Now.’

  The instructor still didn’t appear to want to come over.

  ‘Look, I really don’t want to step on your mats again, but if I have to, I will. I need to talk to you, and we’re going to do it like civilised people, not with five metres between us and fifteen people looking on.’

  ‘They all saw what happened; they’ll back me up,’ John replied.

  ‘My friend,’ Jay started, ‘you have ten seconds. I’m going to go back into the café now, and you’re going to join me.’

  ‘Am I fuck. I’ll be there when the session is done,’ he replied.

  I walked out onto the mats, and Jay followed.

  ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Do you have no respect?’ John howled, in a tone of voice that made it sound like we were stomping on his kitten on our way to spray-paint swastikas on his daughter.

  ‘Sensei, you’re swearing at a police officer in your own dojo, on your own mats,’ I hissed, ‘Don’t talk to me about respect.’

  By now, Jay and I were standing about a metre away from John. I couldn’t help but be acutely aware of the 15 blue- and brown-belts standing behind their instructor.

  ‘Get off my mats,’ he shouted.

  ‘We will, when you come with us.’

  ‘I’m not coming.’

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  ‘You can’t make me.’

  ‘Yes, we can.’

  ‘You think?’ he laughed, and took a defensive stance, before shouting something in Korean. The troupe of people behind him took up a pose that I assumed was the start of some sort of training exercise.

  ‘Use your brains,’ I said. ‘Of course you guys can beat us up. There are only two of us. But if you try, we’ll be back, thirty of us. Fifty. A hundred. And you will all go to prison for a significant time. All I want to do is talk to you, John, about what happened to Chris.’

  ‘Put one hand on me, and I’ll fuck you up,’ John replied.

  ‘Are you preventing me from doing my duty as a police officer?’ Jay asked, innocently.

  ‘Damn right I am.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Jay said. He took a step back and reached for his radio.

  ‘Mike Delta receiving four-eight-three?’ he transmitted.

  ‘Yeah, go ahead, four-eight-three.’

  ‘We’re going to need BSU support at our last assigned. We’re being threatened by 16 pyjama-clad ninjas.’

  ‘Received, stand by,’ the CAD operator said, before firing off some commands over the airwaves, coordinating our backup.

  ‘In about five minutes we will be joined by a minibus full of riot police,’ Jay said, turning to the people behind the instructor. ‘I strongly recommend that if any of you don’t want to get arrested, you get the hell out of here now.’

  Despite loyalty-related protests from their instructor, the group began to peel away, until only two people remained standing behind John.

  ‘Four-eight-three for Mike Delta?’ Jay transmitted.

  ‘Go ahead, four-eight-three.’

  ‘Just a quick update: we are now only being threatened by three pyjama-clad ninjas. We chased off most of them already.’

  ‘Received,’ came the response after a few seconds. Even through the bad reception, it was clear that the CAD operator was laughing.

  ‘BSU are still on the way,’ they added. ‘ETA about four minutes.’

  With the room more empty, we decided to try to get some talking done.

  ‘There has been an allegation of assault made against you,’ Jay said to John.

  ‘Don’t be fucking ridiculous,’ John said, and briefly glanced at Chris through the glass. ‘Look at where you’re standing.’

  Jay made a point of looking around the room very, very carefully, scanning the walls, as if he were looking for something in the distance.

  ‘England?’ he hesitated, after a long pause. ‘This is still England, isn’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what I thought: definitely England. Which means English law applies.’

  ‘Don’t be daft; this is a dojo. People come here to learn how to fight. Sometimes, you get slapped around a little, that’s just how it works. You can’t get assaulted in a dojo,’ John concluded with a triumphant grin haphazardly splayed across his face.

  He had walked straight into Jay’s trap. I pride myself in knowing the law, but Jay is a walking legal encyc
lopaedia – especially any part of the law that is linked to use of force. I guess he would have to be: as a former Trojan response officer, he’d spent a significant proportion of his time in the Met with a Taser and Glock strapped to his leg and a MP5 sub-machine gun over his shoulder.

  I was rather looking forward to Jay laying the proverbial smackdown on John’s deeply flawed understanding of how the law worked.

  ‘Aaaaaactually …’ Jay started. This was going to be great, I thought, but Jay’s monologue was halted before making it out of the starting blocks.

  Six officers, dressed top-to-toe in padding, wearing riot helmets, and holding yard-long wooden truncheons and smaller, round defensive shields, had burst through the door. Shoulder to shoulder, they came to stand behind Jay and myself.

  ‘Nice of you guys to join us,’ I said. ‘We’re just having a nice little chat with John, here.’

  ‘Hey,’ Jay said, talking to the two remaining pyjamas behind the instructor. ‘If you wanted a good excuse to leave, there are six incredibly compelling reasons standing behind me …’

  The two students’ eyes met. They nodded in perfect unison, before sheepishly walking towards the door of the dojo. The riot-clad borough support-unit cops blocked their way.

  ‘It’s okay, Nick,’ Jay said to the team sergeant, who stepped aside to let the two students past.

  ‘Right, as we were saying,’ I started, but Jay interrupted me. There was no way he was going to let me take the lead on this arrest.

  ‘So, John, I’ve been trying to talk to you as nicely as I can, but you’ve just been an insufferable troublemaker. You had your chance to talk, but I’m tired of this, and I’m tired of you. So, I’m done chatting, and I’m going to arrest you under suspicion of assaulting Chris. You can explain yourself on tape back at the station instead. You do not have to say anything—’

  ‘It can’t be assault!’ John tried to interrupt, but Jay continued to read John his rights without skipping a beat.

  ‘… when questioned, if you fail to mention something …’

  ‘What the fuck? This is bullshit!’

  ‘… may be given in evidence.’

  ‘How the hell can it be assault?’ John tried again.

  ‘Remember that you are under caution,’ Jay said, fulfilling his obligation as the arresting officer.

  ‘You are referring to consent,’ Jay said, finally addressing John’s protests. ‘That consent extends only to activities within the expectations and rules of the activity in question. There is an allegation that you supposedly attacked one of your students, inflicting injuries that are vastly beyond those normally sustained during practice. In addition, he was your student, and you were in charge of him. On top of that, you’re a black belt. The very least your students expect of you is that you can keep your cool if they make a mistake. So yes, I have arrested you for assault.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ John spat, still standing in his defensive stance.

  ‘Really? Is that really how you’re going to play this?’ Jay laughed, and took a couple of additional steps back. I followed his lead.

  ‘Right, mate,’ I said. ‘You have two choices: either, you lay down on your front with your hands on your back so we can handcuff you …’

  ‘Fuck off,’ John said, revealing a drearily limited vocabulary.

  ‘… or we are going to ask the six fine gentlemen behind us to handcuff you for us, and you can add another assault to your custody sheet,’ I completed.

  John just stood there.

  ‘Fellas, would you mind?’ Jay asked, and stepped aside.

  In perfect unison, all six officers placed their left legs ahead of their right, dropped their centre of gravity down by bending their knees, lifted their truncheons and held the shields out in front of them. Left foot first, they took a shuffling step towards John. Then another. Then another. Then another. Each shuffle only covered a few inches of ground, but they came in quick succession, and they were gliding along the mat at quite some speed.

  John continued his defensive stance for another fraction of a second, before quickly lying down on his front, with his hands behind his back – he must have decided that no amount of black belt was going to stop him from being arrested by six heavily padded officers with truncheons and shields.

  ‘Spread your legs,’ Nick, the BSU skipper, commanded.

  John did what he was asked.

  ‘Further!’

  It was the best possible outcome, really; a suspect on their stomach, legs apart and arms on his back, is essentially incapacitated. There’s no way they can jump up or harm any of us without signalling what they are going to do. Just try it: lie face down on the floor, legs wide apart, hands on your back. It’s impossible to get up without moving your hands or legs quite a lot – which would give us plenty of time to jump away from you and get our batons ready.

  It was certainly a preferable situation than the alternative, which would have been an all-out brawl between six riot police and a load of pyjama-clad martial artists.

  Once John was handcuffed, the BSU guys wrapped up his legs with Velcro-and-elastic leg restraints as well. I’m not completely sure that was necessary, but given John’s attitude it seemed like a prudent idea.

  It was also entirely worth it – just to see the faces of the people in his class, when four of our padded officers carried the instructor out of the dojo, into the waiting caged van.

  You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone

  ‘Patricia Smith? What’s her date of birth?’ the triage nurse at the other end of the phone line asked.

  I answered.

  ‘Nope, sorry, nobody by that name here,’ she said, before hanging up.

  I sighed, and placed another cross on my sheet of paper. That was the fifth hospital I had called and there was still no trace of Patricia. Or Pat. Or Patty. I had another three hospitals on my list, but I knew I would get the same response.

  Patricia is 13 years old. Her mother, Samantha, has three other kids, but for some reason it’s always Patricia that ends up in my notebook. This occurrence, I was told by Merlin – a police database that stores information on children who have become known to us for any reason – was the twelfth time Patricia had been reported missing in the past two months.

  After rattling through the last three A&E departments without success, I sighed again, got up from my computer and went to my car.

  Today, I was operating Mike Delta 79, also known as the ‘Misper’ car. That’s the unimaginatively named ‘missing persons’ designation. It is, by far, my least favourite job. Not because I don’t think it’s important to find missing people, but because nine times out of ten, the people who are reported ‘missing’ aren’t, in reality, ‘missing’ at all. On our borough, more often than not, people have been reported missing almost immediately after they’ve walked out the front door.

  Patricia is a perfect example: she has discovered that her mother gets incredibly embarrassed whenever the police show up at her house. So, she has decided to use us as a tool to ‘get back’ at Samantha.

  I rapped on the window pane next to the door at number 14. Samantha, hearing the sound, came over, but as soon as she spotted the uniform through the frosted glass, I heard her swear. She stumbled around inside for a few moments before she opened the door.

  ‘What is it?’ Samantha said. She didn’t yet know that Patricia had gone missing. As I opened my mouth to tell her, her mobile phone rang, broadcasting a best-forgotten Lily Allen track into the daylight outside.

  ‘It’s the school,’ she said, as the penny dropped. She waved me in with her left hand, spun round and flicked the kettle on in one fluid motion. I stepped through the front door into a heavy cloud of marijuana smoke – not the first time at Casa Smith – but I was there to find her little daughter, not to arrest her for her smoking habits.

  ‘Aha,’ Samantha said into the mobile phone. ‘Yeah, I knew you called the police,’ she shouted at the person on the other end of the lin
e. ‘Do you wanna know how I know? Because they are here already.’

  As Samantha rang off, she turned to me.

  ‘So, Patricia walked out of school again,’ she said.

  The school have a procedure for these things: if a child says they’re going to run away, and then vanishes, they call the police first.

  I have to admit that I don’t really know for a fact what they do next, but I suspect they call their own solicitors second, followed by the school’s social worker. Then they go and buy some lottery tickets, turn their computers off and on again, contemplate the plot of Inception for a while, day-dream about being a rally car driver, think about that fit chick who works in the front office, before they finally get around to calling the parents.

  Okay, so I may have made some of that up, but how I managed to receive a call, make eight of my own, pop into a shop to buy a cup of tea, cruise three miles across the borough in lunch-hour traffic and still beat a phone call from the school will have to remain a mystery for another day. When I was young, they at least had the sense to call the parents first.

  From my Metvest, I dug out an Evidence and Action book and began to take down Patricia’s details.

  ‘So, Ms Smith, what was Patricia wearing today?’

  I ran through the whole spiel. Did they have any arguments? Did Patricia say she was going anywhere? Did she have her Oyster card with her? How much money did she have on her travel card? Did she have access to any other money? Etc. Etc. Etc.

  Missing Persons is an aspect of policing that can be fantastically rewarding – when you are searching for somebody that actually needs finding. The ecstasy on a parent’s face when they are reunited with their three-year-old after a few days is absolutely and incomparably priceless. Sadly, most of the time, Missing Persons is absolute, soul-destroying, pointless busywork. Schools and parents seem to think that dialling 101 (or 999 for the particularly clueless) is the first port of call when a kid goes ‘missing’. Whatever you do, don’t call their friends or their friends’ parents. Don’t call the school. Don’t do a quick stroll down to the local shop to see if they popped out to buy an ice-cream cone. For heaven’s sake, don’t try calling or texting your kid on their mobile; that would simply make too much sense. Just call the police right away.