Confessions of a Police Constable

by Matt Delito

  ‘Fuck this, man,’ Hakeem said suddenly, as if he’d changed his mind about something. I was on his left side, and from the corner of my eye I saw his right arm move towards the pocket of his hoodie.

  ‘DON’T MOVE,’ the PC shouted. I used Hakeem’s arm – the one I was already holding – to pull him towards me. He was off-balance now, which made it easy for me and the two closest officers to pull him to the ground.

  ‘What is wrong with you?’ Hakeem shouted. ‘I haven’t done nothing!’

  He was on the pavement, struggling violently with three police officers on top of him. He barely paused to breathe as he fired off a cavalcade of swearwords that would make a soldier cower in embarrassment. Two of my colleagues were handcuffing him, and I continued the search, while the sergeant stood back to keep an eye on our surroundings and call for additional backup on his radio. This particular council estate was none-too-friendly to police, and he wasn’t going to take any risks.

  A group of youths, around six or seven strong, came up to us.

  ‘What’s this all about? You guys always picking on us, man,’ one of the group said.

  ‘Please stay clear,’ the sergeant said, but his plea went unheard under the stream of abuse coming from the man we now had in handcuffs, still face down on the pavement. He repeated himself more loudly: ‘I said, stay clear.’

  ‘He’s clean,’ I reported, once I had concluded my search of the man. He only had a wallet on him, no weapons of any kind. I told him to calm down whilst my colleagues helped him to his feet. We decided to leave his handcuffs on until we’d clarified whether he represented a risk or was already wanted by police.

  He muttered something about only wanting to give us his ID from his pocket.

  The rest of our carrier arrived and the remaining officers joined us. The group that had been gathering was taken aside so we could concentrate on talking to Hakeem.

  ‘Why the hell? There was no need to throw me on the ground like that,’ he said, and struggled against his handcuffs.

  ‘Okay, please listen to me,’ I said. ‘I’ll explain everything, but you really do need to listen to me, okay?’

  His volley of swearing was ebbing, so I seemed to be getting through to him. Once he’d finally shut his organ for swearword distribution, I continued.

  ‘We had a report of a group of youths fighting with knives, and you fit the description of one of the suspects,’ I told him.

  ‘And what was that description? Black man?’ Hakeem spat with unveiled contempt.

  To be fair, I probably wouldn’t have been very happy to be dragged to the ground by police either, so I decided to take the time to explain everything to him: what had just happened and why. ‘Well, yes, but also wearing a dark hoodie, like yours.’

  ‘That fits every one of us,’ a man from the group, who were now standing a few yards further up the road, shouted. I’d almost forgotten we were performing for an audience. The comment was rewarded with a burst of laughter from his friends. My eyes scanned the group. I recognised a few familiar faces. One of them I believed I had arrested before. A couple I recognised from the gang identification charts on the walls in our briefing room. Others were unfamiliar to me. My attention switched to their clothing; I was unsurprised to find that the man’s observation was accurate. Every single one of them was wearing a dark hoodie – some with a logo on the front, some plain.

  ‘The reason we took you to the ground,’ I said, turning back to Hakeem, ‘is that we had reports of youths fighting with knives. The description we got for one of them was someone of your height and build, and the description of your clothing fit, down to the logo you’ve got on your hoodie, there.’

  Hakeem looked down and shrugged, as I pointed at the logo on this clothing.

  ‘When you went for your pocket,’ I continued, ‘we couldn’t take any chances: we had to assume you were going for your knife, and none of us wanted to get stabbed, so we took you down and put you in handcuffs.’

  ‘It wasn’t even me, though,’ he fired back. ‘This is police brutality, man.’

  I sighed, sensing a very, very long night in my immediate future dealing with complaints. I looked at Hakeem. There was something other than hatred shining through his dark eyes, and it inspired me to not give up on him, even though I was aware that he only saw me as ‘yet another uniform’. I imagined he was attributing every bad story he had ever heard about a cop to me personally.

  ‘Do you work?’ I asked Hakeem.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he replied.

  ‘A job. Work. Earning money. Do you work?’

  ‘Yeah, man, I’m an accountant for a commercial laundry firm,’ he said, his eyes scanning mine for a reaction.

  ‘Okay – hypothetical scenario. The phone rings at your office. You pick up and an anonymous voice tells you that someone with a black hoodie, a red baseball cap and a knife was just seen entering your building. The next thing you see is that someone with a black hoodie and a red baseball cap enters your office and starts talking aggressively to one of your co-workers?’

  ‘I’d call the police, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘I’m glad you said that,’ I told Hakeem. ‘But what would your assumptions be about this man? Would you be worried if he reached into his pocket?’

  ‘I see what you’re doing, blood, but it ain’t the same!’ he laughed. ‘Nobody ever comes into our office with a knife, are you fucking crazy? We’re a laundry, chief, use your brains! We ain’t got nothin’ worth robbing or nothin’!’

  ‘Ah, but you see … the streets are our office, and that phone call I described to you? That’s exactly the phone call we got over our radios. So we’re now faced with the situation I told you about: we got a phone call with a description of a person seen half a mile away from here, and when we turn a corner, we find you, and you fit the description.’

  ‘That’s bullshit, though; you can’t just search me because I fit someone’s description – how do you know it’s me? I never carry no fucking knife, man …’

  ‘I understand that, but see it from our perspective,’ I said, as I unlocked the cuffs from behind his back. He moved his hands to the front of his body and started massaging his wrists. ‘The only way we have to figure out whether it was you is to search you. If you’d had a knife on you, we would have known we could arrest you and figure out whether you were involved with the episode in the park.’

  ‘Yeah, I get you,’ he replied. ‘Still ain’t fair, though. I’ve been searched like eight times this year, man, it ain’t fair.’

  ‘I know what you’re saying, but can you imagine why that’s happening?’

  ‘’Cause I’m black, innit?’ he replied.

  ‘I don’t think it is because you’re black,’ I replied. ‘Have you noticed much police here on the estate this year?’

  ‘Yeah, of course. You guys are hard to miss, with your flashing lights and all that,’ he said nodding to the police van parked not ten feet away. The van’s strobes were bathing the estate in an eerie, pale blue glow.

  ‘Do you know why we’re here?’

  ‘Yeah, you keep stopping me for no fucking reason, innit?’

  ‘Not you specifically. Do you know why we’re stopping anybody at all?’

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘That’s right. This estate is known for the amount of drugs and weapons floating about. Quite a few gangs, too. We want to make this place safe for everybody who lives here, but to do that, we have to deal with the drugs and the gangs.’

  ‘Yeah. My sister was robbed the other day, man, that ain’t right.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I replied. ‘But we can’t do anything about that until we do something about the gangs. To do that, we have to try to remove the drugs and weapons from the area. And to do that, we have to search people. We try to search only people we believe to be gang members, but that leaves us with a problem: gang members don’t wear a neon saying: “I’m a gang member”.’

  ‘I see what you’re saying,’ Hakee
m said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Well, all the gang members are black, innit?’ he said, with a lowered voice, keeping his eyes locked on mine, looking for my reaction.

  ‘Well, that’s not quite the case – there are quite a few gang members who are white and Asian as well, but yes, many are black’

  ‘And I’m wearing the same clothes as them, so I look dodgy.’

  ‘Hakeem, it’s not that you look dodgy, but I think you’re thinking in the right direction here. The problem we have is that we can’t identify a criminal or a gang member. All we have are statistics, and statistics aren’t on your side, in this case. This is an area that has a lot of gang members. Many of them are black, most of them are roughly of your age and wear similar clothes to you.’

  ‘That’s fucked up, man,’ he concluded.

  ‘You know, you’re right. But the thing is, I haven’t got a solution for that. I guess one solution would be to leave everybody in this estate alone, but I doubt that would make things any safer for your sister.’

  ‘Man, why don’t anybody ever explain all this shit when they search you?’ Hakeem asked, with the half-smile of a man who’s just solved a puzzle that has been bothering him for a while.

  ‘Y’know, perhaps we should,’ I replied.

  ‘So are you saying I should wear a suit?’ he asked.

  ‘No, you can wear whatever you want, but unfortunately, given who you are and where you live, you might find yourself targeted more often than others.’

  It has been months since this episode happened, but Hakeem’s words have been ringing in my ears ever since. He was right, it isn’t fair, but I’ll be damned if I can think of a way to make it better.

  Slowing down for the weekend

  We were having one of those freak, unbearably hot summers. The type of summer you desperately long for when the sloppy London winter is doing its damnedest to work its way into your boots, but which, when it happens, you hate just as much as any winter day. To be honest, there aren’t many types of weather during which it’s nice to be a Metropolitan Police officer – save the odd few days in spring and autumn, perhaps.

  Fridays are notorious for all sorts of reasons. Statistically, traffic accidents are more likely to happen on Friday afternoons. Friday evenings following a hot summer day are silly season. People drink way too much, they are dehydrated after a long warm day, and I swear the summer heat brings out the hormones in full force. In my line of work, there’s no such thing as a ‘slow’ Friday, but tonight, all the planets would be in alignment for a perfect storm.

  I mention all of this only because it made me happy I was on the early turn, working from 6 a.m. until about 2 p.m. In other words, there was a sliver of a silver lining to sweating like a spoiled kid in a toy store: at least we’d be off duty before it all kicked off later in the evening.

  This particular Friday, I was posted with Kim. I’ve mentioned Kim before, but not stressed yet what a truly formidable woman she is; Kim is my age, but before I’d even finished university she had had two children. There’s something profoundly disarming about a 30-odd-year-old rather attractive woman who has perfected the universal ‘mum stare’. I saw her use it on a young armed suspect once. The suspect in question was roughly 14 and armed with a knife, but one look from Kim and she put her kitchen knife down, hung her head and apologised, before offering up her arms to be handcuffed – and all of that without saying a single word! She’s one of the best police officers I know.

  Kim has been married to one of the custody sergeants at our nick for many years. A rocky relationship, I have no doubt, but at the end of the day, there’s something deep and genuine between Kim and her husband, Jacob; they seem to have reached a perfect balance of laughing and shouting at each other.

  After a particularly spirited fight, Jacob once drunkenly confided to me, ‘Kim has this thing she does. She sleeps naked, and when she gets up, she drowsily shakes her hair out of her face, before she grabs her underwear and a pair of jeans. She then forces that amazing arse of hers into a pair of trousers that only just fit. In the process, she jumps up and down and wiggles back and forth. I have to tell you, Matt, the way her breasts move when she does that … I could never leave her for that sight alone.’

  I’ve never brought up Jacob’s story since, of course, but – curse him – I’ve never been able to see Kim in quite the same way again. If she were single …

  Kim and I were doing our usual thing: manning the area car, a lovely BMW 5-Series that is used for general support and fast-response duties. Our end of the borough is a crinkly mess of back roads and one-way systems, so in reality, the Beamer rarely arrives faster than the Astras, but the additional comfort and the feel-good factor of being on the area car makes it a good posting. So far today, we had helped out with a resented stop-and-search that ended up in a couple of arrests for assault on a police officer. We also attended as a second pair of hands on a domestic dispute where two brothers had decided to settle a disagreement with their fists (another pair of assault arrests). Last but not least, we ended up standing around, directing traffic around the site of a particularly nasty traffic accident involving a cyclist and a black cab.

  ‘Two-zero receiving Mike Delta,’ my radio murmured.

  ‘Twenty receiving, go ahead,’ I replied.

  ‘You’re showing green, are you tied up at the moment?’ the CAD operator enquired, referring to the fact that our status was set as ‘on patrol’, which causes our call sign to show up green or ‘not deployed’ on the CAD software.

  ‘We’re just directing traffic around the incident in Chute Street,’ I said, as a set of flashing blue lights approached. Reinforcements, in the shape of a traffic patrol car, had just rocked up. I pressed my PTT61 button again to resume my transmission. ‘Looks like traffic just arrived, so I think we can be stood down from this in a couple of minutes. What have you got?’

  After we made sure that the traffic guys didn’t need us we took off to the next job.

  ‘I’m not really sure what the deal is here,’ I said to Kim. ‘The operator was saying something about a school, but it’s not completely clear what’s happening. Can you check the CAD and fill me in?’

  Kim looked through the pages that had been sent to our in-car computer and chose bits to read out loud to me.

  ‘I’m not really sure what this is about either, it looks like the 999 operator has been smoking crack rock,’ Kim said. ‘But I’m pretty sure you were right about the school, although there are three other addresses on this bloody CAD as well. Let’s go take a look at the school first.’

  When we arrived we were met by one of the teachers who led us to a nurse’s office. Inside, a paramedic was finishing up his assessment of a girl from the school.

  ‘You’re going to be all right,’ the paramedic said to the girl, as we came in, ‘but since you’ve had a knock on the head, we’re going to take you to the hospital to make sure. I’ve got to fill in some paperwork, though, so perhaps you can talk to the officers here first.’

  The paramedic looked at me, winked at Kim and went back to his paperwork.

  Kim took out her notepad and started questioning the student. It turned out she was 14 years old, her name was Sandra (‘my friends call me San. Like Sam, but with an N. There’s another Sandra, you see, so people call me San’) and she had been in a fight.

  ‘So what happened was that, like, Lateesha was calling me names and I said to stop and then Tiff told her to shut up but Lateesha had already texted Winnie and Sam on her Blackberry, but then Ms King saw her and stopped them from shouting at me but then they sent me a message on Facebook but I didn’t get it because I’ve blocked her and she doesn’t know that, but I didn’t respond and then she just sent a message to Jim instead and Lateesha really likes Jim but nobody is supposed to know about that and then I said that she really liked Jim and she told me to shut up but then Ms King came back and told me to go to the other end of the schoolyard but she has no right
to do that ’cause it’s a free country and I refused to go, but then Lateesha went to the loos but I didn’t know that was where she was so when I went to the loo they jumped me and I ran out where I bumped into Jim, and Lateesha followed me but Sandra was talking to Jim so—’

  It was as if someone had turned on a tap that was spewing an uninterruptable stream of seemingly unconnected words and phrases.

  I glanced over at Kim’s notebook. She had written ‘Sandra McOwen – DOB/06011998’, and nothing else. Kim looked up at me, and tried really hard to suppress a smile. She nearly succeeded.

  ‘Hey San, you’re going to have to stop there for a moment,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to remember that I don’t know any of these people; let’s start at the beginning, what happened?’

  We spent a very long time teasing the full story out of San, and ended up taking a ‘good cop, tangent-referee’ approach: Kim was the understanding listener, and I had to step in every 24 seconds or so to get San back on topic. We still learnt a lot of ‘off-topic’ information, such as San’s taste in music (she doesn’t like dubstep), to her school politics (she was baffled that wearing her necklace wasn’t a human right – how dare they take it away from her?), to recent developments in reality TV shows (I would recap, but I fear I’d be showing my age; I had absolutely no idea which shows she was referring to).

  The facts, it turned out, could be succinctly summarised as follows: Lateesha is the 18-year-old sister of one of San’s classmates. San and Lateesha have an ongoing tiff that flares up at irregular intervals. Today’s episode started two days ago, when Lateesha said something about San. San retaliated by fraping62 Lateesha. Lateesha retaliated by gathering her friends in the schoolyard and then beating up San, using her keys and key-rings as a weapon. In the altercation, San was slashed with the keys across her arm and on the face. She then fell to the ground, hitting her head against a bench.

  We had finished taking our statement and were ready to let the paramedic take San to hospital for a more thorough check-up, when San let another morsel of information slip: ‘I guess you’ll be able to see all about it on YouTube tomorrow anyway.’