Confessions of a Police Constable

by Matt Delito

  ‘Wait a minute – how would this end up on YouTube?’ Kim asked. ‘Has that happened before?’

  ‘Yeah, all the time, but then YouTube takes it down again,’ San said, her voice betraying more than just a trace of bitterness. ‘Not until the whole school has seen it, though.’

  ‘So … Someone was filming this?’ Kim asked.

  San nodded: ‘Yeah. Sandra. The other Sandra. She’s got a Blackberry and she’s always filming shit. She thinks she’s Spielberg or summat.’

  ‘Do you know what Sandra’s last name is?’ Kim asked.

  San told her.

  ‘What about her address? Do you know where she lives?’

  San did not.

  I left the nurse’s office and went to find a teacher.

  ‘Hey, we need the address for one of your students,’ I said. ‘Can you help?’

  She referred me to the school office.

  ‘Hey, I’m Matt Delito,’ I introduced myself. ‘I’m investigating an assault on one of your students, and we urgently need to speak to Sandra Hollywell; could you give me her address?’

  ‘Sorry, we can’t give out information about our students,’ the lady behind the counter informed me, and nodded firmly. ‘Data protection and all that.’

  ‘But …’ I began to protest, but the lady leant forward, as if anticipating my argument.

  ‘We. Can’t. Give. Out. Information. About. Our. Students,’ she said, with the tone usually reserved for only the slowest of children.

  I went back to the nurse’s office where Kim was showing San something on her mobile phone.

  ‘I think we have her address,’ Kim said. It turned out the two Sandras were friends on Facebook, and that Sandra Two, the bully, had just checked in at ‘home’. Her address had popped up on the map application; that’s all we needed.

  We left San in the care of the paramedic.

  ‘You know what we’re going to have to do, don’t you?’ Kim said to me, as she shoved her notebook back into her stab vest.

  I nodded, curtly. We were going to have to find Sandra and confiscate her mobile phone as evidence; assault is serious business, and the video might be crucial in securing a charge against Lateesha. However, if Sandra somehow realised the importance or severity of the film she had on her phone, she might delete it, which would leave us with nothing.

  ‘Right, you’ve got the address?’ I asked.

  Kim nodded.

  ‘Right-oh. Let’s go deal with this bully, then,’ I said.

  As we were leaving the room, I turned quickly to San. ‘Please, don’t tell any of your classmates that you’ve spoken to the police yet. We need to find Sandra, and it’s best if she doesn’t know she’s about to get a visit from us.’

  San was bouncing up and down in excitement.

  ‘It’s just like CSI!’ she said, with a huge smile on her face.

  ‘Er,’ Kim said, looking over at me briefly. ‘Yes. Exactly like that.’

  We climbed back into the BMW, and Kim started typing the address into the car’s Mobile Data Terminal.

  When we arrived at the estate at which she’d ‘checked’ herself into, we saw a girl who fit Sandra’s description outside.

  ‘Hi there,’ Kim said to the girl, who was typing away on a mobile phone.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, without even looking up.

  Kim stopped right in front of her. When the girl finally registered Kim, and her uniform, she nearly dropped her phone.

  ‘Uh, is anything wrong?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing to worry about,’ said Kim. ‘I just want to ask you a few questions, is all. Are you Sandra?’

  As soon as the name was mentioned, the girl’s eyes darted back and forth between me and Kim. She remained silent.

  ‘Are you Sandra?’ Kim asked again, positioning herself off to one side. I stood on the other side, just in case she decided to make a run for it.

  ‘Maaaaaaybe,’ she said smartly.

  In the process, she made our job a lot harder – given that she hadn’t committed a crime per se, there wasn’t much we could do to make her to talk to us. We wouldn’t be able to arrest her, given that we didn’t have any grounds or reason for arrest.

  ‘Am I under arrest?’ the girl asked.

  ‘No! Not at all!’ Kim smiled. ‘You have nothing to worry about, but something happened at Sandra’s school today, so we need to talk to her.’

  ‘I don’t know anything,’ the girl said, and started walking towards the gate leaving the estate. I looked over at Kim and she looked back, shrugging.

  Another girl came out of a building, and she shouted out to the girl who was about to leave.

  ‘Hey! Where are you going?’

  ‘These cops are here for you,’ she shouted back, and kept walking.

  Ah, so we did have the wrong girl – but at least we now knew who the right one was. Kim walked over to her. I called a quick ‘Thank you’ after the other girl and joined Kim.

  ‘Hey,’ Kim said.

  ‘Hi,’ Sandra replied. ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Kim said, glancing down at the mobile in Sandra’s hands. She was in the process of writing a message to somebody. The mobile was a Blackberry.

  ‘Can I borrow your phone for a moment?’ Kim said.

  ‘What? No you can’t – you’ve got your own!’ Sandra said, and pointed towards the personal radio clipped onto Kim’s stab vest.

  ‘Right, well, can you put it away in your pocket for a moment, then? There’s something I need to talk to you about.’

  I took a couple of strides away, and sat down on the steps. Kim was using her girl-talk voice and there wasn’t much I could do by hovering but risk intimidating Sandra. I pretended to be incredibly bored and played with my iPhone, all the while keeping a close eye on both of them.

  To my surprise, Sandra took Kim’s suggestion, and put the phone in her trouser pocket, before leaning against the brick wall surrounding the courtyard of the estate. She folded her arms across her chest and glowered at my colleague.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘I hear there was a fight at school today,’ Kim started.

  ‘Yeah? So?’

  ‘Well, the thing is, one of the girls who was in the fight got injured.’

  ‘She’s a bitch.’

  ‘I can’t really judge that; I don’t know either of the girls. However, when there’s a fight and somebody gets hurt, it’s my job to find out what happened.’

  ‘Did she call the cops? Fuck, that’s so like her,’ Sandra said, before realising she had sworn. ‘Er, I mean … I didn’t mean … I’m … Eh …’ Sandra was looking so forlorn that Kim couldn’t help but laugh.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she smiled, ‘I won’t arrest you for swearing. How’s that?’

  ‘You can do that?’ Sandra said, wide-eyed. ‘Arrest someone for swearing?’

  ‘It depends. Are you going to swear some more?’ Kim asked, and winked.

  Sandra shook her head vigorously.

  ‘I think we’ll be fine then,’ Kim said, and continued with the task in hand. ‘Hey, Sandra, someone told us that you may have recorded the fight. On your mobile phone, maybe?’

  From where I was sitting, I could see a change in Sandra. She tensed up, and one of her hands dropped down by her side, faux-casually. She had her hand resting over the pocket where her phone was.

  ‘Is that bad?’ she said. ‘Is that illegal?’

  ‘No, you can film whatever you want, whenever you want. Forget about that for now. Can I just talk to you about what happened?’ Kim asked, whilst digging out her notebook.

  Sandra nodded, and the two of them spent the next few minutes walking through what had happened: who said what and to whom, in what order, and why. Thankfully, Sandra proved to be a lot better at telling a coherent story than San had been.

  Once Kim had outlined the whole story, and confirmed that Sandra had definitely filmed the incident, the time came to break the bad news.

&
nbsp; ‘Well, I think that just about wraps it up, but now we have a bit of a problem – I’m going to have to borrow your phone for a while.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, you were witness to an assault, so we needed to take a statement from you, but what you have on your phone is evidence. I’m going to have to take your phone away to our lab, so our guys can take the video off your phone.’

  ‘You can’t do that!’ Sandra said, loudly.

  ‘Well, actually, I can.’ Kim said. ‘So, please, could I have your phone?’

  ‘No. I use it all the time,’ Sandra said. Kim glanced over at me and I shrugged. We had to take the phone.

  ‘DAAAAAAD!’ Sandra wailed.

  A man sitting on one of the first-floor balconies peered over the railing at us.

  ‘Uh. Hello, officers,’ he stuttered, clearly confused to see two constables next to his daughter.

  ‘What have you done now, Sandra?’ he said, in the typical dad-joke fashion (delivered in the same tone as the hundreds of lines dads love to use whenever a police officer gets anywhere near them: ‘He did it!’ ‘Oh no! They’re coming to take me away’, ‘See, they’re here because you didn’t finish your sprouts last night.’

  ‘They want to take my phone,’ she shouted up.

  ‘I’ll be right down,’ he called, and vanished towards the lifts. A fistful of seconds later, as the lift doors slid open, a tall man wearing a pair of glasses and a cigarette, along with well-worn flip-flops and a grim expression on his face, appeared.

  ‘You can’t take my daughter’s phone,’ he started immediately. ‘She hasn’t done anything wrong, has she?’

  ‘Oh no, I didn’t mean to give you that impression,’ I hastily said. ‘Your daughter is not under arrest, and she’s not suspected of anything. The only thing is, she recorded an altercation on her mobile phone and we need to seize it as evidence.’

  ‘That’s bullshit,’ he said.

  ‘Dad! Language!’ Sandra said hurriedly.

  ‘Er, Yes. Sorry. But this isn’t right. It’s her phone, and you can’t take it away from her,’ the dad said. ‘If you want the pictures, I’m sure Sandra would be happy to email them or put them on one of those USB-things for you. Wouldn’t you, hon?’

  Sandra nodded, her face brightening immediately; it looked as if she could keep her phone after all.

  ‘Unfortunately, that’s not going to be possible,’ Kim said. ‘In order for something to be useable as evidence, we need to take it off the device ourselves. In fact, it’ll be our lab guys doing it. They’ll do a statement about how they got the data off the phone and whether they believe it was tampered with or not. I’m not saying your daughter would do anything to the files, like accidentally erase them, edit them or anything like that, but it’s simply the way we have to do things for something to stand up in court.’

  My radio blipped into life.

  ‘Two-zero receiving Mike Delta.’

  I took a couple of steps away, without taking my eyes of the trio, and responded: ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Are you guys nearly done over there? The late turn is coming on and they were just wondering when the car would be back.’

  ‘Give us twenty minutes to wrap up. We’ll be with you in half an hour,’ I replied.

  When I rejoined the conversation, there was a heated discussion going on.

  ‘Give me the phone, Sandra,’ the father said. Sandra produced the phone, and handed it over to her dad, who shoved it in the pocket of his cut-off jeans. ‘You’re not getting this phone. We bought it only a few months ago. Do you have any idea how expensive these damn things are?’

  ‘Sir, I’m frightfully sorry, but don’t worry,’ Kim said. ‘Your daughter will get her phone back, but we do need to seize it as evidence for now.’

  ‘You can’t just go around and take people’s phones,’ he said, shooting a long, lingering, angry stare at Kim.

  ‘I completely understand that you are upset,’ I interjected. ‘But the truth is, we can most certainly take somebody’s phone if we suspect that it contains evidence. Sandra said herself that the phone contains a video of a girl beating up another girl, and we will probably want to prosecute the assailant. To do that, we’ll need the video evidence.’

  My argument didn’t seem to be working, so I decided to try another angle: ‘How would you feel if Sandra had been assaulted, and you knew there was a video of the assault that could help get justice, but the person who filmed it didn’t want to hand over their phone?’

  ‘Yeah, well, you don’t have the right,’ the father said, feebly.

  I could tell from the way he was looking at us that he did understand why we needed the video; he just didn’t want to hand over the phone.

  ‘I’m afraid I do. Under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, section 19,’ I said. ‘There’s another thing you have to keep in mind as well. If Sandra was to try and copy over the video files, but it turned out that they were corrupted for some reason, or they got deleted by accident, she would be under suspicion of tampering with evidence. That would be rather serious, wouldn’t you think? Now, if our guys do something to delete the footage by accident, they’ll have to write a statement about that and Sandra wouldn’t be liable.’

  ‘I understand all of that,’ he said. ‘So when could she get the phone back?’

  ‘It shouldn’t take too long,’ I said, realising that I didn’t actually know how long it was going to take. ‘I don’t know exactly how long, but I shouldn’t think it would be more than a couple of weeks or so, at the most. After all, the phone itself wouldn’t be evidence, just the video stored on there.’

  ‘Can I call someone who knows the law, and find out?’ he said.

  ‘You can, but we’re in a bit of a rush; we’ve been here for nearly an hour now, and the shift after us needs our car, so I’d like to be back in my car within five minutes,’ I said.

  Kim took a step forward: ‘Sir, I really don’t want to mention this, but if you don’t hand the phone over voluntarily, we have the right to take it by force. I can see you’re a reasonable guy, but I’ve explained everything to you and we really need to get going now.’

  ‘Please,’ she added, employing the mum-stare that few people can resist, ‘the phone.’

  Never in a million years did I think that little speech would work. Effectively threatening someone with violence rarely works, in my experience, but there’s something very disarming about Kim. She was right, of course, we do have the legal right to take the phone by force, but actually explaining this to someone we were trying to convince was a bit of a gamble.

  ‘Er,’ the dad said, ‘okay.’

  He stuck his hand in his pocket and handed the phone over to Kim, who immediately turned to Sandra.

  ‘Do you have a password on your Blackberry, in case the battery runs out?’ she asked.

  Sandra shook her head.

  ‘Right,’ Kim said, and pointed at an entry in her notebook. ‘Now if you just sign here. This confirms that we’ve taken your phone and that you understand why.’

  Sandra scribbled her signature at the bottom of the short entry in Kim’s notebook.

  ‘Thank you, Sandra,’ she said. ‘It’s really important that people don’t get away with bullying others like this, and your video is going to help make sure we can stop this from happening in the future. You’ve done a really good thing here today.’

  We finished up with Sandra and her dad and left them on good terms. For sure, neither of them was happy that we’d taken the phone away, but both of them seemed to understand that we had to and that we had the right to do so.

  When we’d climbed back into the car to go check the phone into evidence, I suddenly remembered an embarrassing episode from a few months ago, when I had seized a phone belonging to a drug dealer. ‘Kim, did you remember to take the battery out of the phone?’

  She shook her head, and immediately set about taking the phone apart to take the battery out. Blackberries are clever little
devices – they can be wiped remotely, even if they are turned ‘off’ at the power key. There was probably little risk of Sandra doing that, to be fair, but you never knew.

  When the time comes to copy the evidence off the phone, the forensic guys will hook it to a fresh battery, in a room that’s completely shielded from radio signals, so that if anybody did try to wipe its memory, the signal wouldn’t make it to the phone.

  ‘Ha!’ Kim said. ‘Can you imagine if the phone got wiped after all that? We’d never hear the end of it …’

  ‘Yeah, you ain’t wrong,’ I said. ‘I’m just glad we didn’t have to tussle with the dad. That could have gotten messy.’

  She shot me a look: ‘You need to get better at reading people. He was perfectly ready to hand over the phone; he just needed an excuse to do so, and I gave him one.’

  I shrugged, and turned the BMW out of the estate, steeling myself for the hours of paperwork I still had to do after the day’s shift, but still pleased I’d be off the streets before the evening fun started.

  The stolen iPad

  ‘Right,’ the skipper said, as his eyes slid around the small assembly of plain-clothes officers in front of him. ‘Jesus, you’re a messy bunch.’

  ‘If you were the fashion police,’ he said to me and Simon, the only two in full uniform in the stuffy room, ‘you’d have to arrest us all!’

  We were on Operation Slate, an undercover job. Two female officers were to be placed, plain-clothed, in a busy bar that had become a hotspot for theft. The hope was that their tablet computer – an iPad – would be stolen, so we would be able to arrest the thieves right away.

  Twenty minutes after the briefing, we had installed ourselves in and outside the bar we were covering.

  Though we were all in close vicinity, we would communicate by radio alone. I went on the Event 2 channel that was reserved for our sting operation. Simon stayed on the normal despatch channel on the radio, to keep half an ear on things going on around the rest of the borough.

  ‘Radio check from uniformed units on Operation Slate,’ I radioed in.

  ‘CCTV receiving,’ one of the team members in the bar’s CCTV room radioed back.