Confessions of a Police Constable

by Matt Delito

  ‘Safety receiving,’ the team guarding Lisa and Miranda – our officers with the iPad – added.

  ‘Spotter Alpha receiving,’ said another officer who was charged with just milling around the nightclub looking for known suspects and keeping an eye on things.

  Then my radio beeped twice. One of the undercover officers had a radio in their purse, with a pair of buttons on the inside of the bag. One of the buttons sends a beep; the other sends an urgent assistance signal. Two beeps meant ‘okay’, so I guess they were receiving us.

  We are involved in operations like this every few weeks, targeting whatever crime hotspots we have around the borough. We usually target different types of theft, including bicycle theft, pick-pocketing, shoplifting, among others, usually guided by the areas where the SMT63 in the borough feels our statistics are weakest.

  The jobs tend to be either incredibly busy or completely dead. So far, this was the latter. Simon and I were strolling up and down the street outside the nightclub, with my radio silent apart from the occasional radio check.

  The streets around the club quarter were relatively well patrolled; six officers were doing big loops around the bar district, and every 20 minutes or so, I’d have a chance for a quick chat to catch up on some of the gossip. It’s a perk of these operations; you’re working with people that aren’t on the same team as you, so you get a chance to catch up and have a natter with officers you don’t know as well, or haven’t seen in a while.

  At one in the morning, about three hours into the operation, my radio woke up from its slumber.

  ‘All teams stand by; we have some suspicious activity near the girls.’

  ‘Standing by,’ the safety team replied.

  I whistled to Simon, who was giving incredibly detailed directions to two attractive blondes in high heels. He waved back, said his fond farewell and started walking towards the club on his side of the street.

  ‘It’s an IC1 male, around five foot tall, blue striped shirt, carrying a small backpack over one shoulder,’ the CCTV team transmitted. ‘He is sitting down, looking around. He is at the end of the cubicle with the bag holding our package. Don’t look at him.’

  Inside the club, there were six officers who desperately wanted to get a closer look at their suspect, but forced themselves to stare at each other instead.

  ‘Our view is blocked,’ the CCTV operator said. ‘No visual.’

  ‘I see him,’ one of the safety officers radioed back, barely legible over the music in the background.

  Simon and I were on opposite sides of the door to the nightclub; if the thief did steal the iPad, he would probably try to make a quick exit, and then it would be our turn to leap into action. Simon was leaning against a barrier where about 20 people were waiting to be let into the club.

  My radio suddenly spat out a 15-second burst of loud club music, but no recognisable words.

  ‘Safety, are you okay?’ the CCTV team transmitted, followed by a long burst of silence, during which my full concentration was on the earpiece I was wearing.

  ‘Safety, confirm status. Spotters, go check on them,’ the CCTV team transmitted, after what seemed like an absolute eternity.

  I was waiting for my radio to give a meaningful response, when I heard a commotion on the far side of the club doors. Simon had turned around, and was shouting at a young man.

  ‘Mate, shut up and listen,’ he shouted. ‘If this gentleman says you have had enough to drink, then that’s his prerogative. Go home.’

  I sighed; it’s a scene we see a dozen times on any given Friday or Saturday night; a group of young lads had been ejected from one club for being a drunken gaggle of nuisance-makers and were trying to sneak into the next club. The bouncers use their own radios to warn each other about the worst grief-magnets, and so when the inebriated good-for-noughts are ejected from one club, chances are they won’t be doing any more drinking that night. It’s a pretty good system, particularly because it’s a lot easier to deal with troublemakers outside a club than inside one.

  The group of youths was six strong, and they were obviously disinclined to listen to Simon. I glanced at the door for a second, then reached for my radio, changed the channel to despatch and quickly transmitted.

  ‘Mike Delta receiving five-nine-two.’

  ‘Five-nine-two, go ahead.’

  ‘We’re on Operation Slate. I’m outside the Summer Fiesta nightclub, and could do with some additional help to clear away a group of six inebriated males.’

  ‘Received,’ the operator replied, and then proceeded to transmit a request for some extra backup.

  I switched back to the operation channel and caught the tail end of a transmission.

  ‘… the door.’

  ‘I was on another channel,’ I said. ‘Update, please?’

  ‘Coming, Matt! Yellow shirt!’ one of the safety officers shouted down the radio. I whirled around, and spotted a man with a yellow shirt dart out of the club, clutching Lisa’s bag. He didn’t even pause long enough to spot me in my uniform; he simply ran straight past me.

  ‘Shit,’ I transmitted. ‘Get some guys out here, I can’t leave Simon by himself,’ I said, my eyes on the man who was sprinting down the road. The argument between Simon and the young men was escalating.

  About 30 seconds later, several of the spotters and the two safety officers came bursting out through the doors.

  ‘What the fuck?’ one of them shouted. ‘All you had to do was to stop the little bastard!’

  I waved him off, and turned my attention to Simon, who was now physically intervening between the ‘ingress/egress security advisor’ (that’s a bouncer to you and me) and two of the lads who were causing trouble. I walked over and got involved, and half a second later the three spotters joined us.

  ‘Stand back,’ one of them called. ‘Police!’

  The group of youths was momentarily confused. The plain-clothes officers had hauled warrant cards attached to lanyards out of their pockets and donned them around their necks to identify them as police, but at the same time, two additional security guys had shown up; they were also wearing their IDs around their necks.

  ‘Fuck you, you ain’t police,’ one of the youngsters said to the bouncers, as one of his friends was dragging at his arm.

  ‘Dude, they’re totally police, let’s get out of here,’ he said.

  Slowly, the guys gathered their wits. Just when they had decided to go, a van containing half a dozen uniformed units arrived. The drunk boys seemed to sober up rather impressively quickly at the sight of them, and executed their previously made plan of making a hasty disappearance. They started running down the road. We let them go; they had been loud and obnoxious, and perhaps shoved Simon around a little bit, but nothing they’d get prosecuted for. Besides, we had bigger fish to fry.

  I turned around. The whole operation team had come out of the nightclub.

  ‘Why didn’t you stop him, Delito?’ Seventy-one’s voice boomed.

  ‘Er … Simon …’ I stuttered.

  Sergeant Thomas, who had been leading the operation, piped up.

  ‘Not to worry, lads,’ he said, and fished an iPhone out of his pocket. ‘I can track the iPad with this thing.’

  Apple’s Find My iPhone/iPod/iPad feature is great, but it’s not perfect – it’s useful for finding out where your iPhone is at any given time, but if it gets stolen and ends up in a council estate somewhere – as stolen things are often wont to do – you’ve got a problem: we can tell which building the device is in, but there could be dozens, if not hundreds, of flats stacked on top of each other, and we wouldn’t be able to bust in through every single door looking for one device.

  ‘What does this mean?’ the skipper said, pointing non-specifically at the iPhone’s screen.

  ‘Can I?’ I asked. I’m a bit of an Apple fanboy, and I’ve used the system before.

  ‘It says it can’t find the iPad,’ I said, after pressing various options on his iPhone screen for a while.
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  ‘Damn,’ the sarge said. ‘He must have disconnected from the WiFi.’

  ‘Umm … What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, if he disconnects from the WiFi, we can’t find him until he connects to a different WiFi.’

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ I said. ‘Is it not a 3G iPad?’

  The sergeant stared at me blankly.

  ‘What …’ he said, ‘do you mean?’

  ‘You bought the iPad thing especially for these operations, right?’ I said to the boss of the Clubs and Vice team.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So, er, which iPad did you buy?’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot, Delito,’ he said. ‘This is the Metropolitan Police. You shouldn’t have to ask; I bought the cheapest one, of course.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ I said, rubbing my forehead with my fingertips.

  ‘What?’ demanded Simon.

  ‘The top-model iPads have 3G and GPS built in. Like on a phone. So, if we’d bought one of those, the iPad would know exactly where it was, and it would have an Internet connection anywhere there is mobile phone coverage,’ I explained. ‘But instead, we bought the cheapest version, which only has WiFi, and no GPS. The one we bought never knows exactly where it is, it can only guess its location based on what WiFi networks it can see … And it only has a network when it is connected to WiFi.’

  Nine pairs of eyes stared at me blankly.

  ‘Fer feck’s sake,’ I said. ‘Do I really have to spell it out? Basically, we won’t have any idea where that iPad is until our thief connects it to a WiFi network. Which, if he has any sense, he won’t do. If he formats the damn thing, we’re royally fucked; we won’t get our iPad back, and the guy will get away with it.’

  ‘But … I have Find My iPad right here,’ Sergeant Thomas said, wiggling his iPhone in the air desperately. ‘Bollocks,’ he concluded, wisely.

  The sarge stood still for a second, weighing his options. Then he started ordering people around: ‘Okay, Delito, you know about this geek stuff. Simon, stick with me, and Tracy, you come with us as well. The rest of you, you’re dismissed. Write up a quick MG1164 about the theft, and email it to me before you head home.’

  ‘Let’s see if we can’t find our iPad,’ he added grimly to those of us who had been ‘lucky’ enough to be chosen to stay behind.

  ‘Bollocks to that,’ Tracy said. ‘I need a cuppa.’

  The sergeant sighed.

  ‘Yeah, me too. Let’s go,’ he said, and led the way to one of the late-night coffee bars that had recently popped up in the area. The coffee bars were apparently opened especially to cater to stoned hipsters, hip stoners – and us.

  As we leaned over our steaming cups of coffee, the sarge prodded his iPhone whilst the rest of us looked beaten.

  ‘Do you know what the kid looks like?’ Simon asked, half-heartedly.

  ‘Yes, but we were tracking the wrong guy on the CCTV for most of the evening. We had the fella in the striped shirt, he was looking well dodgy, but after the other guy ran off with the iPad we finally took him aside and it turned out he was just pilled off his face,’ Sergeant Thomas said, shaking his head. ‘We did catch the little bastard on one of the cameras, though. I emailed a copy of the image to my phone, hang on …’

  After a couple of minutes’ worth of fiddling – about a minute and 57 seconds longer than it ought to have taken – Sergeant Thomas held up his phone.

  ‘Never seen ’im before,’ Simon said, after poring over the shot for a moment. The rest of us repeated similar sentiments.

  We spent another ten minutes in the café finishing our coffee. Just before we got up to leave, Thomas had another look at his iPhone.

  ‘I’ve got him!’ he said.

  Simon and I leapt up and slid around the table to look over the sergeant’s shoulder.

  Tracy, who was sitting next to the sarge had a clear view: ‘He’s just off the borough,’ he said, ‘but only about ten minutes away. Have we got a car?’

  ‘Er …’ the skipper replied, tentatively. ‘Technically, no. We sent them all on their way home. I figured we could catch a lift later.’

  ‘Any units near the Coffee Bucket?’ I threw myself on my radio.

  Tracy walked to the counter to pay for our coffees, whilst Simon and Sergeant Thomas kept their eyes on the little iPad icon in the middle of the map display.

  ‘Unit calling for backup near Coffee Bucket; Mike Delta two-eight receiving.’

  ‘Two-eight, cancel, cancel, we don’t need backup. We just need a lift. Do you have ten minutes?’

  ‘Yeah, of course,’ came the reply. ‘On the hurry-up?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘Aaaalrighty then,’ the driver said, and halfway through his atrocious Jim Carrey impression, we heard the sirens of a caged van whine into life over the radio. ‘For you? Special price. Get me a brew, will ya?’

  Tracy overheard the conversation via his radio, turned around and retraced his steps back to the counter to order a cup of tea for the van driver.

  Moments later, sirens came to a halt outside the coffee shop, and we all poured out and climbed into the van.

  ‘Hey, Joe,’ I said, recognising the driver and passing him his tea.

  ‘Thank you for your expedience,’ Thomas said. ‘Step on it, we need to get to Garyson Rise double-quick.’

  He flashed his iPhone at Joe to show where we were going.

  ‘Aye, boss,’ Joe said. He placed his drink in the cup holder and pulled away. Laughing, he added, ‘Are you going to the Starbucks up there? I thought you guys just had a coffee’.

  Tracy and I looked at each other. Garyson Rise is just outside our borough, in an area where there isn’t usually a lot of trouble, so I’m not very familiar with it.

  ‘Seriously? There’s a Starbucks?’ I asked. ‘What else is there?’

  ‘Oh, not much, really,’ Joe said. ‘Couple of pizza joints. Delivery places, mostly. One of those Internet places and a Tesco, but I think it closes at midnight,’ he rambled on.

  ‘Screw the Starbucks,’ I said.

  ‘Take us to the Internet place,’ Tracy added, finishing my thought.

  ‘But kill the sirens and lights before we get there,’ Simon said completing our train of thought.

  Finally, for the first time all night, we were working as a team.

  As we came up to Garyson Rise, Joe cut the sirens. He left the blues on as we pulled through a red light. Then he shut the flashers off as well, and stopped in a bus stop a few doors down from the Internet shop. The shutters covering the windows were down, but the door shutter was open and there was a dim ray of light spilling out onto the pavement.

  ‘I’ll go in. You guys stop him from getting away again,’ Tracy said.

  Simon and Tracy got out of the van and Tracy took up position next to the shop.

  ‘Fuck me, where did you learn to drive, Joe?’ I said, keeping my eyes on the shop front. Joe mumbled something about hiring a limo instead, if I didn’t like his driving. The sergeant and I climbed out of the van and approached the door from the other side.

  Once we were in position, Tracy nodded to Simon, before turning back and nodding to me. We were ready … He quickly checked to make sure none of his police paraphernalia was showing, before he casually strolled into the Internet shop, his police radio on mute in his back pocket. Tracy’s undercover stab vest and other equipment in a covert vest were hidden under his oversized zippered hoodie.

  He came walking out again after a minute, sipping a can of Coke. He didn’t look at any of us, until he was out of the dull light-cone from the door. When he was out of sight, he looked over his shoulder to see if he’d been followed, before quickly unzipping his hoodie and shooting some instructions over to Simon. A second later, Simon’s voice came over the radio.

  ‘There are two guys in there, and they’re using an iPad. Tracy says it doesn’t have that hideous pink cover on it, but it looks like they have a fair amount of second-hand stuff for
sale behind the counter. It could be anywhere. One of the men is our man from the bar,’ Simon said.

  Tracy grabbed the radio from Simon, ignoring the one he had sticking out of his back pocket.

  ‘I recognise the other guy, too; he’s a nasty piece of work. I don’t think he clocked me, but I nicked him for running a prostitution racket a few year years back. Turkish bloke, in a blue shirt. He put up quite a fight last time I nicked him, so be careful.’

  ‘Should we go in now or wait?’ the skipper asked.

  ‘Now. Let’s get the little fucker,’ Tracy said.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ the skipper said, reaching for his torch. I did the same, and saw Simon producing a torch as well.

  Simon was first in though the door.

  ‘Police, don’t move,’ he shouted, and pointed his torch straight in the face of the guy with the yellow shirt.

  I aimed my torch into the eyes of the second man, who was seated behind the table, but he dropped the iPad in front of him, leapt to his feet and dived out of sight to the left of us. Tracy leapt forward and grabbed hold of our yellow-shirted scoundrel, and within seconds he had his prisoner bent over the table with a set of handcuffs keeping his arms behind his back.

  Simon and I edged forward, trying to locate the man in blue over the racket being caused by Tracy trying to search his prisoner and Sergeant Thomas radioing in a status report. The man seemed to have vanished into thin air. I stuck my head carefully around the corner and spotted a stairway going down into darkness.

  ‘He’s gone down the stairs,’ I called. I turned around to see whether Simon was still following me, and caught a face-full of his ludicrously bright LED torch, which caused me to lose whatever night vision I might have had up to that point.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Let’s see if we can find him,’ I said, and started descending the stairs, my torch piercing the darkness. I heard a clicking sound next to my head; it was Simon, trying a light switch. Nothing.

  We continued down the creaking stair. At the bottom, there was a small, narrow hallway going left and right. We stopped and listened, and I took a step to the right, letting Simon step off the stairs with a step to the left. We couldn’t hear anything.