Confessions of a Police Constable

by Matt Delito

  The extra manpower also meant that we used a lot of cars we don’t normally use: a fleet of hire-cars were brought in to help ferry us around from place to place without standing out like a sore blue-lights-and-sirens-equipped thumb.

  Today, Mike Delta 40 was a hideous burgundy Ford Mondeo Q-car, usually used by the robbery squad. At least it had lights and sirens, as opposed to most of the hire cars.

  ‘I’ll drive,’ Jay said with a groan, after he’d spotted the car we had been assigned.

  I was fine with that. In theory, Jay and I are both advanced drivers, trained to the same high standard. I’d like to think I’m an above-average wheelman, even in the context of the ridiculously well-trained advanced drivers amongst the Metropolitan Police. Realistically, however, I’m probably a distinctly average advanced driver.

  Jay, on other hand, used to be the driver on firearms callouts; he has no doubt spent a hell of a lot more time on long blue-light runs than me. There was also something about that shift that was giving me the creeps, and I was more than happy to hand over some responsibility – any responsibility. Not having to drive seemed like a good start.

  First up, we attended to a couple of simple-to-resolve calls.

  My feeling of dread began to dissipate a little.

  After about five hours of relatively easy jobs (including – believe it or not – saving a kitten stuck in a tree), we decided to head back to the police station for a quick coffee.

  We’d nearly made back, when things got a little bit more interesting …

  My radio lurched into action: ‘We’ve just spotted a group of about twenty youths, some of them carrying backpacks. They all have their faces covered. Most of them are carrying sticks,’ it told me. ‘We’re in an unmarked car, observing from a safe distance,’ the radio continued.

  Instead of pulling into the police station, Jay pulled up next to the gates. We stayed in the car to listen to the radio transmission in progress, both trying to figure out who was radioing in; I didn’t recognise his voice and he sounded nervous. He also failed to identify himself before transmitting, which was curious. Radio protocol becomes such second nature that it becomes unthinkable to radio up without first going through the recipe of identifying yourself and asking for permission to use the airwaves.

  ‘Last caller, you are not coming up in my system. Please identify,’ the CAD operator shot back. I looked over at Jay, and he shrugged.

  ‘Oh, eh, sorry,’ said the radio, and went quiet again, briefly. ‘They’re coming our way. We have to get out of here,’ it continued.

  ‘Last caller, get yourself to safety, then identify immediately. Mike Delta three out,’ a familiar voice cut in. Mike Delta 3 is the chief inspector, a person you would never hear on the radio unless something truly grievous was going on. Hell, I didn’t even know he was issued with a radio.

  ‘Mike Delta receiving one-zero-eight,’ a new voice joined in.

  ‘One-zero-eight, go,’ the CAD operator replied.

  ‘Last transmitting was five-two-two-eight, Smith. He’s the special I’ve got with me. It’s his first shift,’ the voice continued.

  I raised an eyebrow, and glanced over at Jay who met my gaze with an identical eyebrow-raised-expression. We both burst into laughter.

  A special constable deciding to take his first shift as a police officer on a night when there are riots going on? Talk about baptism of fire! Having said that, one-zero-eight is Singh, a solid, veteran officer. I couldn’t think of a safer pair of hands if I tried.

  ‘We’re on Church Street, moving away as quickly as we can. I think the group spotted our radios lighting up when someone transmitted,’ Singh concluded.

  The radios: they’re a blessing most of the time – they can be the lifeline that keeps us out of a lot of serious trouble. But there’s no denying, they’re bulky, and have a nasty tendency to ruin any plain-clothes work you’re trying to do. The displays and the status light might as well be a bright beacon saying, ‘Hey! We’re cops! If you’re up to no good, this is a good time to start running!’

  ‘Okay, is everybody accounted for?’ the CAD operator asked.

  ‘Yes, yes, we’re out of harm’s way,’ Singh replied.

  ‘Good. All units, please avoid Church Street for now, we’ll send the Borough Support Unit to take a closer look,’ the CAD operator transmitted.

  ‘Mike Delta receiving serial bravo-alpha-five-five-five,’ a new voice chimed out.

  ‘Go ahead, BA five-five-five.’

  ‘I know you wanted BSU on this, but we’re a Level One serial here, and we’re just around the corner. Shall we head over as well?’ the voice continued.

  ‘Yes, yes, please deploy and keep us posted,’ the CAD operator said, and continued to liaise with the Borough Support Unit to get a couple of more carriers over to the group who seemed keen to start their own little riot.

  ‘It’s really going to suck to be them,’ Jay laughed drily.

  ‘Mike Delta four-zero receiving,’ another CAD operator interrupted.

  ‘Go ahead,’ I transmitted.

  ‘Switch to spare, please,’ the operator requested.

  I reached for my radio and switched to the spare channel, leaving the despatch channel free to organise units for the violent disorder incident.

  ‘Mike Delta receiving four-zero,’ I transmitted on the new channel.

  ‘Hi, Matt,’ the operator said, leaving the formal tone of the main channel behind. Technically, radio protocol is meant to apply on all channels, but it always sounds really weird when people go through the full patter, especially when you know the person on the other end of the radio and there’s only half a dozen people listening in.

  ‘Hey, Samantha. Busy?’

  ‘You bet. Are you guys dealing with anything?’

  ‘Nope, just stopped for a cuppa, but we can be free.’

  ‘Great. You’re double-crewed, right?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m with Jay.’

  ‘Remind me of his shoulder number?’

  ‘It’s four-eight-three. That’s four-eight-three.’

  ‘Great, noted. We’ve just had an abandoned call from a phone box. It reported shouting, and what sounded like a man beating up a woman over on the Blankenship Estate, near the playground. We couldn’t get any more information, and nobody is picking up the phone at the booth. CCTV has no coverage. Can you zip over and have a peek?’

  ‘Yeah, of course. On the hurry-up?’

  ‘Yes, please, on an I-grade. Is your Mobile Data Terminal working?’

  ‘No, sorry, we’re in a Q-car. No MDT. I know where it is, though. What’s the CAD number?’

  ‘CAD seven-two-eight-nine-two of today.’

  ‘Wicked, we’ll take a look’

  ‘Thanks, sweets; say hi to Jay from me. Out.’

  I turned to Jay.

  ‘Samantha says hi,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, I heard that. How very nice,’ he said, sardonically. Sam and Jay used to date a few years back, but that came to a rather acrimonious end, which – much like Jay’s exit from the AFOs – nobody knows much about.

  Jay spun the wheel and pulled away from the gates.

  ‘Next left,’ I said a few minutes later.

  ‘Then it should be the third or fourth right, right?’ Jay grunted in reply.

  We pulled up outside Blankenship, in a weird little deserted car park. There were walls in front of us and to our left, and on the third side there was a hedge and the playground Sam had mentioned.

  The whole area was completely dead.

  Jay leaned forward over the wheel and peered up into the council blocks. Blankenship is not one of the roughest estates we have on the borough, but it’s on the edge of an area known for a large amount of gang activity. It has more than its fair share of stabbings, and police aren’t exactly welcomed with fanfares, scones and tea.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ Jay said, sucking his teeth and reaching for his radio.

  ‘Show Mike Delta four-zero on locat
ion of our last assigned,’ he stated, adhering to a spot of routine that may well have saved our lives.

  ‘I don’t like this at all,’ he repeated, after we’d had confirmation of our transmission.

  ‘There’s the phone,’ I said, pointing to the booth. It was just in front of the hedge. All of the windows of the box were smashed, and the rest of it was covered so thoroughly in graffiti that I found myself surprised that the box actually still worked well enough to place a 999 call. There’s something to say for the engineering BT puts into its iconic red boxes.

  ‘I can’t hear anything. Can you?’ Jay said.

  I rolled my window down ever so slightly to have a listen.

  ‘Nope, I can’t hear any—’

  I was interrupted by the smashing of the window next to my head. Pain shot through my neck, and out of the corner of my eye I saw someone grab for the door next to me. They pulled the handle hard; the whole car rocked. It was locked. It always is. I lock my door out of habit, whether I’m on duty or not.

  I turned towards my window and saw four people outside. One of the dark shadows had reached his hand inside the window they had just smashed with a brick, and was attempting to reach for the door lock. He was so close that I could smell his arm: a musky tang of earth, cigarettes and cheap laundry detergent. For a second, I thought about how odd it was that I was sitting there, smelling the arm of someone who had just broken the window that shielded me from the elements.

  I snapped out of my shock and looked down at my hand. I had picked up the spare battery for my radio. I didn’t waste any more time and brought it down on his hand. Hard. The young man yelped in pain and pulled away from the door, before running towards the back of the car; his friends did the same.

  I sensed something happening beside me, and turned to Jay.

  Or rather, I turned to the space where Jay should have been.

  The men – boys, really – had opened the door on his side of the car, and were trying to drag him out of the driver-side door. He was still wearing his seatbelt, and the nylon straps digging into his lap, neck and shoulder were the only things keeping him in the car.

  Our in-car MDTs have huge ‘emergency’ buttons on them in case we need help. I reached for the space in the centre console where the button was—where the button would have been, if this car had had an MDT installed. I lost precious seconds registering there was no help to be had from the dashboard, other than the button to switch on the car’s flashing lights. I pressed it, activating the blue lights that are hidden in the grille at the front of the car and as blue LEDs in the reversing lights at the back. Jay, in his struggles, was pressing on the steering wheel, and managed to turn on the car’s sirens as well. Every time he bumped into the horn buttons built into the wheel, the tone of the sirens changed from one melody to another.

  The small, darkened area was suddenly lit up with stroboscopic blues. The deafening cacophony of the sirens echoed off the walls.

  Somewhere in all of this, I found my senses and pressed the red button on my radio.

  ‘Urgent assistance required,’ I shouted.

  I grabbed the door-release handle and bounced out of the car, reaching for my baton with one hand.

  As I stood up, a lap-full of glass rained down off me. Glass was everywhere. I could feel it sticking into my shoulders where it had dug its way under my Metvest. It was gnawing into my sides. My eye felt … odd … but I had but one thing on my mind: helping Jay, and then getting the hell out of there.

  I started moving to the back of the car, continuing my frenetic, shouted monologue into my radio: ‘We’re under attack!’ I shouted. ‘Six males, maybe more.’

  A few of the group who’d been attacking us had been scared off by the sirens. By the time I had staggered around to Jay’s side of the car, there were just three left.

  Jay was half-hanging out of the vehicle, and one of the men was making to kick him. In excruciating slow motion, I saw the attacker bring his leg forward hard.

  ‘Get away from him,’ I shouted, and raised my baton to strike. There was one man between Jay and myself. He saw my stick and began to move out of the way, but I was not in the mood to find out whether he was planning to run off; anything or anybody between me and Jay was going to get a whack with the length of freshly-racked extendible steel I had clutched between my fingers.

  I swung at the man with my baton. I couldn’t hear it, but I felt a crunching as the brushed steel impacted with the lower arm he had thrown up to defend himself.

  I could see Jay’s head bouncing up, and helplessly falling back down again, as yet another boot connected. One of the men was holding him by his arm, still trying to drag him out of the car, as the other kicked him.

  ‘Get back,’ I shouted, on autopilot – ‘get back’ is the universal fighting call that gets drilled into you in officer safety training.

  I brought the baton down on the first man again. This time, he lifted his other arm. My baton connected with something metal. It was a pole. He was holding a short length of scaffolding or piping. I couldn’t tell whether he had used it on Jay, or whether he had plans to introduce it to some part of my anatomy. I was not about to let him, and brought my baton up again for another strike, but he cowered away, half-running, half-leaping into a small set of bushes near the edge of the playground.

  With great relief, I noticed another set of blue lights had joined ours. But I realised I couldn’t hear anything. I couldn’t hear the sirens on our car and I hadn’t heard the other police car arrive. I glanced back. It was a carrier. The BSU serial we had heard on the radio earlier had come to our assistance.

  Glancing back at Jay, I saw that the man who’d been kicking him had started to run, and now had two of the fully riot-clad BSU officers in hot pursuit.

  The last guy, who had been pulling Jay from the car, had dropped his grip and was making to run off too. I didn’t want to let him get away. I leapt forward and crashed into him. The top of my head smashed into his face as I carried out the least delicate rugby tackle ever attempted. My force caused the man to topple over onto the open car door. For a brief moment it seemed as if the door was going to give in at the hinges, but then it changed its mind and we were catapulted the other way. I ended up on my back, with the man I had dived at covering me like a blanket.

  On the ground, trapped by 12 stone of athletic IC3 male, I tried to think of a way to use my baton, which I was still clinging on to. Before I made it that far, two men picked the assailant off of me and deposited him with great force, face first, onto the asphalt. I tilted my head backwards, and from my upside-down perspective, I saw that they were using zip-tie handcuffs to restrain him.

  Looking back ‘down’, I saw Jay wrestle himself into an upright position, undo his seatbelt and climb out of the car. He must have been kicked in the head at least twice; a trickle of blood was running from his hair. He clutched his arm to his chest as he came over to me. He said something.

  I still couldn’t hear a thing.

  He reached over to my radio, pressed the transmit button and said something, before cancelling the emergency mode.

  Jay picked me up from the ground with his working arm. He opened the back door of the Mondeo, and dropped me in the back seat, leaving my legs still pointing out of the car. I sat up and felt instantly dizzy.

  Gradually, as my adrenaline levels returned to normal, my hearing returned. Only then did I also realise that my colour vision had also been absent: I had been seeing the whole episode in a weird, super-slow-motion, sepia colour.

  ‘You all right?’ I could finally hear Jay ask.

  ‘Yeah, I think so,’ I said, leaning forward and placing my face in my hands. I found a piece of glass in my cheek, flicked it aside and returned my face to my hands. I had a dreadful headache.

  ‘You’re covered in blood. Ambulance on its way,’ Jay summarised.

  I twisted and leaned back into the back rest of the front seats. I was looking through the back window of the car. The
whole area was swarming with police; at least half a dozen marked cars, a few rent-a-wrecks and two carriers had responded to my call for urgent assistance.

  I couldn’t hazard a guess at how long I had been sitting there like that, but after a while, I realised someone was talking to me. I had been zoning out, looking at the sea of blinking blue lights at the end of the short road.

  ‘Say again?’ I enquired.

  Jay laughed.

  He looked into my eyes, and I saw a flicker of … something I couldn’t put my finger on.

  ‘Thanks, Matt,’ he said, before stepping aside, revealing a set of paramedics eager to take care of us.

  Footnotes

  1 IC stands for Identity Code. They are used to describe the apparent ethnic background of Victims, Informants, Witnesses and Suspects (collectively known as VIWS). IC1 means ‘white’.

  2 Mobile Data Terminal

  3 Computer Aided Dispatch

  4 Hendon Police College, a huge training complex that serves as the main campus for the Metropolitan Police.

  5 Police Community Support Officer

  6 The training paperwork you get when you learn everything you need to know to be a police officer.

  7 White or Hispanic person

  8 Push To Talk button: The button that opens a radio channel and enables me to transmit with my radio.

  9 Time Of Arrival

  10 Police National Computer

  11 The Metropolitan Police-wide criminal intelligence database

  12 ‘Intel’ refers to Intelligence. Checking for intel usually just means that we check any previous calls and all the various databases we have available to see if we know anything about a place, person, or vehicle.

  13 ‘The nick’ is slang for your home police station – or the closest police station with custody cells.

  14 The Metropolitan Police is so ‘customer-focused’ these days that everyone we deal with is semi-sarcastically referred to as a ‘customer’, even if they are caught red-handed, halfway into someone’s bedroom window during a burglary.