Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now - As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It and Long for It

by Craig Taylor

  I get dragged into a living room with this guy. On the floor was a claw hammer and one of those hand-held stun guns. There was a kitchen knife on the bed. It was horrendous. He reached for the stun gun and I thought, oh my god, now I’m really going to get done.

  Then I managed to push him away from me. He was reaching for the hammer and the knife. We’ve got the metal batons now and I really thought, I’m going to be seriously injured here, so I flipped the baton out and I kept hitting him until he stopped moving, and I actually thought I’d killed him for a minute. My sergeant came in. We’d called up for urgent assistance, so everyone had heard it and the whole world was coming to us. He got to the front door. I was standing there, my shirt was ripped, I was covered in blood where I’d been scratched and cut to shreds, all my uniform was trashed. I’m standing over this man, completely out of breath, just staring at him with the stick still up. He’s just lying motionless on the floor. My skipper just came up, literally turned round and said, out. Walk out. Go and stand outside. Not because I’d done anything wrong; he was just thinking, Jesus Christ, he’s in shock. It was the only time in fifteen years I’ve really been worried. I’ve had other dodgy calls and I’ve been assaulted plenty of times, I’ve been knocked out two or three times, but that was the one time where I sat there afterwards thinking, Jesus Christ. I sat at home that night and I was an emotional wreck, shaking. It turns out it was an imitation firearm.

  At the Alexandra Road estate the two officers get out and climb the concrete steps to the address of a man who hasn’t made an appearance in court. Colin peers through the letterbox. ‘There’s nothing in the world’, he says, ‘like a London letterbox. They’re so useful. It gives you that extra bit of insight. You might look through and see if there are dust sheets on the floor. You might see the layout, a glimpse of a knife, a person.’ The flat’s occupant, a painfully thin, recently arrived Thai man, opens the door to reveal the narrow, dimly lit hall. It’s not meant to be a set of flats but room numbers have been drawn on the doors. The man in question is nowhere to be seen; a dirty rice cooker sits in his room. Muted voices carry from the other rooms. After an inspection, the officers stand for what feels like a long time listening to the sounds of the flat. The Thai man shifts on his feet. ‘Good luck with your studies,’ Colin tells the man as they leave.

  We used to be the Metropolitan Police Force. We were a force. We governed ourselves and we decided how we would do things. We weren’t answerable to people. A lot of other forces are like that around the world. Then we became the Metropolitan Police Service. This is just my opinion, but they did that because it was a corporate relaunch of the Met. We want to be a service; we want to be showing that we’re doing things for the community. It’s all got very political. When we were the police force we told people, this is how we’re going to do things – we’re the experts. That’s how it was done. We would discipline the police force. There were very strict rules, down to ‘you will have your hair cut’. You joined the job and you were told how you were going to do it. Some things don’t change. Guns: a lot of it is we’re proud to publicize the fact that we’re perhaps the only police force in the world, or country in the world – I think New Zealand don’t as well – that don’t. I wouldn’t carry one. Unless it became compulsory.

  With a gun you’d have to become less community-orientated and less polite to people because you’d have to be a lot more firm. None of this, hello, sir, would you mind stepping out the vehicle please. That’s the polite way of the London police officer standing there in his nice, smart uniform. But things are changing, aren’t they? Now, you don’t know what the driver’s got in the car, so we’re more or less saying, hello, mate, out the car, we want to speak to you about your driving. It’s the way you speak to people, isn’t it? If we need to carry guns and you go to a car and you think they’re armed, you’re not going to be the polite London police officer any more.

  With a gun you have to speak to people in a way that they will understand, so in that scenario I think it’s right and proper that you’d be saying, hello, mate, get out the fucking car, now! You swear at them – our armed guys do that. It’s different rules for them. They get a lot more respect.

  I’m very much up for cameras for police officers – headcams are an absolutely fantastic idea. You get these people that have tried to kill police officers. They go to court and they wear the suit and say, I didn’t do anything. The police officers say, OK, we’ll just show you this video, and on the video you’ve got him going, I’m going to fucking stab you! It’s the best thing ever.

  A picture paints a thousand words and your video paints a million, doesn’t it. What better evidence can you have than video – it’s live, it shows facial expressions, you show it from your view; you can’t get better evidence.

  Later, at a flat on the Langdale Estate, he peers through a letterbox and then pushes through his extendable baton. They’re here to look for another man who has missed a court date.

  When the door finally opens, a woman with a Turkish accent says her brother isn’t there. The two officers walk upstairs past framed paintings of roses, framed paintings of cats. A sweet, sickly smell permeates the flat.

  ‘Who’s in the loo?’ he asks.

  ‘My brother,’ says the woman. ‘But not the brother you’re looking for,’ she adds quickly.

  ‘How do we know that?’ asks Colin. There’s a sound, a metallic clink, from behind the door. The sister looks confused. Colin steps away from the door.

  ‘He’s not going to jump out at me, is he?’

  ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘Someone’s here.’

  ‘It’s my other brother.’

  ‘I don’t know that until he comes out, do I?’

  There’s another metallic thump. Both officers suddenly have their batons in hand. Something has changed. On the North London landing, surrounded by paintings of roses, the situation swivels back and forth, innocence, threat, innocence.

  The door opens.

  ‘My brother isn’t here,’ says an overweight man draped in a dressing gown.

  In the aftermath of the London bombings I was on the cordons at Warren Street for days afterwards. We were told to go out and do a lot of searches. Now that’s typical of the Met. In the aftermath they decide to look for the horse after the stable door’s shut and the horse has already bolted. We were going out doing stop-and-searches. I’ve never known whether we had intelligence. A lot of it is just public reassurance, which is good, but you’ve got to be careful that you don’t discriminate, that you don’t only stop Asians with backpacks. At the end of the day it was them that did the bombs, so it could have been intelligence-led stops really; so if you saw four Asian blokes with rucksacks, then yeah, perhaps they should be stopped. A lot of people stopped white businessmen. Now clearly that’s going to wind white businessmen up, isn’t it? But you’ve got to use common sense again, haven’t you? I’m not saying a white man in a business suit couldn’t be a bomber – he could be. But we were told to just go out, there was no profile of a suicide bomber. Stop-and-search is a very controversial power, but it is our best power – to stop and go through someone’s pockets. Take their liberty away for five minutes and it makes them realize you’re in charge. This is how it’s going to be: we suspect you of something, we’re going to do this to you whether you like it or not. We can use force on you if you don’t comply with it. We’ll give you the warning. If you kick off, then we will force you.

  It becomes a problem when they tell you to go out and do these stop-and-searches and it becomes disproportionate to the amount of items found and the arrests. So, you know, borough X in London, they say, we’ve got an up-and-coming knife problem, so they draft in loads of resources to go and do stop-and-searches; inevitably, depending on the demographics of the borough, you’re going to get problems where maybe during that week’s operation you see a 50 per cent increase in young black youths being stopped, so straightaway their ethnic minority figures fo
r stop-and-search go up and it distorts the figures. If you do fifty stops a day and don’t find forty-nine weapons a day, then your figures are going to be disproportionate, and you’ve done a thousand stops this month, but you’ve only found three knives – how can that be right? And you say, hold on, we’re responding to this crime or this crime. You have youth leaders, people like that, saying, our youths are always being stopped. That’s because they’re out at three o’clock in the morning standing around in gangs with their hoods or with these new jackets with the hood up with the big goggle eyes, and they can zip right up so their faces are concealed. So that’s it from the police point of view. I can see why they think they’re being unfairly targeted, but it has to be done.

  We have to be nosy. We have to get in people’s faces. You have to get in their pockets. You have to ask what they’re doing, otherwise you’re not doing your job.

  It’s nearly 10 p.m. when the final call comes over the radio. Waves of young Somalis wearing gang colours are travelling up the Northern Line from Charing Cross. ‘Purple is what the Peckham Young Guns wear,’ Colin says. They’ll gather later in Leicester Square. They’ll rendezvous at the Trocadero. All this aggression will be played out in the West End. ‘A Section 60 has been granted by a supervisor,’ he says. ‘A Section 60 is authorized with good intelligence and it give us power to stop anyone in Camden borough without reasonable grounds. Usually a stop-and-search is only an option with reasonable grounds.’ He reaches out and attaches the Kojak light. The car surges to life. The traffic parts.

  When we arrive at Camden Town Tube station there are already a few black youths in the station with their arms spread wide in front of the officers. ‘Put your hands down,’ one officer says. ‘This isn’t America.’

  ‘Why all this?’ asks one youth.

  ‘Leicester Square,’ the officer replies.

  ‘I never heard anything about anything,’ says the youth.

  ‘There’s a Section 60,’ the policeman says. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Fourteen.’

  He’s wearing light blue shoes and what look to be lavender shoelaces but it’s hard to know what constitutes purple in the bright lights of Camden Town Tube station. Handel’s Water Music is playing through the loudspeaker in an effort to calm the Camden crowds. Occasionally the voice of the Underground announces: ‘Ladies and gentlemen there is a good service on the Northern Line.’

  When the search is finished, the youth lowers his arms and turns away from the wall.

  Another police officer is patting down a tall Somali boy wearing a blue Adidas top with purple stripes on the side.

  ‘What gang do you lot think you belong to?’

  ‘I’m wearing a blue top,’ says the youth to the wall.

  ‘What does the purple mean?’

  ‘It’s blue. It’s not purple.’

  ‘We could have you remove these gang colours,’ he says.

  The youth straightens up and responds to each soft pat of his torso. Some of the officers are wearing violet-coloured plastic gloves. The violet gloves, the light purple of the stripes, the robin’s-egg blue of the jumper.

  ‘It’s blue yeah?’ says the youth. ‘Not purple.’

  NICK SMITH

  Riot witness

  The weather was good. It was early evening on a sunny day, so I was in good spirits. When the sun shines in London people tend to be in a good mood. There had been major trouble in Brixton the previous night. Peckham had been hit as well, but none of that was on my mind. I thought maybe it would be contained. I was thinking about getting home and when a bus arrived, probably the 68, I was finally able to get a seat upstairs. I was listening to music on my phone when a call came through. My friend asked me how I was. Things were happening in Peckham, he said. The bus continued through Elephant and Castle. A few minutes later it was pulled over.

  The engine went off. Straightaway a few people got off the bus and a crowd gathered around the police officers who were standing there. The crowd got bigger. It was strange, actually, seeing the buses stopped before the crossroads. The police hadn’t really organized themselves. There were still cars coming out of the side streets, beeping to get past. The roadblocks were quite far back. Cars were trying to overtake the buses. There were people everywhere. There was annoyance but no sign of trouble. There was no information. People began questioning the police. Some people were curious, others bewildered. None of the police were in riot gear. It was August 2011.

  I decided to walk down a side street to get past the police. Another woman was doing the same. As we walked a guy casually passed us walking the other way and holding a bunch of mobile-phone equipment in his hands. He shouted something I didn’t catch, something boastful. I guess I assumed what was going on. I carried on, straight into the middle of it.

  The street led back to Walworth Road. It was quiet in that stretch, eerie. I looked back at the police in the distance, the empty buses. When I turned and looked the other way I saw groups of people gathered near the shops on the corner. The glass doors of the pawnbrokers and the betting shop had been kicked in but the windows throughout were intact. The other shops had substantial damage. It looked like someone had used a brick. The cracked glass looked like a spider’s web.

  Ahead of me there was a reasonable-sized crowd working on the Foot Locker – around fifteen people repeatedly trying to force their way in, rattling the metal shutters, shaking them, prying them open. This group around the Foot Locker – a lot of them, like me, looked caught up in the wrong place. Some people were there for entertainment. They were not going anywhere. They were enjoying the scene.

  It didn’t feel aggressive; it felt controlled. I could have decided to go back to where the police were standing, but for some reason I didn’t feel nervous walking through. It was broad daylight. There wasn’t anger on display. It was greed and opportunity, a chance to steal. It’s a lot scarier to be present when someone’s being mugged. I didn’t get that same feeling of fear. And there was no territorial aspect to it – people were helping each other out, black, white and brown. There was enough for everyone, and it was as if they all knew they needed the numbers. The numbers were important. The numbers allowed it to happen.

  I’d never experienced anything like it before. I certainly didn’t expect it in London. The people I saw – they didn’t come from another country. They didn’t just show up in London. They were the people who would, on any other day, be sitting next to me on the bus. They were smashing up shops.

  I was trying to survey the scene, so I wasn’t paying attention. I ran into a man quite hard. He had a scarf covering part of his face and didn’t look like an innocent bystander. He was big. Even on a normal day you wouldn’t want to smash into someone like that. I did and he was, I don’t know, almost jovial. He couldn’t care less. He had better things to do. I said sorry and he replied, ‘Cool bredren’, something like that. It felt, at that moment, like I was part of his gang. He didn’t know who I was but I wasn’t a police officer. I was on the same side. I felt as if I could have talked to anyone on the street – I could have said: ‘Why don’t we head to that shop next?’ I didn’t, but I could have.

  I definitely had the feeling there were some bad people there, people known to the police. But there were others, people caught up, and I could understand them. The DVDs scattered on the floor outside Argos? Why wouldn’t I pick them up? It was as if a great big box had split. There were too many DVDs for one person to carry. People were selecting which ones they wanted to pick up. I didn’t want to get involved but I stood and watched as some women pulled up and began flinging them into their car. Those in bandanas; those smashing shops – that’s not, and would never be, me. However, I think maybe if I’d been 16, 17, working part-time, I would have been tempted. I looked down at those DVDs and I thought, I’ve got a couple of box sets I haven’t found time to watch. Why would I bother picking up DVDs when I haven’t finished The Wire? But I wasn’t worried about getting caught. I’m sure I
could have got away with it.

  Further along I saw a flatscreen lying on Walworth Road. I was actually tempted to pick up the flatscreen to see why it had been abandoned, but I was worried about how that would look. If I pick up a flatscreen, even to take a look, it’s not something that’s easily explained.

  I felt quite calm. There had been fires burning the night before, fires in different parts of London, but while I was on the Walworth Road I felt calm, relaxed. It seemed like a lot of shops had already had their windows smashed. People were just working on the shutters of the Foot Locker. There was no conversation. They were working.

  I left the Foot Locker and carried on walking home. It was hard to believe I’d just walked through that particular scene. The bus was stopped at seven and by the time I was home it was half eight. I live on my own. I called my friend back, told him I was all right. You see footage of the LA riots but that’s just what happens in America. I know it’s happened here but I was three years old in ’81. It never seemed real. The mass scale, the way nobody cared about the police, the broken glass in broad daylight – it wasn’t the London I knew. I didn’t feel like I was in London.

  MOHAMMED AL HASAN

  Suspect

  I got stopped and searched by the cops for terrorism. It was in Hounslow East Station, I was going to college in the morning, around 8.30, 8.15. They said, we’re doing a random search so can we see your bag? They looked inside and they searched me and then they gave me a little receipt with a code that was the reason for the search. It was like C26 or whatever, and when I turned it around I saw that it meant terrorism. I was kind of shocked. Why am I getting searched for terrorism? You know, you say it’s a random search but you grabbed me and let about ten people go. Obviously they saw my college ID with my name, and I’ve got a rucksack on and I’m Asian. It was like, what have I done? They didn’t tell me.