I found the address on Bergholt Walk, stepping around the usual mounds of dog shit and litter in the walkways, and knocked on the door. It opened as I touched it so I walked straight in with a colleague, Tim. Pungent odours of stale tobacco, accumulations of dirt and body odour greeted us in the filthy flat. I shouted “Police!” and heard some scuffling and cupboard doors being banged shut. A thin and very scruffy chap in his mid-thirties with straggly brown hair like rat’s tails was standing in the kitchen. I asked him his name and he confirmed he was the man I was looking for. I told him why I was there and to my astonishment he immediately opened a cupboard door and produced the stolen item. Sometimes when the unexpected happens it can throw you off guard a little. I said to him:
“I am arresting you on suspicion of theft and taking you to Radford Road police station where further enquiries will be made.” I cautioned him: “You are not obliged to say anything but what you say may be written down and used in evidence.” I was so delighted by the quick recovery of the CD player, that I handcuffed him and bundled into the police car straight away. We didn’t search him or his flat.
While my prisoner was standing at the charge desk in the station a colleague noticed two small plastic bags of white powder on the floor at his feet. He picked them up and said to my prisoner:
“What’s this?” to which he looked blank and replied:
“No idea, never seen it before...”
Tim and I should have searched the man before we put him in the car, or better still, while he was in the flat. The powder was placed in an exhibit bag and handed to me. There were no other detainees in the vicinity, so it seemed likely my chap had tried to rid himself of it.
It was January 1986 and we were only just trying to comply with the new regulations of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. Though passed in ‘84 it didn’t become effective until the latter part of 1985, and was some of the most influential legislation ever imposed on the police. It completely revolutionised the way a person was dealt with in custody and replaced the nebulous ‘Judge’s Rules’. Until then the arresting officer had a huge amount of autonomy when dealing with his arrest, and very little accountability. It was commonplace to throw your prisoner in a cell with instructions to think about coughing the job, leaving him there for hours or even all weekend in order to ‘soften him up’ for interview. I saw prisoners chained to radiators or even bannister rails in old police stations. To be fair, sometimes this was through necessity rather than calculated malice. Many of the buildings such as Gregory Boulevard police station were unfit for purpose. But after being lashed to a hot radiator the detainee would most likely admit anything.
Making sure your prisoner admitted the offence was the most important aspect of an investigation, and there were many interview ploys available. Shouts and threats were common, and some of the older CID officers used the tactic of threatening a prisoner with the arrest of his wife or taking his kids into care if he didn’t cough the job. It was all seen as good interviewing in order to put the offender under immense pressure. I was reminded of what one of my first sergeants told me: “Don’t worry if you have to bend the rules, you are acting in the interests of justice.”
The PACE Act reduced such opportunities dramatically. An admission is still great evidence, but latterly we were told it would no longer be enough to secure a conviction without corroboration such as additional witnesses or forensics. Threats or inducements are no longer permitted, and the promise of bail if the job was coughed could now jeopardise the whole case. Most cops had to completely rethink their interview technique when the PACE Act was introduced. It was seen by many as being too soft on criminals and overly concerned about their welfare. Every moment a person was in custody was now accounted for and recorded on a comprehensive hand-written ‘Custody Record’. Before this it might be recorded on the back of the detention report, or ‘Domestic Sheet’ as it was called, but only if anyone could be bothered.
Cops could no longer interview a drunken prisoner, because quite often they’d admit anything when pissed. If they said they were tired they had to be left in the cell for eight hours so they could get some sleep, which was outrageous. Keeping a prisoner awake until they coughed had always been a great ploy during night shifts. Up until then I had rarely seen anyone ask for legal representation, and if they did, the news flew around the station immediately. Had they committed murder? Why did they want a solicitor? After the introduction of the PACE Act everyone seemed to want one, and the Legal Aid bill grew rapidly as a result. At one point quite recently, Legal Aid was costing almost as much per year as the total funding for all forty-three police forces in England and Wales. The biggest reason of course was that for the first time the detainee was actually asked correctly and given detailed advice about it, crucially having to sign for their decision.
Two hours later I started an interview, recording it on contemporaneous notes. This meant writing down the questions and answers while talking. It was far from ideal, and you had to write quickly to keep a continuous flow. Taped or video interviews were still many years away. My prisoner, now officially known as a detained person, didn’t want a solicitor. Even though he had a long record, typical of the time he’d never used one before. The interview went well at first, and he admitted theft of the CD player, but he knew he had no choice. When I took out the white powder his attitude changed. The following is a verbatim extract from the interview notes:
512:
Are you taking drugs at the moment?
Reply:
I have been for a long time.
512:
What do you take?
Reply:
Speed. I’m not denying I don’t take speed. I take about two grammes a day, ‘cos I’m a heavy user of speed.
512:
This was found close to where you were standing in the cell block after your arrest. Do you know what it is? (REFERRING TO POLICE EXHIBIT ONE)
Reply:
It’s some wraps
512:
Where did they come from?
Reply:
I don’t know
512:
In your property there’s a needle. Has it been used?
Reply:
I’m not sure, I wouldn’t deny it.
512:
Supposing we get the needle and this stuff examined and it turns out to be the same substance that would prove it to be yours wouldn’t it? (This was a complete bluff on my part)
Reply:
Why is that speed in there?
512:
You tell me
Reply:
You can do all the tests you like, that is not mine
512:
Where did this come from then, fall from the sky did it?
Reply:
I don’t know. It seems like a set up to me.
512:
You’ve said to me already that you’re on two grammes of speed a day and then we find this stuff in our cell block right where you were standing.
Reply:
Yes alright. It’s mine.
This was my very first cough and I was elated. I’ve absolutely no doubt whatsoever that had this man been given legal representation he would have been advised to answer ‘no comment’ to all my questions. I would then have been unable to prove the wraps of white powder were his, unless the bags were sent for forensic examination. Because ‘speed’ or amphetamine sulphate was a Class B drug, and Class ‘A’ if injected, under the rules of the day I was obliged to contact the drugs squad. Twenty minutes later a detective inspector and a detective police woman (known as a DPW) arrived and took my prisoner from me for a while.
Later I travelled in a plain car with the DPW to my prisoner’s flat. We found small weighing scales and some plastic deal bags, and in the kitchen drawer a syringe containing red liquid that looked like blood. We interviewed him again:
DPW:
There appears to be blood inside this hypodermic.
What is inside it?
/>
Reply:
Speed. Amphet.
DPW:
Why is it red?
Reply:
I was flushing it when you lot banged on the door.
512:
Flushing it?
Reply:
Yeah. Inject it and pull back the plunger and it fills with blood, then inject it. Flushing.
512:
Will you roll your sleeves up for me? (I noticed numerous puncture marks on the inside of both arms.)
512:
How long have you been using amphetamine?
Reply:
About fifteen years.
DPW:
Where do you get the syringes and needles?
Reply:
From the same people I get the drugs from. Some guy in the pub. Don’t know his name.
DPW:
How much do you pay for the syringes?
Reply:
Two pounds. I bought the rocket (RE-USABLE SYRINGE) for ten pound.
DPW:
How much do you pay for the wraps?
Reply:
Ten or twelve pounds.
I charged my prisoner with theft and possession of amphetamine sulphate. He was bailed a month hence, to early February. Probably because he was off his face on speed he didn’t attend court, so I called around his flat and brought him to the station. I then charged him with his bail offence but this time he was remanded in custody.
I noticed he constantly used expressions such as ‘far out’, ‘bombed’, ‘tripping’ and so on, words and phrases commonly used in the drug sub-culture. It occurred to me that until recently I’d used these expressions myself when I was immersed in the same sub-culture.
TECHNOLOGY AND CARS
In February 1986 my two-year probation was confirmed. It had become a formality by then, as I was enjoying the job and was quite good at it. There was no formal ceremony but I did receive a letter from Fraggle Rock. If I wanted to, I could now make the police my life, at least for the next twenty-eight years until retirement. I understood the significance of it by talking to my peers. They all spoke about their time in the job, but more specifically the years they had left before they could escape into retirement. Cops looked at the finite thirty years almost as a sentence to complete and everyone seemed to be counting down to the end. The amount of service you had was crucial to almost everything, and very often you were judged on that alone. It was also used as a kind of career template. After the first two probationary years you’d get a driving course and work response for a while, then you could specialise in the CID or another department.
There was no official tenure so once in the CID you could call yourself a DC and ditch the uniform for good. I often saw people ‘squad hopping’ all their service, leaping from one specialist department to another, vanishing for years until they reappeared under a new job title, but still a safe distance away from the uniformed front line. In my humble opinion everyone should spend at least a year on response duties between squads, if only to remind them how lucky they are in escaping.
Getting onto the CID wasn’t easy. You needed a few decent arrests which might involve working with CID officers for a while, getting to know them, and crucially, getting to know the DI, the boss. It would also mean buying the detective inspector a drink as often as you could, getting on well with him until he finally uttered those all-important words, “You ought to come and work in the CID, leave it with me I’ll have a word with your inspector.” The process could take months and involved a lot of drinking.
In the mid-1980s the police didn’t have a lot of technology. The control room at the brand new Radford Road police station had two computer terminals, and were the only computers in the entire building. This seems odd now, and almost unbelievable considering the ubiquitous nature of today’s technology. It was probably a lot less than most other places at the time too, because the police have always been lamentably late in acquiring new technology. Even when the new systems arrived they were often already hopelessly inappropriate. This could have been due to a cock-up on the procurement front by senior officers with no knowledge of technology, or the misguided belief that technology beats boots on the ground, which it doesn’t, or a mixture of both.
There were three operators in a divisional control room such as Radford Road. These were usually two cops and a civilian member of staff. Sometimes it could be one cop and two civilians. They were ordinary civilians too, not ‘civvies’ dressed to look like cops as they are today. One computer was dedicated to two systems, the Resource Availability System, or RAS as it was known, and the PNC. The person sitting in this seat also had control of ‘the pad’. This was where all the hand-written messages were collated for issuing to officers, and it meant that you were effectively in charge of the station and all the available staff. On this person’s right was the other computer, the CRS system. This was the local Criminal Record System, and it contained all the names and details of anyone arrested and charged within Nottinghamshire. It was an extremely quick, friendly and very useful system. Both terminals had green screen monitors with a small flashing cursor, very simple by today’s standards. Probably because they were so basic they were easy to use and understand. When you charged a person your collar number would appear in page one of the CRS record adjacent to the offence. I found it very satisfying to see my number in such circumstances.
The two computer terminals in the control room were located beside one another a few feet apart on the front desk. Between them was a large control panel inside a sloping wooden cabinet on which were mounted two black Bakelite telephone handsets. These were the instruments of pre-war technology used to communicate with officers on the outside. There were also rows of buttons and switches which operated the various CCTV cameras around the station and the large sliding doors in the back yard. Radford Road was a maximum security police station and had emergency roller shutters over every external door with ‘attack lighting’ around the building. To date I don’t think any of it has ever been used, and probably never will be, since the cells were removed and turned into offices and store rooms. I heard locals describe it as a fortress, and they weren’t far wrong. Designed and built in the early ‘80s there was a clear anticipation such fortifications might be needed. It even had an air-raid siren on a steel tower in the rear car park which has since disappeared.
At the start of every shift after briefing, each officer would walk into the control room and lean on the chest-high wooden casing of the control panel and note down any jobs that needed doing on their designated beat area. The centre of Hyson Green, known as Area One, was thought to be the most demanding beat at the station, and probably the whole force area. It remains so to this day. A decent response cop would probably take five or six jobs from the pad before disappearing out on patrol. An idle cop would maybe take two or three, and even then they might return saying they hadn’t been done. In the meantime if anything urgent came in while he or she was working their way through these jobs, they were diverted where necessary.
The 1980s was the beginning of a very busy time for the police. Crime began rising dramatically every year and no-one really knew why, in the same mysterious way it has fallen in recent years.
The Burndept radio was eventually replaced in favour of encrypted equipment. It seemed people could listen to police radios, despite the threat that it was illegal to do so if the information was acted upon. At the start of every shift you took a radio from the locked cabinet and signed for it, writing down on the clipboard which radio you had taken. There was a battery tester in the cabinet, and it was vital to make sure you had enough battery life for the whole shift. You really had no idea what sort of day you would have, which of course was the beauty of the job, so you needed a full charge.
The police cars were ordinary vehicles liveried with day-glow stripes and markings. The public perhaps believe that all police vehicles are somehow ‘souped up’ and have turbo-charged engines but sadly this is not the case. In Febr
uary 1987 I was sent on a three-week residential driving course at Epperstone Manor. Every day we had some classroom work during which we were taught how a vehicle behaves on a road under various conditions and at different speeds, particularly when cornering. A vehicle is in a stable condition when it is being driven straight and all the pressures are acting upon it equally, like an aircraft in level flight. When different pressures are applied such as braking, accelerating and cornering, the problems can start and control – or lack of it – becomes an issue.
The driving course mainly consisted of driving one of the marked vehicles around the local countryside with an instructor sitting in the front passenger seat, and two other pupils in the back, taking it in turns. We drove a Ford Escort 1.3 petrol engine saloon, and learnt how to drive to a specific system. This meant observing the speed limits, holding the steering wheel at ten minutes to two, and using the foot brake rather than the gears to control speed. When approaching junctions the clutch was depressed and the appropriate gear selected in order to move off quickly, rather than changing down the gears routinely, as was taught when first learning to drive. It was all about safely ‘making progress’, and manoeuvres that would probably amount to a fail in your driving test had to be learnt and demonstrated effectively. This included, when overtaking, moving over to the other side of the road if necessary in order to get a clear view ahead. It also meant straightening bends when safe to do so. It all seems quite alarming to passengers when driving your own car! One of the ways this system is learnt is through verbal commentary. It’s not easy at first but it greatly increases awareness of hazards ahead, which is of course why it is done.
Who'd Be a Copper? Page 11