Who'd Be a Copper?

by Jonathan Nicholas

  “Junction coming up on the left, clear. Pedestrian on the right with a dog, it’s on a lead so it’s safe. Child on a pedal cycle coming up on the left, slowing down just in case, indicating to pass, no oncoming traffic so I can give them a wide berth, nothing in my rear view mirror so it’s safe to proceed, just giving them a tap on the audible warning to make sure they know I’m here. Bend coming up to the right, double solid white lines in the centre of the road, now approaching a blind bend, slowing down and preparing to stop in case of an obstruction in the road. Around the bend and the road ahead is clear so it’s safe to proceed. Buildings coming up on the left, pedestrian crossing and 30mph sign slowing down...” and so on. Try it next time you drive a car – you’ll find it can be quite exhausting.

  I passed the course with seventy-two marks. Everyone seemed to get the same mark, which I found very curious. If anyone passed with more than that – even just one or two marks – they were invited to join the traffic department. One of the candidates on my course was awarded seventy-six marks and because he was also known as ‘a good lad’ he was given a job in the traffic department almost immediately. As far as I recall he spent his entire career there. This was how you moved between departments in those days, and it seems bizarre now, in today’s world of politically correct equal opportunities.

  The three-week course was known as a ‘standard driving course’ and you may be surprised to read that we were not taught how to drive faster than the speed limits. This was probably due to the absence of sirens at the time.

  Response duties at a busy station should be reserved for younger cops. Driving a very basic manual car around an inner-city area for eight hours or more with a half hour break in the middle – if you were lucky – was very tiring. It often seems relentless and it can also shred the nerves. You are usually the first to arrive at all serious incidents, frequently alone, day or night, most of the time having no idea what to expect at the scene. On several occasions, when on response duties, I woke up in bed shaking my fists at the bedroom wall, rambling and shouting after a particularly busy day.

  Gallows humour can develop too, the type of humour that is banned today. Sometimes anything could lighten the mood and relieve stress. I remember one serious domestic incident I attended with a male colleague when we knew at any moment we could be fighting, he whispered into my ear, “What do you think they’d do if we started French kissing now?”

  We’d occasionally chase around the city in the cars on night shifts, spraying one another with fire extinguishers, or practicing handbrake turns in the car parks of industrial estates. We didn’t have a ‘skid pan’ so this was an excellent way to understand the dynamics of vehicle control. In the early years, a colleague called Mark said to me as we sped along Gregory Boulevard in our Vauxhall Chevette at 60mph:

  “The gears in this are so shit, watch this for a clutchless gear change,” as he rammed the car into gear causing a loud bang and the car to stop immediately. A few years later, on rare occasions of quiet, another colleague, Phil, used to try crossing the city without changing gear at all. It’s astonishing to witness a 1.4 diesel engine successfully performing hill starts in fourth gear. A burning clutch is an awful smell, so it meant keeping the windows open, which was an arse in winter.

  New recruits were teased endlessly, with strange initiation rituals invented for them. They were often made to take cycling proficiency tests in the back yard of the police station, with such manoeuvres as ‘emergency dismount on the move in pursuit of a suspect on foot’ and ‘saluting an inspector to the left and right’ much to the amusement of everyone else in the building, peering into the back yard. There is a near total ban on any of this fun at work nowadays of course.

  I had a refresher driving course a few years before I retired which proved to be a very different experience to my initial driving course. Without ever being formally shown how to use the siren or the flashing lights the driving instructor simply shouted that I was to drive the police car at whatever speed I wanted in order to get across the city as quickly as possible. I thought this was rather strange and potentially extremely dangerous because I’d never been formally taught how to drive fast. The instructor probably assumed I’d already had the training. The truth is I’d been unofficially doing it for many years of course, since the early days of driving with one hand or alternate hands while busy pressing the horn, flicking the headlights and changing gear, in the days before sirens.

  It is certainly very exciting driving at 80mph on the wrong side of the road in built-up areas, and probably a lot safer now with sirens and both hands on the steering wheel. But is it really necessary to drive at such speeds? It’s very stressful and extremely dangerous. I see young cops tearing past schools while children run around at the roadside. Nothing could be urgent enough to risk the lives of pedestrians in this manner. I think some cops believe the lights and sirens act as a force field around the vehicle, protecting them from harm. Many of them don’t realise that if they killed a child while driving at such speeds, even with the blues and twos, nowadays they would almost certainly be given a lengthy prison sentence.

  INSIDE AND OUT

  In 1988 my section needed someone to operate the control room computers. I was volunteered for the training by my inspector on the basis that I kept a very neat pocket book. This was typical police logic. I knew absolutely nothing about computers. As with any training course it was Monday to Friday office hours, so it was great to live a normal life for two weeks and be at home during weekends with everyone else. The usual Sunday night blues don’t normally happen when working round-the-clock shifts. Sunday nights, with the prospect of another working week ahead, could actually fall on any day of the week.

  After almost four years of working rotating round-the-clock shifts it became clear there were some advantages to shift work. Days off in the week meant there were few traffic jams and the shops were always quiet. If you’ve ever worked shifts you will understand this. The down side balances the good points though. On a 4/12 shift unless you keep yourself busy during the day it could seem as though you were simply waiting to go to work, and this is worse on a Friday when the rest of the country finishes for the weekend.

  The PNC was the first computer I’d ever used, if you don’t include playing Donkey Kong. I was very impressed with it, as I had been at training school, but now more so since I understood its capabilities. In around four seconds the PNC could search twenty million vehicle records and tell you who the owner was and where the vehicle lived. I was astonished. There were also millions of names on the system, and of course it was a nationwide database. There were other functions of the PNC but by today’s standards it was a very basic system. It was more advanced than Nottinghamshire’s own criminal record system, the CRS. This system had a maximum capacity of fifty convictions on any one record. When I was first trained in its use it was extremely rare to find anyone with so many convictions. Sadly as the 1980s progressed it became increasingly common to see records with far more than this. Today criminals have convictions numbering in the hundreds. You have to ask yourself, how does someone accrue so many? Surely common sense would suggest the offender is not learning anything from the criminal justice system? Nottinghamshire’s own CRS system was eventually scrapped. I suspect it couldn’t cope with the amount of offending.

  Later the same year I submitted a request to be married, complying with police regulations. My prospective wife and her family were then checked for suitability to marry a police officer. Luckily I was granted permission. I’m not sure what would have happened if it had been refused.

  As soon as I returned from my computer course I began working in the control room at Radford Road. At first it was just the occasional shift, but then it was for weeks and eventually several months. This carried on for the next few years, working inside and then outside, then back inside again. I still worked shifts with the same people, and I found the role genuinely interesting. It was very challenging sometimes when work
ing the pad, being in control of the station. Split second decisions had to be made as to who should attend urgent calls from the public, and the stress levels were sometimes very acute.

  Because I was tied to my own shift it was an unwritten rule that you didn’t usually ask a member of another shift to take jobs off the pad, unless absolutely necessary. There was a pride in your own shift managing to ‘keep the lid on’ and to clear the pad. This was known as ‘cardboard visible’ and it was great to hand over to the next shift with nothing waiting, though this was quite rare. On some shifts it was so hectic that you hardly had enough time for a toilet break, and certainly not a meal break, in the whole eight hours. Food was taken at the desk while working, there was no alternative. This was another thing we did in order to make the job work, when perhaps it shouldn’t. It was very stressful at times. The RAS computer had a bell, as did the roller shutters to the cell block and the link with the front counter. All these rang in the control room, with the addition of five telephones which never seemed to stop ringing, except for a few hours in the middle of the night. We also had a red telephone on the front desk called The Bat Phone, just like in the TV series. It was a direct link to the main VHF control room at Fraggle Rock, and someone had actually drawn a picture of a bat on it. Add to this the constant radio chatter and some ambient noise from colleagues standing around chatting; it was often loud and unpleasant.

  So what happened when a member of the public rang the police? All ‘999’ calls were taken at headquarters and then sent down the line via the RAS computer system. If a caller rang the police station directly on the local number rather than using the 999 system a hand-written message was created by the control room staff. If a member of the public called at the station in person the enquiry counter would write a message for the control room. It hasn’t changed much and the same procedures apply today, but now everything is entered directly onto a computer.

  Very often it became impossibly busy, to the point where no-one was available to attend calls. When this happened some less urgent jobs were disposed of, or ditched, as we called it, in order to make the job work. They were taken off the pad and placed in ‘Docket Thirteen’ as it was known: the bin. All incoming messages should have been stamped with a hand-held consecutive numbering machine, but at very busy times this was overlooked. On these occasions ‘when the wheel came off’ as we called it, even some stamped messages were ditched. If you ever called the police in the ‘80s or ‘90s and no one arrived and you wondered why, there’s your answer.

  Disposing of calls from the public as a way of controlling demand was not employed every day but it was a method that everyone in the control room knew about and used, with some doing it more than others. The local gaffers weren’t officially aware of it, like a lot of things we did, but there were some who knew and accepted that it was usually done at times of sheer desperation. It was interesting to observe at very busy times some gaffers would slowly amble out of the control room, coffee in hand, to find somewhere quieter, with few, if any, willing to sit down and pick up a phone. I don’t blame them really; the atmosphere was extremely noisy and stressful. On one occasion an inspector calmly wandered from the control room to the property store with his coffee saying, “See you later” and blew his brains out with a shotgun. The corridor downstairs to the rear yard was a terrible mess.

  Demand was rising at an alarming rate, and I noted in my diary that calls to Radford Road police station in 1989 totalled 51,634. The following year the end total was almost 20% higher at 59,839. How could this be sustained? There were increasing occasions when no-one was available to attend genuine emergencies. I know the public might find this hard to believe but it’s true. It’s much worse now. I remember one such occasion I was on the pad when this happened; in sheer exasperation I ran from the control room, picked up a set of vehicle keys and travelled to the job myself. I then returned to the station and sat down in the control room. I only ever did this once but it was a sign that something was clearly wrong.

  Working in the control room gave a much greater insight into the personalities of colleagues, learning quickly the difference between the workers and the shirkers. The same hard working colleagues constantly called up for more jobs and regularly visited the control room, in person, asking for work. Other members of the shift would disappear for hours, never to be seen or heard. If they were asked to do a job it seemed they were always busy with other things and unable to help. At the end of the shift they would then wander into the control room and let slip that they’d been bored all day. This is the price of idleness. It began to annoy me that we were all paid the same, regardless of the amount of work we did. This is not unique to the police service of course; everyone at some point has worked with at least one idle bastard.

  One of the hazards of indoor work at that time was passive smoking. I’d given up smoking years before and was still jogging in my spare time, so I was aware of other people’s smoke without being self-righteous about it. However, I was working with several heavy smokers and at busy times they would smoke constantly. In only a few hours with two or more smokers in the relatively small room it would often have the appearance of a Moroccan Kasbah. The control room was operated on a twenty-four-hour basis, and so every six months the ceiling was painted white to cover the deepening yellow stain. I began to acquire a cough and frequently experienced headaches and a sore throat. On more than one occasion I contracted pharyngitis, a serious throat infection, and visited my doctor. The first thing he always said to me when he looked at my throat was “Do you smoke?” I occasionally took time off with throat problems, which my doctor and I attributed to passive smoking. The expression was very new, and I remember my inspector, a rather corpulent man who seemed to care little for his own health at the time, told me that I was being stupid, and if I took any more time off in such circumstances I would face disciplinary action. I was told to forget about the whole thing and get on with my work. Undeterred I conducted some research into this new phenomenon of passive smoking.

  I contacted the Tobacco Advisory Council, the TAC, which was sponsored by the tobacco industry, and their opponents, the charity Action on Smoking & Health, or ASH. I still have the leaflets they sent me. The TAC’s advice came in the form of a very glossy brochure which flatly refuted the existence of so-called ‘passive smoking’. Under the title ‘Not the real problem’ health issues in the workplace were more likely being caused by a phenomenon known as ‘sick building syndrome’ rather than Environmental Tobacco Smoke, or ETS. The brochure has a picture of two men smiling at one another while seated at a desk; the man nearest the window is smoking, and an extractor fan is seen drawing all the tobacco smoke out the window. A whole page of the booklet then talks about the history of tobacco and how much it formed part of everyday life. Looking at it today the whole thing seems hilarious, but in those days it was meant to be serious.

  ASH sent me a simple factsheet about passive smoking, and it was frightening reading. They also sent me instructions on how to apply for a Smoking at Work Policy. Having digested all the facts on 21st December 1989 I submitted a three page General Report requesting Nottinghamshire Constabulary adopt a smoking policy. I still have a copy. It was ignored. A few years later two colleagues in the same control room contracted throat cancer. Only one of them smoked. I’m happy to say the non-smoker is still alive and well.

  DRINK DRIVERS

  I was becoming more confident in the use of computers so I applied for an Intoximeter course. The Lion Intoximeter 3000 was the large machine in the cell block on which drink drivers were tested after failing the roadside breath test. The machine works by firing a short laser burst through the subject’s breath. It can tell by refraction how much alcohol is in the vapour, and is extremely accurate. The small handheld device used by cops on the street is merely a screening device, and cannot in itself be used as evidence in court.

  The Intoximeter machine was regularly checked and calibrated to ensure accuracy, and I f
ound it very interesting. However, not many colleagues agreed, and because it was done on a voluntary basis I became one of only a handful of trained officers. There was no extra money involved, as in most such things at the time, including working in the control room. I’m not saying I was the hardest working cop in the station but idle cops don’t volunteer. I undertook these additional roles because they were interesting and they were new challenges.

  There should have been at least one or two cops on every shift trained on The Lion, as it was known, but in the following eighteen months I undertook eighty-eight Lion operations. The vast majority resulted in a guilty plea, mainly because of the machine’s spotless reputation. However, my Lion operations still resulted in more than twenty court appearances in a relatively short time where I gave evidence against the defendant.

  According to my pocket book, on one particular night shift when I started work at 10pm, my first operation was at 11pm, and then I conducted almost one an hour until 6am when I finished work. The majority were brought into Radford Road custody suite by the roving traffic officers from Nottingham’s Central Traffic Department in the big ‘jam sandwich’ police cars, the like of which you rarely see on British roads these days. Don’t be fooled by the brightly liveried Highways Agency vehicles that patrol British motorways today. They are not cops, even though they and their vehicles are dressed up to look like the police. They have a power to pull you over ‘on safety grounds’ but they cannot search or detain you, or issue you with a speeding ticket. They can give you advice but that’s about all. I notice drivers slowing down on the motorways when they see these vehicles, and I find it annoying that people are being paid to look like police officers when they aren’t. I thought it was illegal to impersonate a police officer?