Who'd Be a Copper?

by Jonathan Nicholas

  I’ve witnessed the same in the NHS too, when working at the hospital. It seems everything is being privatised, from catering to cleaning. Local people who’ve worked in the health service for generations now find themselves working for private companies on lower rates of pay, changed working conditions, and little or no pension. As in any such organisation complaints are met with the usual comments of ‘If you don’t like it, the door’s there.’ The changes in the health service are implemented using a climate of fear specifically created to ensure what’s really happening is not leaked to the public or the media.

  In 2009 we were issued with Blackberry phones. They were linked to some of the force computer systems and we would eventually use them to input crime and other incidents directly into the new crime database. The CRIS system had gone, thankfully. The keys on a Blackberry were tiny, as you might know. Learning to input complex information using the QWERTY keyboard on the phone was difficult at first. We were encouraged to use the handheld device, as it was euphemistically known, instead of calling the control room, as it was all part of the government’s £7m drive for the police to use ‘mobile data’. If the idea was to get cops back out on the streets to be more visible then it was another dismal failure. The discipline had long since gone and some cops continued to spend entire shifts in the station sitting at a computer looking very busy but actually doing nothing.

  Anti-social behaviour, or kids messing about, continued to be a problem on other people’s beat areas. It was decided to use beat managers such as myself to staff a patrol car specifically to deal with ASB. This became known as Operation Cacogen, and still runs to this day. It was quickly known by its practitioners as Operation Cack Again. It was unpopular because of course ASB only usually happens in the evenings, and mainly on Friday and Saturday nights. Consequently day shifts were changed, rest days cancelled, and time off refused, all in the service of the Cack Again monster. Driving around the city knocking stuff on the head in this manner is soul destroying and pointless, but the gaffers seem to love it.

  For more than twenty-five years I was known by one radio call sign, my collar number, 512. By 2011 I had acquired a total of four. When working on Cack Again and similar operations I was not only 512, but also CB822, LB35, or CASB01, depending on the role I was undertaking. Bearing in mind your ear becomes attuned to your call sign so you can hear it almost instinctively over all other noises, to be called different things on different days was ludicrous. The reason for it of course, was simply in order to suit the command and control database being used at Fraggle Rock. The dog was yet again thoroughly wagged by the tail.

  Cack Again was city wide. You could therefore find yourself at the far end of the city in a strange area, usually at night, talking to kids you’d never met before and who you were unlikely to ever meet again, trying to build a relationship and an understanding with them in five minutes flat. It simply doesn’t work. You might say cops should just turn up and tell the kids off and do as they are told, and some cops do conduct themselves in this manner, but the kids just look at you, think that you are a complete twat, and carry on as soon as you’ve gone. ASB callers would come out of their houses and reveal the offender to be the lad down the road, you know the one, he always wears a blue top, and he ran up the jitty as usual, just there, you know the one... well; actually I don’t, because I’ve never been here before. The question asked by astonished members of the public when I told them I usually worked at the hospital five miles away was: “What are you doing here?” But as usual the gaffers loved Cack Again because someone, anyone, was addressing a problem the gaffers above them – the other monkeys in the tree – had asked them to find a solution to. In my humble opinion the service to the public was embarrassingly shoddy and unprofessional.

  THE END

  THE FALL AND RISE

  By 2012 large cracks began appearing in the police service. These were mainly gaps in staffing levels and shortages of vehicles. As usual the gaffers were desperate to do something about it so some of the extraneous squads were reduced or disbanded. Nottinghamshire lost the mounted section and the OSU, Operational Support Unit, was cut. The OSU, or ‘the unit’ as it was known, were based in the woods at Fraggle Rock and were a team of mainly male officers who were used to police football matches, special events and so on. They have been variously known as the Force Support Unit and the Special Operations Unit, but such names apparently sounded too aggressive for the Labour city council. Their numbers have now dwindled to such an extent that other cops have to stand in and do the jobs they used to do. There’s an obvious irony and clear stupidity in reducing a team in favour of saving jobs at the front line when by doing so their job then has to be done by cops from the front line. This happens a lot in the police service, and no doubt across the entire public sector. It’s like rearranging the deck chairs again, and sadly it’s getting worse.

  In 1968 Nottinghamshire County Police and Nottingham City Police amalgamated into Nottinghamshire Constabulary, and four divisions, A, B, C, and D were created. There was always a running joke among those at the sharp end that at times of crisis the gaffers would decide to change it back to City and County. In 2011 the four divisions disappeared and Nottinghamshire Police was indeed split into City Division and County Division. It seems yet again that going backwards is the way forward.

  In the last few years of my service I was frequently removed from my normal duties to police various events across the city, problems that until then were usually addressed by the OSU. Operation Country takes place on the coldest and wettest October nights every year, and runs alongside Operation Graduate. The purpose of Op Country is to bring down the high number of burglaries and street crime in a certain area and Op Graduate is to provide reassurance to the 60,000 ungrateful middle-class piss-heads masquerading as students who come to live in the worst parts of the city. These always follow the annual fun of Goose Fair. All three involve trudging the streets wearing a big hat in an entirely pointless manner getting soaked and very tired.

  I turned up at Canning Circus police station in the city centre one Saturday afternoon to work from 5pm until 1am on Operation Graduate. I had already been changed from a day shift so when I arrived for work I should have been at home. At 6pm we were told we would be kept on duty until 6am. It rained all night. The modern police uniform can best be described as utterly shit. It couldn’t keep the wearer dry in a desert. The reflective yellow jacket stops at the waist and is not waterproof. The rain runs down onto your legs and in ten minutes you are wet through to the skin. You then have to walk around in more rain for ten hours in this condition.

  My biggest problem with being frequently abstracted was that back in the real world, at the hospital or on the housing estates of my own beat area, jobs began piling up. I could read about the incidents on the computer from a distance and there were many occasions where I knew who an offender was and could have dealt with the matter quickly and informally but I was miles away and not due back for weeks. I repeatedly pointed this out but I was told by sergeants and inspectors not to worry about it. Abstractions were something we would just have to get used to; but I began to lose touch with my beat area and, worse still, the music club began to collapse because of my frequent evening commitments elsewhere. I protested but was told to get on with my work; my beat area was not my concern when I was away from it. I always found this statement rather peculiar because when back on our beat areas we were given weekly statistics of crime and ASB trends with concerned questions as to why certain crimes had risen. When I stated the reason may be because I hadn’t been on my beat area for a while I was told: “That’s got nothing to do with it.”

  Even when I wasn’t abstracted a gaffer told me I was only allowed two hours a week for the music club, saying: “You’re a police officer, not a youth worker.” For the first time in years ASB began to rise across my beat. At first I felt personally affronted by this, but as the abstractions continued, and I was again told not to worry about it, I
did just that. I gave up. If the people above me in the rank structure displayed a total lack of concern then why should I bother? This is a perfect example of utterly uninspiring leadership.

  Crime began falling in 2002. From the peak in the mid-90s total crime in England and Wales in 2012 was around 9.5 million and has continued a sharp downward trend, though with some fluctuations at times. The national homicide rate dropped to 550 in 2012, exactly the same as in 1983. Harold Shipman, the murdering doctor, apparently killed 215 people so he briefly skewed the figures a little. You might wonder what the police are doing if crime rates are falling so much, but the crime figures have been boosted by some new recording trends which take up huge amounts of time. In the twelve months to July 2014 Nottinghamshire Police recorded 33,541 incidents of ASB, anti-social behaviour. Total crime was 105,343 for the same year, so according to these figures they spent a third of their time dealing with kids making nuisances of themselves.

  You won’t believe how much time is consumed by ASB these days. Each incident of ASB generates a crime number. It’s not a crime as such, even though the procedures are the same, and a cop spends forty-five minutes on his or her Blackberry trying to generate one. It’s known as a noncrime ASB crime number. There’s nowhere else to record them so they are entered onto the crime database. This then means a four-page crime report must be completed, and then a written risk assessment. The victim has to be visited and contacted regularly on a specific schedule which must be strictly observed, for ever. There’s no end date to the revisits if the problem persists. If you work for the Home Office or you are currently a gaffer I can hear you agreeing with this, and it does sound great, but it’s a logistical nightmare. I had very many victims of ASB telling me after my tenth visit not to bother them any more as they were fed up of the police calling round to the house every other day.

  The same also applies to cases of domestic violence. Quite right too, I hear you say, and I agree to a certain extent. Years ago the police were not interested in domestic violence. We’d just take the offender, usually the male partner, to his mother’s house for the night, leaving the female at the address crying into the kitchen sink. But one of the last jobs I dealt with was one brother verbally bullying another in the same household. I was tasked to visit the brothers every week for the rest of their lives. Presumably now that I’ve retired someone else will be paying them regular visits. If one of the brothers told me he had been shouted at again by the other I then had to generate an entirely new non-crime domestic crime number, fill in the four-page crime report, and then another two-page written risk assessment, and again if he did it the following week, and so on, forever. I’m not joking. If you wondered why you never see a police officer these days you now know why.

  I submitted a report – which as usual was ignored – suggesting we deal with wind damage in the same protracted manner, merely for the sake of recording it because nobody else did. A fence blown down in a storm could be a non-crime wind-related crime number, generating a wind-related non-crime crime report and risk assessment, at least a couple of hour’s police time utterly wasted. Why not? The police could even sell the statistics to insurance companies, generate some revenue, target repeat wind victims, and assist in the long term rectification of the problem, i.e., buy a new fence. We need not stop there. A dead bird in the street could become a non-crime dead-bird related crime number, and the figures could be used by the RSPB or RSPCA to monitor wildlife levels, because nobody else is doing it. Recently, the Thunderbirds puppet known as Tom Winsor in his role as HMIC stated that police use of discretion had prevented thousands of crimes from being recorded. So, let’s do as he asks and record everything we see!

  I’m not saying the police shouldn’t take matters of ASB and domestic violence seriously, but in 2014 there has to be a more efficient way of doing it. If and when crime starts rising again there simply won’t be sufficient time available. The service to the victim in my opinion is overly attentive to the point of being almost pressured, and the reasons for it are very definitely not purely to provide a good service. The main reason for such procedures, as everyone knows who works in the public sector, is as an insurance policy. It is common knowledge that most of what cops do today is covering their back in case something goes wrong. It sometimes seemed as though more time was spent doing this than actually doing the job. If someone is found dead the first thing that is looked for is blame. I don’t mean who the offender was, but which public servant didn’t do their job properly. The media seem to concentrate all their efforts on finding out who they can publicly hang while the real offender and victim are often side-lined as irrelevant. Minor mistakes and accidents happen. No-one can provide gilt-edged guarantees against the random behaviour of human beings; it’s what makes us human, so get over it.

  In 2010 I started sending stroppy letters to the police magazine Police Review, mainly about how shit the job was becoming. They must have thought I was Mr Angry, but to their credit they published quite a few. Eventually they became so pissed off by my frequent ranting that they offered me a regular column. I was paid the glorious sum of £70 for five hundred words every month. I was thrilled. Suddenly I was a professional writer and had fulfilled a lifelong dream. I obtained formal permission to be a columnist from my employers in the form of a ‘Business Interest’ and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Most of my ramblings were directed at the crazy policies oozing from the arse-end of the Home Office, as was most of the magazine’s content. It was no surprise such dissent was stifled when the publication ceased in 2012 despite being profitable. It was probably in preparation for the oncoming slaughter of the service that has taken place since.

  My column in Police Review inspired me to write further, so I began collecting some of the incidents I’d dealt with at the hospital. Friends in the pub couldn’t believe I’d dealt with a doctor who regularly masturbated at nurses in his coffee breaks, and another who stole a huge television, so there was a clear interest in the subject. During Op Graduate in October 2010 I wandered alone through the dark streets of Nottingham all night in the rain while during the day I’d write. The following year I published my first book, Hospital Beat, about my antics at the Nottingham City Hospital. It was an immediate success. The initial print run of a thousand paperback copies sold out quickly, despite the fact that I had to classify it as fiction, when a huge amount of it was factual.

  In 2011, while again trudging the streets of Canning Circus in the rain every night for two months, I began writing my second book, Kibbutz Virgin. One morning in November 2011 I almost collapsed at home feeling dizzy and unwell. My doctor sent me to hospital and, to my astonishment, after a scan I was informed I had a blood clot, an embolism, on my right lung. 30% of people who acquire such things die in their sleep. I was told I would be off work for several weeks and so for a while I enjoyed a writer’s life, and finished Kibbutz Virgin.

  I returned to work in February 2012. The following month I received news from Fraggle Rock that changed my opinion of the police forever.

  RUBBER HEALS AND RESENTMENT

  I had twenty-eight years unblemished service. I’d never hit anyone, I’d never used my CS spray and I’d never had a complaint upheld against me. That’s not to say I’d never been in receipt of complaints. Many people complain about police officers, and it’s usually at the point of arrest because they don’t like being caught. In today’s society where parents and teachers are reluctant to use force it comes as a shock when handcuffs are applied.

  I was proud of a clear discipline record, and I considered myself to be a good cop. I’d never been interviewed by the Complaints and Discipline Department as they were once known. They were also known as the ‘rubber heal brigade’ because they could easily sneak up on the unwary. Such things happened frequently to other cops, but not to me, and so I was shocked when the Professional Standards Department, the PSD, came for me on 1st March 2012.

  I was served discipline notices for my book Hospital Beat. T
here were thirteen parts of it that were apparently ‘unacceptable’. Not only this, I was informed I didn’t have permission to publish it. I was stunned. My writing had become incredibly important to me and I loved it with a passion. I was close to retirement and it would soon become my second career. I immediately argued that I had been given permission to write as a columnist, but I was told ‘columnist’ is different to ‘writer’. At first I thought someone was joking. I assured them that the book had been classified as fiction, but this didn’t seem to have any impact. I also reminded them that Nottinghamshire Police, or even the word ‘Nottingham’, never appeared in the book. The wording of the charge was:

  Jonathan Nicholas describes actions, attitudes and opinions that, if true, would result in disciplinary action and which in any case bring Nottinghamshire Police into disrepute.

  The book was classified as fiction, and Nottingham isn’t mentioned, so how could this be possible? My Business Interest as a columnist was variously described in different articles of paperwork from the PSD as ‘Freelance Journalist’ and ‘Freelance columnist’ which they corrected months later to ‘Police Review Columnist’, and in the notices served on me the investigator referred to it as ‘Writer’. Were they just incompetent or merely confused? In the wording of the Business Interest it says ‘You should not appear in uniform’ and yet my monthly Police Review article carried a photo of me in my uniform, but this was never mentioned. Was it selective discipline?

  The whole matter started when a member of staff at Fraggle Rock decided he didn’t like the book. He stated some of the contents were ‘as bad if not worse than the recent Channel 4 Coppers TV programme’ where Nottinghamshire officers frequently described members of the public as ‘snaffs’. There isn’t a single mention of that word in the entire book, and besides, as I kept reminding them, it was classed as fiction. In the discipline paperwork this person found the book ‘personally unacceptable’. He wasn’t the chief constable, he wasn’t even a high ranking police officer, nor was he in the PSD, so who was he to make this judgement on a personal basis? Presumably had he liked it nothing would have happened? This appeared to me to be a bizarre and astonishingly unprofessional way of conducting discipline issues.