Good Cop, Bad War

by Neil Woods

  But before I could launch into my tirade, the DS broke into a broad smile. ‘Don’t worry. We know the concerns regarding the Greater Manchester Constabulary – we’re a special unit. In fact we were formed precisely because of those concerns.’

  It turned out that he was the head of a team of twelve hand-picked detectives, specifically charged with dismantling the Arran Coghlan empire. This was their only mission, and they reported directly to the Greater Manchester chief constable – and only to him. The bosses in Manchester knew their department was so riddled with spies that this team had to operate entirely in secret, totally cut off from the rest of the force.

  ‘So wait – there’s twelve of you, yeah? So, you’re basically the Untouchables.’

  ‘Yeah.’ The DS laughed loudly. ‘But our guvnor says we’re not allowed to call ourselves that.’

  Now we both laughed. It was classic prohibition policing: form a special squad, but instead of sorting out the corruption that actually made it necessary, spend your energy monitoring what they call themselves.

  I hung out with not-the Untouchables all afternoon, watching them work and getting their perspective on the war we were all fighting. I found the very idea that this squad was necessary – that out of the 11,000 or so police under the Manchester chief constable’s command, he could only find 12 he could trust – completely insane. Once again, though, that fatalistic phrase kept cropping up, ‘Look, with this much money in the game, how can corruption not happen?’

  For them this was simply a bleak statement of the obvious. For me, it cut much deeper. On top of all my other doubts about the War on Drugs, we were now being asked to accept the inevitable corruption of the police force itself. Of course there have always been a few bent coppers, but it is only drugs that generate the kind of money that makes other cops just shrug and accept it as inevitable.

  I had dedicated my life to the police. Despite everything, I still absolutely believed in the essential necessity of our mission as cops. The one thing I could not stand was the thought that the police themselves were becoming warped and tainted by the war they were being forced to fight. I drove home that evening in a fury, more convinced than ever that the War on Drugs must end, and that protecting the integrity of the police itself meant that I must do my part to bring this about.

  But it was getting harder just to maintain my own work, let alone fight a crusade for policy reform in my spare time.

  Each day the exhaustion made it harder to maintain my focus. I would sit at my desk, staring at the patterns in the styrofoam ceiling, while the telephones and office chatter faded to a dull hum, miles away. I fell so behind on my paperwork that I began having to bring files home, catching up in the witching hours after I’d woken from some awful nightmare and couldn’t go back to sleep.

  And now the situation with Sam reached a crisis point.

  The real collapse began one morning after we had dropped the kids off at school. The second they were out of the car the shouting began. I tried to stay calm and maintain focus on the road – but there was always that voice in my ear – louder, louder, louder. It felt like it was never going to stop. Something inside me snapped. I couldn’t take it anymore.

  I slammed on the emergency brake, sending the car screeching to a halt in the middle of Buxton market. Then I pounded my fists onto the horn and just held them there, the blaring of the horn giving some momentary relief from that voice.

  I slowly turned my head to look at Sam, my eyes actually beginning to fill with tears. Was I actually losing it? Actually going mad?

  Slowly the world swam back into focus. I could hear the shouts and beeping of the drivers stuck behind us. Summoning every atom of self-control that I’d developed over years of undercover work, I restarted the car and drove off.

  That moment stuck with me. I would slump exhausted over my desk at work, going over and over it in my mind. It felt like Sam was purposefully pushing me towards the edge. Surely she couldn’t be doing it on purpose? It sounded ludicrous to my rationalist, police-trained mind. It must be me. I must be losing it. It’s a terrible feeling to imagine you are losing your grip on reality.

  I was lucky that my uniformed inspector at the time was understanding. A few years previously he had needed to take six months off himself due to stress. He frequently let me know that his door was open if I needed to talk. Looking back, I wish I had taken him up on the offer.

  Not that it would have made much difference when the break finally came.

  The situation couldn’t last. I had been pushed beyond my breaking point, and needed to escape from the shell of my marriage. I had originally stayed to protect my children, but now I realised they were old enough to make their own decisions, and maintaining the façade of this relationship was doing them more harm than good.

  Sam must have realised it too. I was about to head off on a two-week Detective Sergeant’s course, and we decided we would drop the kids with my parents, and she would use the time to find a new place. Tanith and Gareth were to stay with me.

  An indescribable weight had been lifted. I went off to that DS course feeling reborn. I couldn’t remember a high like this since I had heard the handcuffs click on Danny Anderson at the end of my first undercover job.

  But I shouldn’t have fooled myself. It was never going to be that easy.

  The day I got back from the course I went straight in to work. That evening I signed out a CID car in order to drive through to Matlock Station, where my own car was parked. On the way down I thought I’d pop into the house for a quick shower and change of clothes.

  Of course she hadn’t moved out. The shouting started the second I opened the door. It was as if our previous conversation had never even happened.

  At that moment, something inside me broke. Every memory of blades and guns, squalor and savagery from my years on the streets came exploding through my brain at once. I couldn’t breathe. I gasped frantically but no air seemed to come. My chest felt like it was being pounded by a sledgehammer. For a moment I thought I might actually be having a heart attack.

  I sank to my knees, the tears streaming down my face. I didn’t know what to do. My mind was white noise. The only thought I had was that I had to get away. Still blinded by the tears, the only vision in my mind was Kyle from Stoke holding his samurai sword to my throat, I crawled on my hands and knees under the kitchen table. I curled up in a ball and sobbed.

  That’s where I woke up the next day. I groggily opened my eyes, only to realise someone was banging on the front door. I staggered up and opened it, only to see my own DI standing there on my doorstep. His eyes widened when he saw the expression on my face.

  ‘Neil… Woodsy… what the hell is going on?’

  I couldn’t even answer.

  Of course the CID team at Matlock had come in that morning and wondered where their car was. It was my name on the sign-out sheet.

  The DI didn’t press me. He put his hand on my shoulder and gently asked, ‘Neil, do you need to go sick for a bit?’

  The words wouldn’t come. All I could do was nod in abject relief. That afternoon I pulled myself together, ran the CID car back to Matlock and phoned into the station from the car park to tell them I was taking leave.

  Of course Sam did eventually move out. There had never really been a question.

  Between the time off from work, and the time off from the relationship, I began stitching myself back together as a human being.

  For the first time in my life I went to see a counsellor. Within two sessions of describing the nightmares, panic attacks and trouble focusing, she had diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder.

  At first I had a hard time accepting the idea. To me, PTSD was for guys coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq, not Leicester and Brighton. I also pointed out that I had mainly felt very calm and rational during most of these actual encounters.

  ‘Neil, I’ve treated many patients with PTSD – both military and non-military. You have a severe case. You need t
o take this seriously. It’s not necessarily the fear you feel at the time that causes this type of harm; it’s the fear you don’t even know you’re feeling – the fear that gets repressed till years later.’

  My counsellor also talked through the history of my relationship with Sam, forcing me to undertake a process of completely re-evaluating everything I thought I understood about marriage and what love and partnership really mean.

  There is no figure in society more abject than the junkie, no character more degraded than the addict who will crawl on their belly and endure any humiliation in order to get their fix. Somehow, I was able to relate. Or, to put it another way, you know your home life has become unmanageable when your coping mechanism is going out every day and pretending to be a homeless crackhead.

  Gradually things began to piece themselves together. The Police Federation got me two weeks’ rehabilitation at Flint House, a law-enforcement convalescent centre in Hertfordshire. The staff there were amazing, and helped me finally kick booze. I began exchanging emails with my DI, arranging my return to work.

  But the return never came.

  Sam and I were never going to have a clean, easy break. Between the kids and the fraught emotional complexities of our relationship, it took months of toing and froing, picking up and dropping off, arguments and lawyers’ letters. Then, one day in late April, when Gareth and Tanith were both away, she called and brusquely told me she was coming to pick up her table.

  I knew immediately what she was talking about. Sam had brought the beaten up old coffee table with her when we first moved in together. To be honest, the thing had always slightly annoyed me. It was too small to actually use, but big enough to make any room feel slightly awkward, and the chunky edges had a sharpness that stung like a whip when you inevitably stubbed your toe. The wood was chipped and ugly, and I was more than happy to see it go.

  It was only as I was carrying it out to Sam’s car that I realised that this was it – this was the last of her possessions gone – the final physical trace of how her life had imposed itself on mine. The kids were old enough to come and go between our separate places, but now she would have no reason to come inside – there would be no ghostly feeling of her still weighing down on me in my own living room.

  Walking back into the house, I was immediately swept with an almost uncontrollable rush of exhilaration and joy. But there was also another emotion, something unrecognisable, an uncanny sensation that I couldn’t place or name even as it flooded through my veins. I spent hours just padding from room to room in a sort of daze, trying to put the right word to this exotic new feeling.

  It took hours before it came to me. I was walking down the stairs from my bedroom to the kitchen, when I stopped dead in my tracks. Safe. That was what I felt. For the first time in years I felt safe in my own home. It had been so long that I couldn’t even recognise the sensation. I sank down to sit on the stairs and leaned against the bannister, letting the sense of release and weightlessness wash over me.

  I stayed like that for what felt like hours, my head leaning on the bannister and my mind spinning as I felt years of fear and trauma beginning to wash away. When I came back to myself, I could see through the hall windows that it was now evening, and the entire house seemed bathed in the whisky-gold of a late-spring sunset. Almost on autopilot, I stood up and walked out the door to my car.

  I had no idea where I was going. It just felt right to be on the road, driving with no set destination. For the first time in as long as I could remember the future seemed wide open, I could go anywhere and anything was possible.

  I soon found myself deep in the Peak District, and pulled over at the top of a high ridge that was one of my favourite spots from my days running the Fells. Leaving the car behind, I walked off and sat down at the cliff edge, my feet dangling into thin air. The entire valley seemed limitless and glowing in the sunset. Two hawks wheeled around, lazily riding the warm currents of air as they circled the hills.

  Looking out at this glorious scene I began to think about the future, about how I would return to my job as Detective Sergeant and rededicate myself more deeply than ever to the cause of reforming drug policy.

  The question never exploded into my mind in some sort of momentous flash of inspiration. It was as if it had always been there, but only now could I actually hear it.

  Why did I need to return to the police to pursue this reform? Could I not better serve this cause without the force’s rigid institutional boundaries? I had put in my years with the police, I had more experience in this field than almost every other officer I knew – maybe it was now time to deploy that experience elsewhere?

  I think at any other moment this thought would have been too shocking for me to even contemplate – being a cop was such a fundamental part of my identity. But, somehow after what felt like the final goodbye with Sam that day, everything felt boundless and infinite. Anything was within reach. Why not think about a life beyond the police?

  For real cops, the police force isn’t just a job or an institution – it’s a way of looking at the world. Being a cop was in my blood, that training had formed my mind and taught me how to think. I knew that after all I had given to the force, and all the force had given me, I would carry that identity until the day I died. But somehow, I also knew that this wasn’t where my immediate future lay. My priority – my new mission – was to work to end the War on Drugs. This was my purpose, my meaning. This was the legacy I wanted to leave to my own children, and all those who had suffered in this stupid, pointless, self-defeating struggle. To pursue this mission fully, I needed total freedom to operate. I needed to get political.

  I took a deep breath, and went back to looking out over the valley, watching the hawks as they floated, wheeled and dove. Then I walked back to the car, almost unsteady with the weightless thrill of my realization – but completely, finally, at peace.

  The next day I tendered my resignation. That was that, I was no longer a cop.

  CHAPTER 16

  A THOUSAND WASTED YEARS

  OVER THE COURSE of my career, my drugs investigations put people in prison for a total of well over a thousand years.

  For me, every single one of these is a year wasted. These are a thousand wasted years of human potential; a thousand wasted years of possible creativity, learning and exploration; a thousand wasted years of people languishing in tiny cells rather than contributing to the world.

  Don’t get me wrong – I haven’t gone soft. A lot of these people deserved to be punished and definitely needed to be taken off the streets. People like Kyle in Stoke, Stitz in Nottingham and the Burger Bar Boys in Northampton had all committed vile, horrific crimes, and I take pride in having held them to account.

  But it didn’t need to be this way. There is a common thread to all these stories. There is an underlying condition that made their criminality not just possible, but virtually inevitable: the fact that there is a global illegal narcotics market worth £375 billion every year.

  These were a thousand wasted years because people were born into a situation where selling drugs was the logical choice. It was the law that created this market. It was the law that ensured the addicts these people sold to were trapped, unable to seek help because they were now ‘criminals’.

  There is a mythology common in police circles that some people are just ‘bad’ – that if drugs were legalised they would simply find other forms of criminality. This line gets predictably trotted out whenever the current prohibition is challenged. It’s drivel.

  Most cops who toe this line only have experience of prosecuting criminals – I’ve lived among them. I spent fourteen years undercover, living with dealers, thieves, addicts and gangsters. I know their motivations. I can tell you categorically – the idea that most people commit crimes because they are somehow inherently ‘bad’ is mendacious, propagandistic bullshit.

  There are extremely few genuine psychopaths in the world. The criminals I encountered in the drugs trade were busin
ess-people. They had made the decision that their best option for getting ahead in life was to sell crack and heroin to a captive market. Some of them were capable of disgusting, almost sociopathic violence, but they became that way through exposure to the drugs trade.

  This isn’t theory – I’ve watched it happen. The clearest example was JB’s crew in Leicester. Those kids were eighteen years old. Over the months I was deployed there, I saw with my own eyes the process by which they were transformed from schoolkids into hardened gangsters. I could see each fork in the road in front of them, as day by day they were forced to learn that their only option was to become ever more violent and brutal.

  To simply label some people as evil is a lazy moral choice. It’s also a lie – and an evasion of responsibility. I will no longer even use the word ‘junkie’. It’s a word that stigmatises and condemns, when what is needed is greater effort to understand.

  The fact is, we set up the conditions whereby these characters can make and carry through their decision to sell drugs. We declared some of the most vulnerable people in society criminals – turning them into hostages to their own dealers. We set the arms race of the War on Drugs in motion.

  But, we can fix it. We can change course. We have the power to rationally analyse the evidence, and choose a course that will spare future generations the awful harm that prohibition does.

  This change of course is the purpose to which I am now dedicating my life.

  I left the police with a strange feeling of brokenness and liberation. For so long I had defined myself through this work. Being a cop wasn’t just what I did – it’s what I was. Now I had to discover a new role.

  At first my only concern was to take care of the kids, and make sure to provide them with some stability through my divorce from Sam and change of career.

  But after several months of intense reflection, I began to realise that, though I may no longer be a police officer, I still had a specialist knowledge of this field, shared by only a handful of people in the world. I could still put this to good use. The madness of the War on Drugs still had to end – and I could still play a part. In fact, I realised, not having to work within the confines of trying to advance my police career may even free me to operate more effectively.