A Sense of Perspective

“Okay, slow down — Is anybody hurt?” I ask the man who is standing in the kitchen, holding an enormous meat cleaver.

“No! Nobody!” he replies, wild-eyed.

“Right, well, can you put the knife down please?”

He looks at me, eyeing me up from top to toe. I’m worried I may have to react quickly, but I can tell he is more afraid than angry. I put both my hands up in front of me, showing him my empty palms. Pete mirrors my movement next to me, but he also takes a small step back, just to ensure he stays outside the man’s reach.

Vice City Love

“When was the last time this happened to ya,” John says, reaching for the handle underneath the passenger seat. He stops mid-sentence, before finally finding the right handle, leaning the seat further back by a few notches.

“Hmmh?” I ask.

I briefly turn on the ignition so I can roll the window down a little, before turning it back off.

“I’m on front office duty, right, and this broad comes in. Says her mobile has been nicked.”

“Ah?”

Fear and Loathing

Despite everything you hear about he job as a police officer, I’ve got to say, I don’t do ‘scared’ very often. Overall, on my day-to-day shifts as a response officer, my shifts tend to be extremely varied, and even occasionally dangerous. I get the odd adrenaline dump here and there, but scared? Not really.

An Eviction

Pete and I were standing outside a block of towards the north end of the borough. Our destination was on the eleventh floor, but sod’s law struck gold, and of course the lifts were out of order. We started the long climb.

I started whistling a song, but noticed that Pete didn’t join in – quite unusual, for him.

“What’s wrong, mate, you’re awfully quiet today.” I asked.

“I had a dog of a shift yesterday.” he said.

“That bad, huh?”

“Yeah, I couldn’t sleep, to be honest. I’m knackered.”

“Bloody hell. What happened?”

“Mate, it was grim.”

“Go on…”

Going the way of the Dojo

In the parking lot behind a local Sainsbury’s I’m sat with my feet on the dashboard, in the passenger seat of a Panda, waiting for Jay to come back with our lunch. I don’t really have any reason for having stayed in the car, other than complete, abject laziness. I suppose I was fiddling with the MDT when we pulled up, but really, that could have waited. Besides, I quite like to have someone else buy my lunch for me. Jay, especially – he’s had a vegan girlfriend for a while, a relationship that fell apart a couple of weeks ago, and he’s been trying to take revenge by eating as many cows as possible. If you ask me, it’s not the greatest way of getting back at an ex, but as long as it makes him happy, who cares.

“Mike Delta two-four receiving Mike Delta” the radio buzzes. I look down lazily, before reaching for the in-car hand-set. It’s one of those ancient, enormous squeezy-button-microphone ones you see in American cop shows a lot. We never use it – we’ve got small microphones and fancy push-to-talk buttons, but I guess I was in a retro mood.

The Arrest Enquiry

“Delito”, the skipper snaps, peering over his stack of loosely-arranged papers. I look up. “What are you, six years old?”

“What? I… I didn’t even do anything”, I try, but the sergeant’s eyes confirm my suspicion that my half-hearted lie was never going to be believed in a hundred years. I hang my head, mumbling a “Sorry, sarge”, accompanied by the cacophony of laughter from the rest of my team. We had been doing a series of practical pranks on each other all week, and I managed to be the first person to get caught out, mid-prank.

The next few minutes are spent fiddling with my handcuff keys, as I’m releasing the handcuff that is linking Pete’s arm to the radiator – just in time; the Inspector walks into the briefing room, and we all leap to our feet, whilst Pete is hiding the fact that he still has a cuff attached to his arm by placing one hand behind his back.

A shot to the heart…

It’s about half-way through my shift, and it has been completely and utterly dead all morning. Sometimes, dead is good, and I’m sure quite a few of my colleagues would disagree with me when I say this, but I much prefer busy. Officially, the shifts are about 9 hours long, with one hour over-lap. Sometimes, that means you are dismissed earlier, because the next shift has managed to get their act together quickly; other times, you’re working for fourteen hours straight because you somehow end up with an arrest minutes before the shift is meant to end.

The last line of defence

I was leaned against the wall outside a maternity clothing store, casually minding my own business. I had been there for about an hour and a half, and with my luck, I’d be there at least another hour. Maybe two.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll probably have been deceived into thinking it’s all ‘go, go, go’, with plain-clothes operations, riots, spies, and traffic-assisted drama. Some shifts are certainly all of these things, and I’ve had 12-hour shifts where I’ve dealt with upwards of a dozen different calls. Those are the shifts that fly by, for sure, but if I am to be painfully honest it can be weeks or sometimes even months between shifts that are worthy of a blog post.

There’s a first time for everything

“Never assume anything” Syd echoed my sentiment from seconds before, and looked out of the window.

Syd is a member of the Metropolitan Police Special Constabulary, or a ‘special’ as they tend to be called. They are the voluntary police force, that many people seem to confuse with Police Community Support Officers (PCSO’s). The main difference between them is that specials don’t get paid. Also, unlike PCSO’s, they have the same powers as myself, and have been sworn in, warranted by the queen to do arrests, talk sternly to inebriated teenagers, wag your finger at people failing to wear seat belts, heroically rescuing kittens out of trees, and so on and so forth.

The iPad Thief

“What the fuuuuuuuuu…”, Simon wails, as his torch is spinning away into the darkness, creating a rapidly changing, ghoulish shadow-play on the walls, as the light from his torch is blocked by all sorts of rubbish on the floor.

“Aaaaaaaaaah”, he shouts. In the light of my own torch, I can see him grabbing his already injured arm, and I see his assailant as well; the Turk Tracy had warned us about.

I reach up to my radio and press the orange button next to my antenna.