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.

Knocking on… Well, a door, of course.

“Eight-six receiving Mike Delta”, my radio murmurs into life quietly. I turn the volume up. Today, I’m running the Misper car, the oh-so-joyous task of looking for missing persons who rarely are missing (and occasionally aren’t even persons*) had taken me into a care home, where the lady who was reporting somebody missing had been utterly aghast by the fact that the CAD operator kept rudely interrupting our conversation. It took me the best part of a cup of tea to explain that the operator wasn’t speaking to me specifically, but instead to all officers.

Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot?

“So basically, you want to have your neighbour’s kid arrested for splashing you with a bit of water?” I ask the man standing in front of me, more to summarise the situation in my head than to get any actual confirmation out of him.

“It wasn’t just a bit of water” the man snaps. “It was a whole glass full!”

I’m looking through my notes. Yes, there it is. A tea-cup worth of water.

The Password

“Mike Delta 592 receiving Mike Delta” my radio encroaches on my rather pleasant chat with Kim in the cafeteria.

Kim is a police constable. She is also married, and I really shouldn’t be talking to her at the moment; she’s going through a tough time with her husband, who used to be a custody skipper on the borough. Due to the Olympics, however, and as it’s causing an additional demand for AFOs (Authorised Firearms Officers), he was lured back to the gun-carrying elite of the Metropolitan Police, and has subsequently been doing a lot of training to get his firearms certificate back in good standing. Kim has been confiding in me about her suspicions of her husband having found someone on the sly, and I’m having to bite my tongue about the indecent fantasies I’ve been having about her for several years now. I’m recently (I say recently… It happened about six months ago) out of a relationship myself, and have been going through a bit of a romantic dry spell. It’s very hard not to offer to take Kim out for a drink or six and see where that takes us, but…

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.

An unusual mission

I open my eyes to a buzzing sound next to my ear. “bastard fly,” I think, and swat at the thin air, hoping that somehow I’ve grown Mr. Miyagi-style fly-catching skills overnight. A likely scenario.

“Godfunking damnation” I groan, and come to several conclusions as I reach the end of that sentence. For one thing, something weird is going on with my vocabulary. I’m not a huge fan of swearing, but when I’m in pain, I wouldn’t usually hesitate to break out the top-shelf expletives. The second realisation is that what I assumed was a buzzing fly was, in fact, my iPhone vibrating. When I tried to swat it into the fourth circle of hell (the one especially reserved for flies that wake you up at night), I instead whacked my bedside table hard enough to send my phone flying to the ground, and my hand to hurt like a – yes – motherfucker.

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.