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.

Babies Don’t Bounce

Dawn on a Tuesday morning, and I’m sitting in the briefing room, contemplating why I am doing this job again. Don’t get me wrong, I love it, but the first early start after four days off really gets to me. Every. Single. Time. The muted half-conversation and the stingless banter around the room indicates that, like every other first shift after a short break, I’m not the only one contemplating a change of career, or a quick nap in changing rooms before heading out.

“(…) is Mike Delta 592 and Mike Delta 5112″, I hear.

I engage the one spider-sense you (eventually) develop as a police officer: The ability to rewind a conversation in your head. It’s one of those weird things; You start reacting to your shoulder number almost instinctively, and even if you weren’t really paying attention, you’ll somehow be able to recall the whole conversation without even really trying. The beginning of the skipper’s statement had been “Today, two-six (…)”.

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.

Sudden Death

“Elementary, my dear Watson”, I said, jokingly. “Clearly, nobody killed the poor sod, so whatever he died of, it’s probably nothing criminal. Best had get him ready for the coroner though, eh?”

January is a dreadful time to be on foot patrol, but due almost exclusively to my own daft stupidity, my Ticket had expired. The ticket is my police driving licence – you need your own driving licence as well, of course, but in order to be allowed to drive any patrol car, you have to special driving licence. To get your licence, you do a course, a theoretical exam, and a practical exam.

Police driving licences come in different levels, starting at ‘level 4′, which is the boring ticket that allows you to drive from somewhere to somewhere else, but not on blues and twos. You can do a ‘compliant stop’ – which means that you can drive behind somebody and turn your blue lights on to pull them over, but if they drive off, you have to call off the pursuit. It happened to me only once when I was on the basic ticket, and I felt pretty daft having to let the guy drive off. Of course, with London being London, we had a helicopter in the air; they followed him to a petrol station, where I was able to go and arrest them. Turns out they had a sizeable amount of drugs in the car. “Sorry, I didn’t see you officer.” Nice touch. Anyway, there are dozens of different courses you can take. Personally, I have my solo ticket (that’s for riding police motorbikes), and my advanced driving course. That one is rather interesting, and includes all sorts of high-speed pursuit stuff. It’s a shame, then, that our end of the borough has 40 mph limits – or less – everywhere, so you never get to open the cars up properly.

The mysterious case of the Belgian Bike Burglar

As the bike shop owner was reading out the description, we were going through a red light, sirens blaring. Kim suddenly made a squeaking sound, and pointed at the intersection we had just gone through. I slammed on the brakes, and looked. True enough, there he was. Bright red T-shirt with a white logo on the front, and a bike that was gleaming in the bright midday August sun.

Due to the riots, our shift patterns have been completely out of whack. Usually, we work six days on, four days off, but that was suspended as soon as mask-clad hoodlums started roaming the streets. Things got extra-tense for a while, when a rumour was spreading that the army was mobilising to help ‘sort out the mess’, but I have to admit I was a little bit doubtful about the veracity of that particular rumour – I’ve never done any military service (believe it or not, I’m quite a fervent pacifist and a bit of a leftie to boot), but I think the military is a strange choice, when we have a small army of police with guns who they’ve kept hidden in our police stations whilst the riots were kicking off as worst. It was weird – walking into the café at our police station station, you’d have thought you’d have walked into a war; except the war was raging outside, and the only people with weapons that are actually scary were sitting in the café, playing cards, reading books, and looking utterly bored. Meanwhile. people with sticks and shields were trying to calm people with stones and petrol bombs.

Just another Friday

“You know what we’re going to have to do, don’t you?”, Kim said to me, as she shoved her notebook back into her stab-vest. I nodded, curtly. It looked like the rest of the shift was going to be a race against the wits of a 14-year-old.

It was one of those freak, unbearably hot summers you’d desperately long for when the sloppy, rubbish London winter is doing its damnedest to work its way into your boots, but that realistically, you hate just as much as a winter day when it comes. In fact, there aren’t many types of weather during which it’s nice to be a Metropolitan Police officer – save the odd few days in spring and autumn, perhaps.

Fridays are notorious for all sorts of reasons. Statistically, traffic accidents are more likely to happen on Friday afternoons. Friday evenings following a hot summer day are silly season. People drink way too much, they are dehydrated after a long warm day, and I swear the summer heat brings out the hormones in our ‘customers’ in full force. In my line of work, there’s no such thing as a ‘slow’ Friday, but tonight, all the planets would be in alignment for a perfect storm.

A Response

This is not a regular blog-post, it is the response to a comment on this blog. I don’t intend to do this very often, so please bear with me; normally scheduled programming will continue next week!

Recently, somebody misguidedly left a comment on my “Kind Words” page, with something that was anything but kind words. I deleted the comment, not because of any conspiracy, but because it was posted to the wrong place.

However, because it was such a deep, heartfelt, well-reasoned and insightful comment, I wanted to reproduce it here, front and centre, for everybody to see, because it eloquently explains a rarely-discussed challenge police constables face…

Comment by mr. Ian M

Stopping and Searching

“We’ve had a report of a group of six youths fighting with knives in Guy Street Park, descriptions to follow.”, the familiar voice of the CAD operator crackles on the radio. “We have one IC3 male, around five foot five, wearing a black hoodie and a red baseball cap”. The CAD operator is relaying from the 999 call in progress. “We also have an IC3 male, skinny, around six feet tall, wearing a dark track-suit with a large NIKE logo, and an IC1 male wearing jeans and a red sweater. Several knives have been seen. More descriptions to follow.”

“Show Bravo Alpha one-zero-one”, the skipper transmits on his radio, signifying that we intend to respond to the call. “We’re a Blunt serial, one plus two plus six”. He has just told the CAD desk that we’re the unit tasked to combat knife crime on the borough tonight, and that there’s seven of us; an inspector, two sergeants, and four PCs.

Ambushed in the Riots

There was glass everywhere. I could feel it sticking into my shoulders where it had gotten caught under my Met-Vest. It was gnawing into my sides. My eye felt… Odd… but there wasn’t time to find out whether I’d been hit by a shard of glass there as well.

The briefing for the late shift was nothing out of the ordinary, much in the same way that strolling to work and finding Elvis in a tap-dancing competition with Chairman Mao, accompanied by the cast of Glee playing “Do you really want to hurt me” on assorted items of kitchen equipment while wearing nothing but tu-tus and sunglasses, is nothing out of the ordinary.

Only a few days before, in Tottenham, police officers had shot a suspected gang leader in a minicab, and the afternoon briefing was chocker-block with chatter. The Metropolitan Police intel branch was red-hot with tips received via telephone, found on internet forums and social networking sites, and the vast amount of information received from Members of the Public (MoPs) being filed by Met officers on the streets and in front offices all over London.