So I’m minding my own business, keeping myself to myself, as I tend to do on my days off when I get interrupted by the local chavs in the street. It’s dark but it’s not late.
There’s 4 lads & 3 girls, the lads are talking in this bloody stupid affected twat-speak which makes them think they sound like a black dude from Harlem but actually just makes them sound like a complete tosser. They’re so used to listening to pumping vibes on their stolen iPods that their eardrums are blown to hell, I think that must be the case ‘cos they always speak to each other like they’re on different sides of the town rather than standing next to each other.
The fence across the road belongs to Stan & his Mrs. They’re always spending their pension on men in lumberjack shirts to replace it because the local chavs think it’s great fun to kick it down of a Friday/Saturday night on their way through to the estate that progress forgot.
I glance out, as I usually do - hey, I can’t afford spare wing mirrors so prevention is cheaper than cure - and I see the group just approaching Stan’s fence. As I watch them expecting the inevitable boot to rise in the sportiest move they’ve done since they played truant during games lessons, & chav a takes out a crowbar from under his tracky top. He swings it high above his head & proceeds to belt seven bells out of 2 panels.
It must have been the day before going back to work or something as I was probably in a bad mood. Rather than picking up the phone I take it into my head to chuck on a pair of trainers & approach the group, stealth like, to voice some displeasure at their high jinx.
It was dark down the alley & they couldn’t see me approach, so Chav A got something of a surprise when he was grabbed from behind, disarmed of the crowbar & put into a Home Office approved restraining hold before he could shout ‘Oh my dayz’.(seriously, when he realised what I was doing he actually said ‘Oh my dayz’.)
Chav B & C get even more mouthy than before & threaten all sorts of things they’re clearly not capable of but a swift kick in their direction with a few chosen words of warning leave them in no doubt what will happen if they come any closer than that. The girls are threatening to call the old bill which sounds good to me, so I helpfully provide them with the number in case they’re too thick to remember 999.
I drag the bBrain of Britain to the local shops just round the corner. If he’s said the old bill won’t do nuffin’ ‘cos he’s got ADHD once, he’s said it 37 times. Sadly, I have to confess that’s about the only true thing he’s said in the last 10 minutes.
I needn’t bother ringing 999, someone from a nearby house has done it. Except not only didn’t they recognise me even though I’ve lived here for over 12 years, they’ve also told the 999 operator that ’some bloke is attacking a group of teenagers & he’s got an iron bar’. Still it gets the effect desired & the local police are on scene within 5 minutes. Fortunately for me they didn’t wade in without finding out what had gone on.
Mind you, a lift back to the house would have been nice.
As much as I moan about the job & my own force, it seems the grass isn’t always greener.
Every month we see officers quitting the force & transferring out. There will be a variety of reasons, perhaps they want to live in a different part of the country, maybe their partner is having to relocate with their work. Many will be because they are simply disillusioned with the force for a variety of reasons but don’t want to leave the profession totally.
It’s surprising how many get accepted by another force, go to the effort of transferring & often moving house & then end up coming back a few months later because whatever disillusioned them with this force was even worse elsewhere.
It can be difficult to believe that other forces can be any worse that the one you’re in, that they can have technology which makes this force look like a Silicon Valley innovator, but it’s true. There must be some bloody awful police employers out there given the shite that we have in our force to put up with.
I was speaking recently to an old pal who transferred away last year; not just a neighbouring force but one a couple of hundred miles away. She is now back with us. Staffing levels at the other force were even worse than ours. They didn’t have half the technology we have. What got her the most was that there wasn’t enough to do. She was getting 3 or 4 jobs a shift, most of which were domestics & utter tatt.
Our force were quick to accept her back when she phoned in enquiring what the chances were of coming back.
I guess policing is similar everwhere, it’s just the right level of shite you have to be prepared to put up with that changes.
I heard some worrying news this week; PC Andrews is going for an acting sergeant’s position in the control room.
Under normal circumstances I’d say ‘good luck to him’ after all why should someone else’s career path be of any concern of mine? The trouble is, the bloke is a complete tosser. Although he’s not on my shift, we do crossover sometimes & he often relieves me (not in the Biblical sense, you understand!) If he gets the job the chances are that he won’t stay on his own shift & will go to another, that’s a one in four chance he’ll come to mine & be my sergeant.
I’m quite an affable sort of chap & I talk to people on other shifts & I’ve not found a single one who has a good word to say about him. Hi attitude is appalling, his manner is arrogant & condescending. He has 4 years in the job which means he came in the control room when he was just out of his probation. Rumour control has it that he came into the control because the 3 front line shifts he was on wanted him due to being a bloody liability. He’s one of these blokes who thinks he knows it all. He is the prime example the phrase "better to keep your mouth shut & appear stupid, than to open it & removal all doubt", was invented for.
It makes me laugh the way he talks to senior PCs, some of whom were policing before he was born (e.g. me, but especially traffic officers), as if he knows more than they do. If power was ever going to someone’s head, then working in the control room & telling people what to do was his ideal opportunity, he milks it. I mention traffic officers because that department has about the highest proportion of experienced officers still out on the street. Front-line policing is so crap these days that nobody stays longer than a few years. My own example of 28 years is almost unheard of. So it’s fun listening to PC Andrews trying to tell someone on the motorway how to deal with a fatal accident.
Under the old system, it would be reasonably hard for someone like PC Andrews to get promoted. Generally, you had to be a capable officer (unless you were on the High Potential Development Scheme or whatever they call it these days) & you had to pass an exam. These days you have to fill in a few forms saying how good you are, tick some boxes, it helps to be part of a minority group so the force can get its quotas up & you have to show how well you accept ‘diversity’.
I have absolutely no doubt that PC Andrews will achieve promotion sooner or later, not because he deserves it, but because any shift he works with will thoroughly recommend him as the quickest way to get rid of him off their shift.
So I had another rest day cancelled. They can do that to police officers, they can’t do it to civilian (or ’support’) staff, so when they are short, or when there’s a bit of a do coming up & they can’t get the volunteers, they cancel he officers leave. That’s why they have police officers in the control room, because we have no rights unlike the support staff who can refuse to work overtime, rest days & can take industrial action. If they had no officers in there & something happened the wheel would fall off & society would grind to a halt.
They are great at quoting regulations, when it suits. If you want to work two rest days runnign they won’t let you because rules is rules, but if they decide they are too short, can’t get anyone else, they can cancel your 2 rest days (it’s OK, you can have them re-rostered to a day of their choosing since you won’t be able to take it on a day of your own choosing).
They cancelled a weekend for me recently so I had to go in and work a late shift. It doesn’t matter that it was the only weekend off in 9 & I had planned to go to the coast with my family. But rules is rules so they have to give me back a day on a like for like basis, which means I’m entitled to a weekend late shift off in recompense. I’ve emailed the personnel people. They have to re-roster my owed rest weekend within 4 days of me working my days off. They’ve not bothered to reply & haven’t rostered a weekend off for me. They’ve not got many to choose from as I’ll be leaving in under 50, 2/5ths of which I’m off, 1/5th is earlies 1/5th is nights leaving only 10 late shift weekends they can choose from. And I thought I’d I’d left that behind what with having had to put up with it for 28 years or so already. (before all the non control room police officers start bitching about how good we have it in the control room)
The regulations say they have to re-roster within 4 days of the weekend I worked, that was almost a month ago. I’ll probably just have to retire a weekend earlier than expected.
I’ve never fallen asleep on nights in the control room, honestly, I haven’t.
Which is more than can be said for some. It’s not too bad when you’re doubl-crewed because your partner can pick up any jobs or radio traffic that comes in.
It’s not because of any moral duty that I don’t knock out a few ZZZs. It’s more to do with the fact that I have to be in motion in order to enter the land of nod at work.
I can fall asleep at the drop of a hat while sitting in the passenger seat of a fully marked patrol car, but if the car parks up, that’s me instantly awake.
One nick I was at had a guy who drove the area car. On a night shift he’d often drive out of the rear yard & head straight for some woods on the edge of town whereupon he’d park up, switch off the lights & recline the seat. There was me for the next hour studying the local wildlife, counting the stars & trying my best not to look like a dogger.
You can tell the ones who kip on nights. For the inexperienced amongst you, here are some tell-tale signs to look for when the shift comes back at 6 in the morning to hand the keys over.
they don’t actually come back at 6, or 6.15, or 6.30. If they’re not back by 6.45 start checking the likely spots, secluded parks, multi-storeys without CCTV, police station garages.
There is dried dribble down their chin.
There is an imprint on their forehead of the word FORD spelled backwards.
The switchboard is taking reports of a policeman who appears to be sitting on a petrol station forecourt whilst under the influence of death.
The last one happened to a mate of mine. When he fell asleep it was 5.30 in the morning & the petrol station was closed. When he rose from his slumber it had been open twenty minutes & people were filling their cars with petrol all around him.
Our shift all went round someone’s house after one late shift around Christmas. I fell asleep on the sofa. I still have the photograph of me with a world record for the most Christmas decorations someone can balance on a sleeping person’s face in one go.
The ‘management’ must love big operations. It gives a chief inspector or superintendent months off chasing stats so they can write an operational order. This guarantees that once the operation is finished they will be awarded a chief constable’s comendation while the real police work goes largely unnoticed.
I think most operational planning just means getting hold of the last operation & copying it then changing a few words so it looks fresh, new & dynamic.
The operational order is duly produced & packed full of useless information. It can run into a couple of hundred pages & lists in minute detail lots of interesting things like who is on duty & what squad they’re in & roughly where they should be. There’ll be lots of stuff about ‘community impact’ & diversity - there always is.
There won’t be anything in there of any practical use to the control room when someone calls up & asks something remotely practical. Or there may be but it will be buried somewhere in the 200 page manual, but when an officer is after an answer in the next 15 seconds, it’s not much good telling them to stand by while you spend 2 hours reading through in the hope the info you need might be in there.
On major operations, as a controller, you spend the time fielding questions you can’t answer, hoping someone else is listening out there on the airwaves & will jump in to rescue you. I have this feeling everyone I talk to on the radio thinks I’m a numpty & wonders why I don’t know the ins & outs of a cat’s arse on every aspect of anything that might happen during a major music festival or sports event or protest or disaster. I don’t know because nobody ever consults the control room to find out what information we need to be a part of a successfully run operation.
On the last one I did someone thought it would be a good idea to transfer all the people who were stuck on the roads leading to the event & wanted to complain through to the radio operators in the temporary control room we had set up for the event. Instead of telling officers I didn’t know why the sandwiches had run out I had to put them on hold to tell angry motorists I didn’t know whether they’d get in before the event finished. Deep joy.
We took some flak in the local papers for ages after that one. The superintendent & a couple of inspectors still got their commendations, so that was nice.
It’s usually swings & roundabouts in this job; what they give with one hand, they take away with the other.
The penalty for having great hand dryers in the bogs at work in Control Room Towers is the piss-poor urinals (see what I did there?).
For those not acquainted with the finer points of public convenience design, there is a definite art to using them if one is to avoid what we in the trade call ’splashback’.
Splashback is a phenomenon which is almost exclusively a hazard for males & consists of going into the plumbing area with attire which is completely dry but emerging minutes later with tiny splashes down the front of the trouser leg.
What I want to know is which part of the urinal do you aim for in order to minimise the risk of splashback? Do you go for the back wall, do you aim straight for the little hole in the middle of the plug hole which, by the way, appears to be the same circumference as the average stream of ‘product’, Do you aim for a side wall. And as for pressure, do you just let it out under normal gravity-like pressure or do you put some force into it? When I used to play snooker I knew that when you aimed a ball at the cushion it would come off the cushion at the same angle it went in (provided it didn’t have spin), so how come no matter which part of the urinal I hit, with all its various curves & angles, the splashback heads straight for my right thigh. It’s like it’s bloody homing urine.
This only happens at work, most other urinals manage to contain the liquid & funnel it straight down the plug hole. The ones at work must leak about 30% of the content over my bloody trousers!
That’s why going for a piss at work is one of the least pleasurable experiences of my working day.
They’ve joined a growing list of those willing to put up rather than shut up. Fed up with being single-crewed even on late turns, fed up of having time-off refused & annual leave denied, they’ve told the job to stuff it.
Two others have applied for different positions in the force. I suspect the working conditions in the control room had a large part to play in their decision. One of them has been accepted by another department, nothing to do with the control room. It’ll be a refreshing change for her. The other one is a police officer who ants to try something totally different. Possibly he wants to go to a department which treats him like an adult, I don’t know.
I’ve lost count of the amount of people who say that if it wasn’t for the fact that the job is well paid, they’d leave tomorrow. The one thing everyone agress is that there is no fun at work anymore. Fun shouldn’t be a dirty word.
So that’s potentially 3 experienced controllers leaving, definately two. The chances of them being replaced will be slim, judging on the past couple of years. If they are replaced it will be by trainees who have to be taught the job by experienced controllers. This puts more pressure on staff they are sitting with because they don’t perform at the same level which means the controllers have to do even more work.
I can’t imagine how invigorating it must be just to be able to say "I’ve had enough, I’m off."
So there I was driving the patrol car through one of the towns on a night shift. I saw a vehicle on the opposite side of the road coming towards me; a VW Golf. Ahead of the Golf was another car.
The other car had pulled to a halt & was signalling to turn right. It had to give way to me as it was going to cross in front of me, so it was waiting.
The Golf was rapidly approaching the stationary car from behind, as it got up to the car it swerved at the last minute, in a futile effort to avoid crashing into it. The Golf collided with the rear offside of the waiting car then bounced off it, drove round it & continued on it’s way.
I quickly turned round whilst radioing in what I’d seen & asking for another unit to check out the victim’s car. A short pursuit then ensued during which it was obvious that the driver of the Golf was drunk; it wasn’t a very high speed follow & the Golf was swerving all over the place.
The Golf, which just had the driver on board, turned into a cul-de-sac & pulled up. I jumped out of the police car leaving my probationer in my wake, ran up to the car & pulled open the door.
The first thing you notice is the smell of stale alcohol. This confirms what you already know due to the manner of driving. You also note the driver’s apparent inability to runaway.
The next & most surprising thing was that the driver was someone I had grown up with who lived in my street in a town about 20 miles away.
When you join the job one of the initial thoughts & discussions is what would you do if you had to nick a mate? I have bumped into various people from my pre-police days in a number of different situations; for instance I’d seen old mates outside night clubs & enjoyed a bit of banter with them. I’d dealt with an ex-teacher’s burglary, but I’d never needed to nick anyone.
My ex-neighbour was OK about it. I suppose he took the philosophical approach, he’d been bang out of order & been caught. Although I’d known him for the entirety of his 25 years on the planet (I am just a few years older), I had a job to do. He paid the fines & did the disqualification, although I heard rumour he breached it several times, usually when visiting his mother.
I don’t think his mother took the same approach. She’s not spoken to my mother since that event, they’ve lived in the same block for 48 years & this arrest was 15 years ago. I was chatting to my mother the other day & she said did I know that Margaret had been diagnosed with Alzheimers. In a scurrilous moment I said. "She might forget that she doesn’t like you, if you’re lucky."
With sickness being so rife around these parts at the moment I wondered how many people on the shift never went sick.
I’ve not had a day’s sickness in nearly 4 years hence I’ve not been sick since I started in the control room.
I did a straw poll & found there were 3 people who had never had a day’s sick leave. I was surprised it was so many, to be honest. They are all civilian support staff, one has over 10 years’ service, one has 6 and the third has just under 2 years.
I asked them what recognition they’d received for this, not insubstantial dedication to duty.
None. Nada. Nothing. Bugger-all. Not even a word of thanks, neither a letter from a manager or supervisor to add to their portfolio.
Apparently someone had suggested that people who didn’t go sick might be rewarded by maybe a gift token or 1/2 a day’s extra leave or even a certificate, something to recognise the achievement. The official line was that this was not possible because some people complained that it would discriminate against those who were genuinely sick. Incredible.
So it’s 4.15in the morning & I’m reduced to watching the CCTV.
I could be chatting about who’s shagging who, which staff member has gone off with stress or what I did with the family over rest days, but the bosses don’t think it’s important to double-crew radio channels so I’ve got no-one to talk to.
Looking across the control room is like a view into history, a specific point in history just before the sinking of a famous ship, what was its name again? Oh yeah, that’s it, the Marie Celeste; 90% of the radio channels are single-crewed. It’s like the police service took a delivery of really bad deodorant, either that or Health & Safety have decided our individual workspace must be increased by four times. Nobody is near enough for a conversation.
So there’s this guy on CCTV who’s doing a great impression of an ex-human being, flat out on his back beside a bench in the town centre. His girlfriend is cradling him in her arms. He must be drunk because there’s no logs on the box about anyone dying.
Two female paramedics arrive. They stand sufficiently far away from the ‘body’ to be out of reach. Arms folded, they look inquisitively at the body on the ground. I have no idea what they’re saying but they have that look about them of a headmaster who’s just caught Blessington-Smythe minor playing with his bogies during Latin Literature. I suspect this isn’t their first call to a helpless drunk tonight.
Plod arrives & completes a pedestrian circuit of the body. He squats down somewhere near the head & is presumably doing his best biblical impressions but Lazarus isn’t rising. After a minute it’s the copper who goes hands-on & tries to get the body up onto the bench. At least if he rolls off that there will be more laughs in it. It looks like something off a Marx Brothers film. As soon the copper gets one leg on the bench the other falls off. There is so much loss of muscle control that he’s making the rubber man look like a Coldstream Guard. he’s on the bench, no he’s off. he’s back on again, no he’s off.
Nobody wants to do much with a drunk. Everyone knows that as soon as the vehicle door closes it triggers the vomit button & you don’t have many friends when you hand over a vehicle in the morning which stinks of urine, vomit, or worse.
The ambo crew disappear while I’m attending to matters on my radio channel & when I look back the officer is also exiting stage right. The body still looks like the victim of an unsuccessful bungee jump off the Town hall, splattered half on the bench & half in a discarded kebab on the pavement.
He’s still there half an hour later. His girlfriend is leaning against the wall of a charity shop talking into a mobile phone.
I have no idea what happened to him as the CCTV operator got bored & is now watching someone pissing into a traffic cone.
I bumped into a guy I used to know the other day in a town centre I used to frequent.
I’d heard rumours that Paul’s luck had gone on a downward spiral for a number of years. He’d always been a drinker but now was apparently almost on a par with the drunks who sit around the war memorial with their plastic bottles of White Lightning cider.
When I knew him, he’d gone through 2 wives & was well on his way to being binned by the third. I believe alcohol was a contributory factor in all 3 disintegrating marriages.
I say ‘I bumped into him’ but this isn’t strictly true. I actually deftly avoided him on the grounds that I saw him first & managed to change my course through the town centre crowds such that our paths didn’t cross. I felt quite guilty about it.
He looked rough. For a start he looked about 10 years older than I expected he would look like, given that I haven’t seen him for a good 8 years. His once, reasonably fresh features were deep red, the red of an alcoholic with a face & nose full of burst blood vessels. He hadn’t shaved in a while, he looked like that was situation normal. His clothes looked like they’d been wrapped up in a plastic bin liner outside the local branch of the Oxfam Society. I couldn’t imagine anyone being proud enough of him to take him home to mother.
I used to know Paul really well. I felt awful about avoiding him but in the maybe half a second I had to see him, recognise him, take in what I could see, evaluate it, remmeber happier times & decide whether I wanted to stop & speak, he didn’t actually look like someone I wanted to spend time with, any time.
It was a real change from the days when we used to double-crew the area car. Paul had been kicked out of the job for drink-driving quite a few years ago. If he’d stayed on the rails he would have been retiring about now.
The years don’t appear to have been particularly kind to him. I guess we all have choices in life.
I was on one of the main radio channels, the one which covers the motorway. It can be really boring but it can be extremely intense at times.
We had a pursuit start up. A marked unit is following a car, does a check on the number plate which shows it to be one nicked two days before from the adjoining county, and one which has been involved in some of those scummy burglaries I refer to from time to time.
Most pursuits last a few minutes before either the car crashes into another motorist who then sues the police for ‘causing’ it to happen, or it is lost, never to be seen again. Occasionally you get a pursuit which goes on for a good while. These are the ones which end up on some TV programme somewhere with Jamie Theakston spouting forth in serious monotones about this ‘perp on a one way ticket to jail’, or is that Sheriff John Bunning?
Anyway, as the control you are really the conduit of all the communication which goes on, a hub between all the police resources both on the ground & in the air in the case where the helicopter is deployed.
It’s great when the chopper arrives on scene & the pursuit is still going on because pound to a pinch of something unsavoury, once the chopper is above the car ain’t going to lose us.
So the scene was set, down the motorway, one or two traffic cars behind it. There’s me trying to get other units to head them off at the pass, as it were. It goes off the motorway and through the countryside. Then it goes into a different force area, but coppers being coppers don’t want anyone else to have all the fun so we keep the pursuit control until it heads back into our force area, by which time I’ve managed to gather the troops together at a motorway junction and sure enough, bright-spark-scumbag heads back onto the motorway.
Even better for the old excitement stakes is the helicopter has it’s TV downlink on and I’m watching it all on the screens (as is everyone else - normal work does tend to slow down when there’s a good chase going on). It’s like something out of a training manual when the Tactical Pursuit & Containment tactics work like a dream and the bandit car is brought to a safe halt at the side of the motorway. Two scumbags are nicked. They will probably get bail & do a runner, but that doesn’t dampen our spirits for a good result.
It’s a great feeling. I guess, deep down, that’s what the job is all about; nicking bad people. I don’t do that anymore, my circumstances have changed & my role doesn’t involve face-to-face contact with shite any more (well outside the job, anyway). It’s a kind of vicarious excitement these days, a real feeling of ‘go on son’ when you’re playing your little part in the great scheme of things. It’s made all the better when everyone in the control room who is either watching it on the screens, listening to it on the radio, or just reading the updated logs all cheers & claps at the end when the car comes to a halt & you see those little heat sources gathering round two guys prone on the floor.
For those not in the know it’s a sexual practice which can lead to an unexpected & sudden death (unexpected by the person who dies & everyone else who never knew they partook of that particular act).
Apparently, & I stress I have no personal experience of this, cutting off one’s air supply whilst indulging in an act of sexual fulfilment can lead to heightened excitement. What usually happens is the partaker, who is usually alone, engages in the ancient act of "knocking one out" often with the assistance of some visual aids such as those sold in certain gentlemens’ emporiums (or seedy websites, apparently). Having been jump-started by looking at porn they get into their strokes whereupon a noose of some description is placed around the neck. The "wankee" shall we call him, usually raised from the ground by standing on some weight-bearing implement such as a stool or a fallen tree, then proceeds to take their weight round the neck by semi-hanging themselves & thus bringing their efforts to reach sexual nirvana to a climactic explosion of serendipity & a wet carpet.
Unfortunately, many people have, during the heights of ecstasy, fallen off the stool or log & hung themselves.
Now wait a minute! In the words of some ageing rock star or other, ‘I’ll do anything for love but I won’t do that’. The riskiest thing I do for sex is to ask the wife twice in the same quarter. Premature ejaculation I can deal with but premature death?
I’ve dealt with 2 such incidents in my time and heard of several others. Someone has to tell the family, that’s where muggins steps in. You feel almost compelled to guild the lily a bit. I mean, how can you tell the wife & kids what he’s been up to. "Mrs James, it’s about Graham, I’m afraid he may have hung himself." "Oh my god, suicide you say? Thank god for that, I couldn’t live with the shame if he’d fallen off a log in the woods jacking off to photos of the Home Secretary again, I kept telling him about that."
You wonder what goes through the man’s mind just after the moment he realises he’s taken it too far & unconsciousness followed by death washes over him. "I wish I’d taken notice of all the penis extension pill emails, oh the shame."
How many everyday jobs have the potential to stop conversation and make you feel instantly awkward?
I was out this evening with a group of people who didn’t know what I did for a living. Over the years, depending on who was listening depended on what I told people I did for a living. Sometimes I was a copper, sometimes I was a driver, worked on computers or whatever. It’s not because I’m embarrassed by what I do, it’s because sometimes i don’t want to hear the ins & outs of a cat’s arse on someone’s latest speeding ticket, nor do I want to discuss the pros & cons of capital punishment.
You get various reactions when people hear you’re a cop. "You look like a copper" is a good one. "That’s funny because you look just like a quantity surveyor. (or is that merchant banker?)." "Oh, no, and there’s me banging on about speed cameras", was what I had tonight. As if I give a flying f*** about speed cameras when I’m in the pub on my day off. (or, indeed, when I’m at work)
You wouldn’t start a conversation with someone you’ve just met by saying something like, "Oh, you’re a webmaster? I had this webmaster once, a right arsehole, always banging on about how he knew best, took the piss out of all his clients, and overcharged them." But it’s somehow OK to tell me all about some overbearing copper from the Met in the 1990s.
Because you’re meeting a new group of people and you want to get on with everyone you end up listening to reels of rubbish about coppers & coppering when you’re actually trying to forget it for a while. You put up with it because saying you’re not f’ing interested or tell it to someone who cares, doesn’t go down to well in the first throes of a new relationship (friendly rather than romantic, although it would probably be worse in a potentially romantic relationship).
So next time you meet someone & find out they’re a copper, just smile or nod and move the conversation along on to something like the weather or the price of the round you’ve just bought.
I was on YouTube this week doing some ‘research’ when I came across the following video done by the family of a girl who was killed together with a chauffeur by a drink-driver.
It never ceases to amaze me the amount of people who think it’s acceptable to get behind the wheel of a vehicle while smashed. I stopped a car once just outside the High Street. The driver, even to the untrained eye, was either totally pissed or was trained monkey who could work the pedals but couldn’t see over the dashboard. The driver managed to pull the car to a halt after I pulled in front of him. I had to open the door as there were no reactions from the driver. When I did he just about fell out of the seat. He was one of the most drunken drivers I’ve seen in nearly 30 years.
Amazingly, he had driven from just off the top of the High Street - where he & his family had been enjoying a weekend camping at the annual Cub Scout meeting - to the estate at the bottom of the High street where he lived. A distance of no more than 1/2 a mile.
Even more amazingly, his wife, who was completely sober, was in the passenger seat and his two boys, both aged under 10 were in the rear. I didn’t know whether to be more annoyed at the wife for allowing her children in the same car as a completely steamed driver, or to feel sorry for someone who possibly didn’t have the courage or where-with-all to go against the wishes of a man willing to put the lives of his kids at risk.
The sad thing is that no matter how many people who see the following video, the ones likely to take note of the message it sends are the ones who don’t need to be told not to drink & drive.
If you’re a rufty-tufty who doesn’t like showing emotion, make sure you watch the vid on your own - to save embarrassment.
There are those jobs which fall into the "now why did you go & do that" category.
I went to a domestic. Phil was well known at the local nick. He had a list of precons which amounted to petty theft & a little minor violence, of the handbags at dawn variety, usually in the town centre after a few too many Stellas.
I got called to Phil’s house one night by his wife. It was something to do with him spending money on a pizza takeaway on his way home from the pub. The upshot was that he’d pushed his wife over, she’d fallen in the kitchen & cut her arm.
Phil is reasonably affable, most of the time. He suggested that we had better things to do with our time than deal with petty domestics which would be forgotten about in the morning. He’d happily fill out the forms with us so we could be on our way & he could catch Match of the Day.
I explained that he probably went a little too far this time & he’d have to set the video for the footy because he was going to be coming with me. He resigned himself to the free taxi ride down to the cells, with barely a nod & I walked him out to the car.
I had hold of his arm, as I did with all my prisoners. We got out into the street & were discussing the likely time-frame for the forthcoming proceedings when suddenly & without warning Phil punched me in the face. I was a little surprised & after explaining it wasn’t a good idea to do that sort of thing to a friendly policeman because they tend to be less friendly, he was cuffed. We continued the few yards left to the patrol car during which time he was further arrested for assault on police. I said, "What did you do that for, Phil?"
He simply replied, "Well as you nicked me for a poxy domestic I thought I might as well get nicked for something decent."
You can’t help some people. I got £50 compensation when he appeared at court.
Dave was one of those recruits you just know won’t make it through their probation.
He just didn’t look like a policeman. I don’t know what it was about him, he was almost 6 feet tall & had a reasonable stature. He had one of those vacant looks about him. When he smiled you wondered of he was a special needs kid on work experience. He seemed to spend half the time in a state of blissful ignorance, unincumbered by a grasp of what was going on around him.
There were those who said he’d never make a copper as long as he had a hole in his arse. They were right.
You just knew he’d been recruited on a Friday afternoon; the Human Resources folk at recruiting were obviously either drunk at the staff party or totally absent & the cleaner had signed his forms.
On his first week of independant patrol, Dave was walking up to people & asking what they were doing. He’d seen someone fill in a form with a name & address thereon and had thus asked everyone he met what their name & address were. The second person he stopped declined to provide the said details saying "What you gonna do about it then?" Dave knew exactly what he was going to do about it, and told him so, "I’m going to follow you home & see where you live." And he did. Four & a half miles he walked, right up to the multi-storey block of flats. The lad went inside shoving the door closed in Dave’s face. Dave didn’t know the entry code.
On another occasion Dave was sent down to the local pond with instructions to investigate some pretty serious crimes being perpetrated against the wildfowl of the town. Complaints had been received about the local Chinese restaurant whose recent increase in the availability of duck dishes seemed to correlate to a corresponding decline in the number of mallards. Dave’s job was to count the ducks. He walked to the pond, which was some way off his beat, at the start of the shift, counted the ducks & returned near to the end of his shift. For seven nights. Nobody had the heart to tell him it was a wind-up.
Talking, as I was a few days ago, of low-life scum. There can be few lower than those whose own moral-code (if one can accuse them of actually having any morals, which you can’t) allows them to pillage from the most vulnerable people in our society.
These are the complete dregs of society who literally prey on people who have absolutely no means to protect or defend themselves. They are usually travellers, very often Irish, who scour the towns looking for elderly folk to rob. They have to be elderly so they can’t fight back, the older & weaker the better.
Jessie is 96 years old, she lives in sheltered accommodation which means there are people to pop in and take care of her needs but she maintains a degree of independence in her own bungalow. Like many older folk she sometimes has cash in her house, sometimes more than many of us would keep in our wallets or purses. No matter how many times the staff or her family tell her to keep it in a bank, you can bet she’ll maintain her independence by making her own decisions, for whatever reason, for keeping her money close to home.
Billie & Patrick know this. They know where Jessie lives because they’ve been there before. They know where all the old folks homes are gathered together. They used to knock on doors pretending to be from the Water Board. They’d tell Jessie & her ilk that the neighbours have problems with a water leak and they need to come in to check the water. While Billie supervises Jessie turning her taps on and off, Patrick is upstairs pulling the drawers apart, lifting up the mattress and stealing Jessie’s life-savings. It’s so easy. They can do several in an afternoon if they drive from one town to the next.
Sometimes they don’t bother with any pretence, as soon as Jessie opens the door they just barge in, knocking her out of the way, if she falls who cares. They might demand to know where the cash is or they might just go ahead and search until they find it, ignoring the screams, the pleading and the sobs from a helpless 96-year-old.
They call them ‘distraction burglars’ because they distract the householder with some story to gain their trust.
Billie & Patrick have changed their M.O. of late. They’re not saying they’re from the Water Board any more; their current tack is to say they are police officers, they don’t wear uniforms, they don’t look like police officers, they certainly don’t act like police officers but try telling that to a 84-year-old man who is being held down in their chair by the throat by Billie while Patrick is emptying all the drawers.
Absolute scum.
I defy anyone not to be filled with hatred & utter contempt for Billie, Patrick and their like, anyone, that is, who has ever spoken with someone in the very last years of their lives ravaged by this low-life scum.
This post won’t endear me to the PCSO-slagging brigade, so if you’re one of them, look away now.
PCSO Hussain is worth his weight in gold, at least he was this week.
I’m on lates and it’s been a busy week so far. On a good day we have half-a-dozen police units to deploy. If there’s a major incident on the go you might lose two of those for scene guarding or running enquiries/little follow-on jobs. The division has arrest targets. If the targets are down then they’re expected to go out and do arrest enquiries from the list of current wanted people. You could lose two units to arrest enquiries, most of which will be negative. Of the two units left, one might have a pre-arranged interview to conduct while the other might need to do urgent paperwork.
The above has happened more than one day this week. This leaves us with zero units to deal with all the jobs which are still on the box from the early turn, and the day before and the day before and probably the day before that as well. And that’s not to even mention all the new jobs which will come in over the next ten hours. This usually means that most of the jobs go ignored & only the new immediates get assigned. I end up ringing back the same people I rang back yesterday apologising for not being able to send someone round, yet again.
PCSO Hussein helps me out. He spends the next 8 hours going from job to job. Most of them are low level disorder by the youths who are let loose to terrorise the neighbourhoods by parents who don’t give a toss. "Any unit free for kids chucking stones at the old folks flats?" is usually met by a response from PCSO Hussein along the lines of "If you can’t find anyone for that we’ll do it after our current job". He (and his two colleagues) take most of the jobs which come in during the shift. These are jobs which many police patrols don’t like doing because there’s not enough excitement in them, they can’t use their blues & twos, and there is no recordable result. Unfortunately, telling a bunch of semi-drunken, illiterate yobs to fuck off somewhere else doesn’t tick any boxes in the ’sanctioned detections’ stats, unless they can talk the job up to include a Secction 5 Public Order act fixed penalty ticket, which they can’t in most cases.
PCSO Hussein knows most of the yobs, he’s also met their parents over the last couple of years. Some of the kids take the piss out of him, I’m sure, but a lot don’t and at least he gets jobs off the box, which is all the control room supervisors care about. He also takes the time to go and speak with the victim. A lot of police officers don’t bother, they don’t like taking the flak for failing to solve a problem which society has neglected to solve, sometimes they drive off and when asked if they’ve seen the informant or victim they say they’re now miles away and would we mind ringing them to give them the bad news. If we’ve got time I do but only because I’ve been there and I know the feeling. (of the officer). PCSO Hussein visits his informants or victims without being asked.
It’s not until I’m getting to the end of the shift that I realise PCSO Hussein hasn’t had a break all shift. It’s not just the PCs who are running about.
PCSO Hussein won’t get any thanks or recognition for his efforts, certainly off the rest of the shift and probably from anyone who hasn’t seen what he’s been doing for the last 8 hours or more. I’ll send an email to his supervisor though. I appreciate his assistance today, and I might need it again in the near future.
