Confessions of a Police Constable (16 page)

‘So what have you done so far? Any arrests?'

‘On the first few shifts I was out with other specials,' he said. ‘It was interesting, but to be honest, I didn't really get to do anything because the more experienced officers were quicker out of the van every time. I've done a few stops and searches, I suppose, and a ticket for someone who ran a red light. No arrests yet, though.'

‘Well, do you know your caution?'

‘Yes!' he said, and started reciting it.

‘All right, all right, I believe you. So, if you were to arrest me for spray-painting over there …' – I nodded towards a wall that had been graffitied so heavily it was hard to tell what its original colour might have been – ‘What would you say and do?'

Syd spent the next few minutes reciting his way through the arrest process, without making too many mistakes. Most importantly, he didn't miss out any of the steps.

‘Right-oh,' I said, when he finally fell silent. ‘Better practise the caution some more, eh? There was only one thing I would have done differently: make sure you don't give him the chance to turn his spray-can on you – get him up against the wall, and straight into handcuffs. It's not much of a weapon, but it would be extremely unpleasant to get a blast of paint in your eyes, and ordering new uniform items because they're covered in paint would also be a pain in the backside. Anyway, we'll see if we can't find you a body today. Keep an ear on your radio and put us up for any jobs you like the sound of. A shoplifter is a nice easy first arrest, so if that comes up, we'll go and deal with it.'

‘Seriously? Thanks, dude,' he said.

‘Call me dude again, and you'll be walking for the rest of the shift,' I said sternly.

Syd looked over at me and started on an apology.

‘
Dude
, lighten up,' I said, with a grin. ‘If you can't take a bit of banter, you're not going to last long in this job.'

Changing the subject, I asked him why he'd become a Special.

‘I wanted to become a regular,' he said. ‘But when I tried to apply, the recruitment office told me they had a full freeze on all recruitment. They said if I wanted to become an officer, the best thing to do would be to become a PCSO or a special. So here I am …'

‘Good idea. Being “old bill” doesn't suit everybody. It's good to get a feeling for things, I think.'

‘It's a bit cheeky, too, though, huh?' he said.

‘How do you mean?'

‘Well, being a special is a voluntary thing. We get, like, a tenner per shift towards our food and travel expenses, but that's it. So basically, we're paying for our own training, aren't we?'

I thought about that for a moment.

‘I suppose so,' I said, ‘although for a lot of other jobs, you do a degree, and you have to pay for that too, don't you?'

‘Yeah, but in my day job, I work for a bank. We had three months of training, and there's no way I'd have paid for that.'

‘Hmm. Yes, I guess that
is
a little cheeky. I did get paid during my training,' I said, ‘but that was in the good old days, before the recession. Everything was better.'

‘Hey, did you see that?' Syd said.

‘See what?'

‘That red Corsa. The passenger was holding a baby in her arms.'

‘Shall we pull them over?' I asked.

‘Sure.'

‘Wanna do the talking?'

‘Sure.'

‘All right then,' I said, and switched on the car's blues, before doing a three-point turn and pointing the car the right way.

The Corsa was ambling along a thinly trafficked road, and the four cars between us quickly pulled over to let our Panda pass. When there was only one car between us remaining, I turned off the flashing disco lighting on the roof.

‘Run them,' I said.

Syd started fiddling with the in-car computer, not really seeming to know what he was doing. We weren't in much of a rush, though, so I decided to leave him to it. Eventually he got to the right page and typed in the number plate.

‘I didn't get the last group of letters,' he said, after a few seconds' hesitation.

‘Echo Romeo Echo,' I replied.

‘Thanks.'

The car came back as being insured to a Mr Paulsen, without any other markers on it: not stolen, not suspicious, not used in crime, etc.

‘Check him as well,' I said.

Syd copied the driver's details over to the person-check screen, and ran them through the computer as well.

‘There's a match,' he said, and hesitated for a moment, ‘but I'm not really sure what all of this means.'

I looked at the screen.

‘He has been arrested before, and has a marker on him; he is a known drugs user. However, he is not flashing up violence or weapons, which means he hasn't attacked anyone and is not known for carrying weapons. These are all things you need to take into consideration. If he had flashed firearms, for example, we'd have to call in Trojan assistance to pull the car over.'

Syd nodded.

‘So how would you assess the risk on this one?' I asked him.

‘Well, his car is insured and has a valid MOT, and his arrest was about seven years ago. I'm guessing he's a low risk,' Syd said.

‘A low risk? Are you sure?'

Syd fell quiet, realising that there had to be another correct answer of some sort.

‘Ah. No!' he said, remembering his OST
⁴³
training, ‘He's an
unknown
risk.'

‘That's better. For all we know, he's on drugs, or he hates cops, or he may have kidnapped the woman and child. Remember what you were taught in Officer Safety: people are either a high or an unknown risk.'

‘Yeah, I should have remembered that. Sorry.'

‘Don't beat yourself up about it, and don't apologise! Right, let's wait for a bus stop, and then try to pull them over, so we have a bit of space to work,' I said.

‘What about that petrol station over there?'

‘Not a bad shout, but it's actually surprisingly hard to get someone to pull over into a petrol station. When I flick my blues on, people usually think we just want to pass,' I explained.

I spotted a bus stop ahead of us and flicked on my blues. The car in front pulled over to the side nearly immediately, and we zipped past. The Corsa took a couple of seconds to notice us, so I briefly turned the sirens on. When I did, they pulled over to the side, and I followed them across. They came to a complete stop, and the driver bounded out of the car, clearly agitated.

‘Why are you always picking on me?' he shouted before we had even fully made it out of the car.

Oh dear. I opened my mouth to try to handle the situation, but Syd jumped in.

‘Sir, I'm going to need you to calm down,' Syd said.

‘Calm down?' he said, facing Syd. ‘What the hell are you talking about? This is the third time I've been pulled over this week.'

‘What were you pulled over for the previous times?' Syd asked.

A smart move – the man wouldn't have to answer him, of course, but if it turned out he had been stopped for seatbelt-related offences recently, it would change things slightly, and I would have been less inclined to let him off with a warning.

‘Drink-driving,' the man said.

‘And were you?' Syd replied.

‘Of course not! I'm a recovering fucking alcoholic, aren't I? I don't drink or do …' He paused briefly, and it seemed like he changed his mind about the sentence that was about to roll out of his mouth, ‘anything else any more!'

‘I'm sorry about the misunderstanding in those cases, then, sir,' Syd said. ‘My dad was an alcoholic, and it was very hard for all of us. I'm glad you're on the wagon. How long have you been dry?'

Syd's questions took the man completely by surprise, and his transformation was astonishing. He had dropped his arms down alongside his body. He was speaking slower. He wasn't shouting any more, and he no longer looked like he might take a swing at us.

‘Er … just over a year,' he said, after looking Syd up and down. ‘A year and two months, to be precise.'

‘That's amazing. Keep it up,' Syd said. ‘However, that wasn't why we stopped you.'

‘Oh?'

‘The lady in your passenger seat …'

‘My wife,' the man interrupted.

‘Your wife. She seems to be holding a baby.'

‘Yes …?'

‘Well, that is incredibly dangerous.'

‘What are you talking about? Is this about a car seat? We're just on the way to her parents – we left the car seat there last week and we're going to go pick it up,' he said.

‘Where is their house?'

‘Only a couple of miles up the road.'

‘And where do you live?'

‘Over there,' he said, and pointed vaguely.

‘How far?'

‘About five minutes?'

‘Would it be possible to talk to you and your wife at the same time just for a moment?'

‘Er … okay,' he said, and walked to the car, saying something to the woman in the passenger seat. She came out and joined us on the pavement next to the bus stop.

I leaned back against the police car; he seemed to be doing rather well and I was happy to leave him to it.

‘Hi. Sorry to make you get out of the car, but there's something I want to talk to you about,' Syd said.

‘And what's that, then?' the driver's wife snapped, her voice oozing disdain.

Syd was about to say something, but the man interrupted.

‘There's no need to be harsh – he's all right,' he said. I looked over at Syd who glanced back with an almost imperceptible shrug.

‘Well, I noticed that you were wearing a seatbelt, but that your baby wasn't,' Syd explained to the woman.

‘I was holding on to him,' she interjected. ‘I would never let anything happen to him!'

‘I understand that, but please hear me out,' Syd said. ‘You guys were driving … How fast?'

‘Thirty miles per hour exactly, officer,' the man said, with an uncertain grin that showed he was stretching the truth a little.

‘Okay, thirty miles per hour. I'm not going to give you a citation for excessive speed,' Syd agreed.

He was using all the clichés slightly annoyed police officers use: ‘citation'? ‘Excessive speed'? The kid's been watching too many episodes of
The Bill
, I thought to myself.

‘Let's say your baby weighs a stone. Is that about right?' Syd asked.

‘Yeah, he's about fifteen pounds,' the woman replied.

‘Let's call it a stone; it makes the maths easier. The problem we have here is that you guys were driving at,' he said, glancing back and forth between them, before placing a comical amount of emphasis on the next word, ‘
exactly
thirty miles per hour. The problem is that if you are in a crash, you are going to slow down awfully fast. Say, for the sake of argument that you are extremely unlucky and end up in a head-on collision. When that happens, your car goes from exactly thirty miles per hour to exactly zero miles per hour in a very short space of time. Agreed?'

‘Yeah, that's about right,' the man said.

I walked around to the car behind the couple to take a quick glance inside; I didn't have any grounds for a search, really, but if I did spot any drug paraphernalia from outside the car, we could search it. It seemed messy, but nothing was immediately visible.

‘But I was holding on to him!' the woman stressed – beginning to lose her cool. ‘Nothing bad was going to happen to him!!'

‘Right, please hear me out,' Syd said, trying to get them back on track.

‘Say that you go from thirty miles per hour to zero in the space of about a foot and a half, right? That is an acceleration of about twenty times the earth's gravity. That means that your one-stone baby would go from one stone of weight in your arms, to twenty stone and moving away from you.'

The woman just stared at Syd, but her eyes showed that she was trying to envision holding on to a 20-stone baby.

‘I guess what I am asking is: Would you be able to hold on to a twenty-stone object the size of a large watermelon in your arms in the middle of a car crash?'

‘I—' she faltered.

‘Be honest,' Syd said. ‘No, you wouldn't. You wouldn't have a chance. Which means that if you guys had been in a crash, your baby would have flown straight into the windshield. Unlike you, strapped into your seatbelt, he wouldn't have had the benefit of being slowed down gradually. He would be brought to a stop in an inch or less. Then …'

Syd was on a roll, and I could tell that he was about to launch into further explanation. He was so caught up in his own discussion, that he hadn't seen how pale the woman had turned. I caught his eye and shook my head at him.

‘Right,' Syd said, changing tack. ‘You get the picture. Suffice to say that it's unlikely your baby would survive an impact like that.'

The woman turned paler still, as she hugged her child closely. She looked, for a moment, as if she might keel over, but her husband stepped in to put an arm around her.

‘So,' Syd continued. ‘I'll give you guys a choice. Either you, ma'am, and the baby go for a nice cup of tea over there in that café whilst your husband goes to fetch the baby seat. Or, I'm going to give you a ticket for sixty pounds and three points on your licence, and I'm
still
not going to let you drive off unless the baby is in a child seat.'

The couple looked at each other. The woman nodded, and he shrugged in reply.

‘Do you need money?' the man asked his wife. ‘For a cuppa?'

‘I've got a tenner,' she said. ‘Drive carefully.'

Turning to Syd, she said, ‘Thank you for explaining, officer. Why don't they explain it like that when you learn how to drive?'

‘They kind of do …' Syd said. ‘But never mind. Just remember; it's your baby's life at stake. Use your seatbelt for you and a car seat for the little one. He's cute; what his name?'