Confessions of a Police Constable (2 page)

‘Take him away! I don't want him here,' she squealed, as I walked in through the front door.

I was the second car on scene, which is just as well, because I'm single-crewed. The car that beat me there was triple-crewed – unusual, given that, in these times of relentless belt-tightening, we're usually one-up in a car, not three. I was glad to see that my colleague Tim was there; he knows the couple well. In addition to Tim, there was Charlie, a relatively new probationer, fresh out of Hendon, and Syd, a special constable.

Specials are volunteers. Many people seem to confuse them with PCSO
⁵
staff, but there are crucial differences between them, the main one being that special constables don't get paid. Also, not many people realise this, but special constables have the same powers as myself: they have been sworn in, are warranted by the Queen to do arrests, talk sternly to inebriated teenagers, wag their fingers at people failing to wear seat belts, heroically rescue kittens out of trees, and so on and so forth.

I sneak a look at this particularly solidly built special's Metvest. I think I've seen him before, but I can't remember his name; his nametag reads Smith, which is profoundly unhelpful.

He was doing his best to keep the man from getting to his lady-love. Meanwhile, Tim was trying to reason with the woman, in the hope she would come down from being a squeaky, hyperventilating ball of fury.

‘Oi!' I called out. ‘Can we all just shut up for ten seconds? I can't hear myself think in this racket.'

Weirdly (and unusually), they listened to me. The flat fell quiet for a couple of seconds, except for the man's heavy breathing, leaving all six of us staring back and forth at each other for a few seconds.

‘Right,' I said, taking control of the situation in the brief moment of silence. ‘You—,' I pointed at the man, ‘let's go to the living room and have a chat.'

Tim started leading the woman out of the kitchen and into the bedroom. Good thinking. Kitchens are the most dangerous rooms in a house when there's a chance a fight will break out. Heavy pans, plenty of knives, boiling water – it rarely ends well.

I waved the special over to me, and after we'd had a brief chat with the king of this particularly squalid castle, we explained to him that he needed to be arrested so we would be able to interview him properly. I decided to let the special get the body (which is police slang for ‘making the arrest'), mostly for my own amusement, but he promptly ruined my entertainment by knowing what to do, and the arrest went smoothly.

Or at least, it looked to be going smoothly … until the man suddenly changed his mind. Immediately after the special applied one handcuff to him, he decided he didn't want to get arrested after all. At first, he started struggling half-heartedly, but then he found some strength and with it a burst of uninhibited inspiration for mayhem. He booted the special in the shins, and managed to swipe my legs from under me. I hit the floor with a rib-crunching crash, hitting the back of my head against the side of a table. Pain shot through me briefly, before fading away again.

‘For Christ's sake,' I shouted. In response, the probationer – PC McOwen – came running to help us out. And so developed an all-out fight between the three of us and the man. The TV was kicked – I have no idea by whom – and crashed into the wall. Chairs were knocked over, a series of pictures that were balanced on a shelf went flying across the living room, covering the floor in shards of glass, and the table I had already landed on once ended up in several pieces on the floor.

Amid the chaos I heard McOwen scream, ‘SPRAY, SPRAY.'

He had taken his CS spray out of its holder, and was applying a generous dose of noxious liquid (which is not entirely dissimilar to pepper spray) to the man's face.

The man calmed down rapidly, which is great news, obviously, but in the process, I caught some of the CS splash-back, and my eyes filled with tears and a burning sensation I haven't felt since
The Stag Do That Must Not Be Mentioned
.

I react terribly to CS. Generally, I'd prefer we didn't use the stuff in any circumstances. In the probationer's defence, I suppose it was rather effective in this case; chances are we would have continued our living-room-trashing wrestling session for at least a couple of minutes more.

We finally managed to get the man in both cuffs, lying on the floor with the special constable sitting on his legs, the man reeling off a vituperation of obscenities about our mothers, and the probationer holding the handcuffs.

Having reached this position of relative control, we allowed ourselves to relax. It was all over, right?

Right?

Rarely do we have such luck; charging out of the bedroom came the man's girlfriend, holding a rather large box set of the TV series
Friends
.

Yes, really.

‘Leave him alone, he hasn't done anything to you,' she shouted, before lifting the box set above her head, and bringing it down on the special.

Tim came running into the living room after her – I am still not sure how she managed to give him the slip – and tried to grab her. She struggled violently, elbowing him in the face and sending him to the floor. Yowling like a doom-wraith she hit the special with the box set again, this time with enough force that it disintegrated. A flurry of CDs, booklets and bits of torn box flew everywhere.

Between the four of us, we restrained her as well, and started taking the man out of the flat, where a caged police van had just arrived with further reinforcements and a way of transporting the fine specimen of gentlemanhood to a night in the cells.

As we hauled the man off, the woman was roaring from within Tim and McOwen's grasp.

‘LOVE YOU,' she called to her partner, before directing her anger at us. ‘You are hurting him, I love him, leave him alone!' she half-sobbed, half-shouted, conveniently forgetting her insistence that we take him away not ten minutes earlier.

We arranged another van to take her away as well, and they both spent the rest of the night in separate cells, shouting across the hallway between the cells, declaring their mutual undying love approximately 68 times, much to the chagrin of the sleep-deprived custody sergeant.

The next day, lover-boy woke up to yet another ABH (Actual Bodily Harm) charge for beating up his girlfriend for the hundredth time. Meanwhile she was awarded with an assault charge for her valiant rescue attempt.

Before long they were back in the flat, continuing on their previous path of loving each other to death.

‘Hey, Delito,' the sarge said to me that morning, in the daily briefing. ‘Thompson is off ill today, can you take care of the Sierra Delta gang?'

Sierra Delta – or SD – is Street Duties. It is a programme where new police officers are put through their paces, dealing with cases from beginning to end. They might do an arrest for a shoplifting, for example, and go through the whole process, from alpha to omega. Arrest, booking into custody, interview on tape, investigation, and so on and so forth: the whole process right through to court. It means that each case you deal with takes a lot of time, but you also get a full understanding of how the processes work. It's incredibly interesting, and I recall my street-duty sessions fondly – the PC who was my mentor/instructor is still one of my best friends to this day.

‘Delito. You listening?' Daydreaming already? Oh dear, today really was going to be a long day.

‘Sure thing, sarge, I'll do my best,' I replied.

At the end of the briefing, I headed over to the classroom to meet Sasha and Pete, the street duties probationers. They were coming up to the end of their street duties, and they generally had their ducks in a row.

Pete is one of those people who seem to be fuelled purely by air and love for The Job. He also has a look that – when combined with the uniform – makes women swoon when they see him. In some officers – the ones able to pretend they don't notice, or don't know – that can be a fantastic trait, because it makes certain quick quests for information all that much quicker. Pete knows what he's doing, and he's a solid police officer. If the women think ‘He can fuck me', the men think ‘He can fuck me up'. In short, Pete spends every minute he doesn't spend in uniform in a gym. I've run into him at the gym a couple of times, and he doesn't mess around; he may very well be the fittest officer on the entire borough. He's not particularly tall – about five foot seven – but he's built like a row of brick-and-mortar outhouses, and inspires confidence through and through.

Sasha is not entirely unlike Pete in many ways: she's witty, knows her laws and white notes
⁶
inside out, and she's no slouch either – she regularly runs half marathons and is apparently trying for her taekwondo black belt. She's about as tall as Pete. Her slender build, short hair and fragile-looking glasses make her positively androgynous-looking – especially when she's fully kitted out in her Metvest. She famously disposed of the rumours of her being a lesbian by sleeping with Pete just for long enough that everybody knew about it, before dumping him and returning to single life. The ‘everybody knew about it' part was secured when she, early one Tuesday morning, transmitted over the radio, on the open channel, ‘Mike Delta two-two-three, do you have any johnnies?'

She got into some trouble with the brass about that one, but she gained major points with the rest of the team, and she's now well known as someone who doesn't mince her words – quite refreshing, really.

Once we've all said our hellos, we sit down briefly and talk about some questions they have, before breaking out the boot polish, giving our shoes a quick shine, and hitting the streets. Street duties involve a lot of foot patrolling, so you get a proper workout in the process, but seeing as I spend most of my time either driving around in a car or doing quick sprints after naughty little toe-rags, I usually find a walking session to be no bad thing.

It was a pretty slow morning. The radio was so dead that people occasionally ran a radio check, just to make sure their radios hadn't stopped working. So, without anything better to do, we decided to head out on ‘reassurance patrol'.

Reassurance patrolling is usually done in areas where something bad has happened recently. Not long ago, we'd had a series of stabbings in one particular part of the borough, so we decided we'd take a stroll down the streets that had been worst affected, stop to have a chat with some of the shop owners, and just see how things were looking, on the whole.

By the time the morning had crawled to an end, we'd handed out five traffic tickets (all for mobile phone use), taken weed off some young troublemakers and issued them with a formal warning, and spent a bit of time running after a shoplifter who was unlucky enough to come across our path, before continuing his unlucky streak by running straight into a blind alley, where Sasha quickly got her arrest in. We dealt with it swiftly – both Pete and Sasha had made dozens of arrests by this point – and once we were done, we decided to pop into KFC for some lunch.

This particular branch of the Kentucky Fried Chicken (or Unlucky Fried Kitten, as we tend to call it round these parts) is weirdly L-shaped, and we took our seats in the short leg of the ‘L' to chomp down our meals.

As we were idly chatting, we heard some commotion by the counter. When we'd come in, we had spotted a security guard, so I figured he'd take care of things. But no such luck: things escalated rapidly.

‘I gave you 40 pounds, you fat bitch.' A voice broke through to our table of three, ending our genteel luncheon abruptly. Sasha and Pete looked at each other, then at me.

‘Hey, you are the cops,' I said, grinning, as I took the last bite of my Zinger Tower meal. With a full mouth, I continued, ‘Go deal with it.'

The dashing duo rounded the corner, with me following a few steps behind.

Leaning forward with one hand on the counter was a very large man in a bright patterned shirt. When I say large, I mean very, very large indeed. Positively obese, in fact – larger than any man I had ever seen before in my life. For every movement he made with his arm, another part of his body seemed to be moving, as if it were echoing it – or perhaps protesting under its own weight.

Behind him was a shorter but no less formidable woman, who turned out to be his wife. The couple were on their honeymoon from Texas and had decided to come to London ‘because we love musicals', they told me at some point later in the proceedings.

I recognised the man's accent as American, but I wasn't really sure who he had shouted at. In addition to the couple, the security guard was standing very close to them, making sounds designed – but failing – to calm them down.

‘What's going on here?' Sasha interrupted.

‘Ah, thank fuck for that,' the man exclaimed. ‘This fat bitch stole my money,' he repeated. I half expected him to point to his wife, but he nodded to the serving counter. I looked. At first glance, the counter was empty, but then I spotted a girl – not older than 20 – cowering behind one of the fryers.

‘Excuse me, could you come out,' Pete said, waving to the girl for her to come closer, and smiling that broad, winning smile of his. ‘We just want to find out what's been going on here.'

Pete was in front of me, so I have no idea what he was doing, but based on how the girl reacted, I can't help but think that he must at least have winked at her. For the briefest of moments, I entertained myself with the idea that he might conceivably have blown her a kiss.

The girl – her nametag revealed her name to be Cecilie – was five feet tall at the most. She could probably do with going jogging every now and again, perhaps, but calling her ‘fat' hardly seemed fair, especially considering the girth of both the man and his wife. As soon as Cecilie stepped out, the man went off on one again.