Confessions of a Police Constable (23 page)

‘Excuse me? What was that? You have exactly three seconds to get your arse back in your car, before I arrest you for a breach of the peace,' I said, and to demonstrate I meant it I took my handcuffs out of their holder.

The cars in front of his started to move. He stared at me for several long seconds; it looked briefly as if he was going to pull back and take a swing at me. Or perhaps I was wishing that he would take a punch at me, because by now I was itching to arrest him.

I leaned forward, my nose nearly touching his.

‘Three …' I said.

‘Two …' I made a clicking sound with my handcuffs.

‘One …'

‘Fuck you,' the man finally said, and climbed into his car. As he drove off, he very nearly ran over my foot. The PCSO had run his number plate through CAD
⁵⁸
and PNC
⁵⁹
, but it had come back clean.

I turned to him: ‘You okay?'

He nodded and shrugged.

‘What a cock,' he observed.

It was my turn to nod. We walked back to the crime scene together.

‘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 crackled on the radio. He paused to take the details from the 999 call in progress before relaying: ‘We have one IC3
⁶⁰
male, around five foot five, wearing a black hoodie and a red baseball cap. We also have an IC3 male, skinny, around six feet tall, wearing a dark tracksuit 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 transmitted on his radio, signifying that we intended to respond to the call. ‘We're a Blunt serial, one plus two plus four.'

In this transmission, the skipper had conveyed to the CAD desk that we were the unit tasked to combat knife crime on the borough at that time, and that there were seven of us: an inspector, two sergeants and four PCs.

‘There!' shouted Jim, pointing between two buildings. The driver pulled the carrier to a halt, before throwing it into reverse and backing up so we could take another look. Sure enough, someone fitting the description came into view: dark tracksuit, large brand logo, dark skin colour, on a bicycle. He was coming towards us, but when he spotted the huge silver Sprinter van with ‘Police' written down the side, he abruptly changed direction.

‘Out!' shouted the skipper, and four of us piled through the sliding door at the side of the van. We headed into the council estate, whilst the van left to cut off any escape at the other end of the estate.

As I turned the corner, I was suddenly faced with him. He was talking to someone over a fence. He started when he saw me, but he had stopped his bike with the front wheel sticking through the black metal of the fence and couldn't easily get away. He dismounted the bike and started to walk away from us, quickly, leaving his bike behind.

‘Excuse me, mate,' I said after him.

He kept walking.

‘You! In the tracksuit! Please stop!' I called.

He pretended not to hear me.

I started running, and my colleagues followed suit. He didn't slow down, but he didn't speed up either, so we easily caught up with him.

‘Stand with your arms to your sides,' one of the PCs said, as we surrounded him. ‘You are being detained for the purpose of a search; we've had some reports of someone fitting your description—'

He didn't get to finish his well-practised stop-and-search spiel before being interrupted.

‘Fits my description? You mean he's black, yeah?' the suspect shot back, and moved one of his arms down from his Jesus-on-the-cross pose.

‘Don't move, keep your hands out to your sides,' the PC said, grabbing his arm and moving it so that it pointed straight out to the side again. I then started the search.

‘What's your name, mate?' I asked him.

‘I ain't your mate, but it's Hakeem,' he replied.

I continued my search.

‘Fuck this, man,' Hakeem said suddenly, as if he'd changed his mind about something. I was on his left side, and from the corner of my eye I saw his right arm move towards the pocket of his hoodie.

‘DON'T MOVE,' the PC shouted. I used Hakeem's arm – the one I was already holding – to pull him towards me. He was off-balance now, which made it easy for me and the two closest officers to pull him to the ground.

‘What is wrong with you?' Hakeem shouted. ‘I haven't done nothing!'

He was on the pavement, struggling violently with three police officers on top of him. He barely paused to breathe as he fired off a cavalcade of swearwords that would make a soldier cower in embarrassment. Two of my colleagues were handcuffing him, and I continued the search, while the sergeant stood back to keep an eye on our surroundings and call for additional backup on his radio. This particular council estate was none-too-friendly to police, and he wasn't going to take any risks.

A group of youths, around six or seven strong, came up to us.

‘What's this all about? You guys always picking on us, man,' one of the group said.

‘Please stay clear,' the sergeant said, but his plea went unheard under the stream of abuse coming from the man we now had in handcuffs, still face down on the pavement. He repeated himself more loudly: ‘I said, stay clear.'

‘He's clean,' I reported, once I had concluded my search of the man. He only had a wallet on him, no weapons of any kind. I told him to calm down whilst my colleagues helped him to his feet. We decided to leave his handcuffs on until we'd clarified whether he represented a risk or was already wanted by police.

He muttered something about only wanting to give us his ID from his pocket.

The rest of our carrier arrived and the remaining officers joined us. The group that had been gathering was taken aside so we could concentrate on talking to Hakeem.

‘Why the hell? There was no need to throw me on the ground like that,' he said, and struggled against his handcuffs.

‘Okay, please listen to me,' I said. ‘I'll explain everything, but you really do need to listen to me, okay?'

His volley of swearing was ebbing, so I seemed to be getting through to him. Once he'd finally shut his organ for swearword distribution, I continued.

‘We had a report of a group of youths fighting with knives, and you fit the description of one of the suspects,' I told him.

‘And what was that description? Black man?' Hakeem spat with unveiled contempt.

To be fair, I probably wouldn't have been very happy to be dragged to the ground by police either, so I decided to take the time to explain everything to him: what had just happened and why. ‘Well, yes, but also wearing a dark hoodie, like yours.'

‘That fits every one of us,' a man from the group, who were now standing a few yards further up the road, shouted. I'd almost forgotten we were performing for an audience. The comment was rewarded with a burst of laughter from his friends. My eyes scanned the group. I recognised a few familiar faces. One of them I believed I had arrested before. A couple I recognised from the gang identification charts on the walls in our briefing room. Others were unfamiliar to me. My attention switched to their clothing; I was unsurprised to find that the man's observation was accurate. Every single one of them was wearing a dark hoodie – some with a logo on the front, some plain.

‘The reason we took you to the ground,' I said, turning back to Hakeem, ‘is that we had reports of youths fighting with knives. The description we got for one of them was someone of your height and build, and the description of your clothing fit, down to the logo you've got on your hoodie, there.'

Hakeem looked down and shrugged, as I pointed at the logo on this clothing.

‘When you went for your pocket,' I continued, ‘we couldn't take any chances: we had to assume you were going for your knife, and none of us wanted to get stabbed, so we took you down and put you in handcuffs.'

‘It wasn't even me, though,' he fired back. ‘This is police brutality, man.'

I sighed, sensing a very, very long night in my immediate future dealing with complaints. I looked at Hakeem. There was something other than hatred shining through his dark eyes, and it inspired me to not give up on him, even though I was aware that he only saw me as ‘yet another uniform'. I imagined he was attributing every bad story he had ever heard about a cop to me personally.

‘Do you work?' I asked Hakeem.

‘What do you mean?' he replied.

‘A job. Work. Earning money. Do you work?'

‘Yeah, man, I'm an accountant for a commercial laundry firm,' he said, his eyes scanning mine for a reaction.

‘Okay – hypothetical scenario. The phone rings at your office. You pick up and an anonymous voice tells you that someone with a black hoodie, a red baseball cap and a knife was just seen entering your building. The next thing you see is that someone with a black hoodie and a red baseball cap enters your office and starts talking aggressively to one of your co-workers?'

‘I'd call the police, wouldn't I?'

‘I'm glad you said that,' I told Hakeem. ‘But what would your assumptions be about this man? Would you be worried if he reached into his pocket?'

‘I see what you're doing, blood, but it ain't the same!' he laughed. ‘Nobody ever comes into our office with a knife, are you fucking crazy? We're a laundry, chief, use your brains! We ain't got nothin' worth robbing or nothin'!'

‘Ah, but you see … the streets are
our
office, and that phone call I described to you? That's exactly the phone call we got over our radios. So we're now faced with the situation I told you about: we got a phone call with a description of a person seen half a mile away from here, and when we turn a corner, we find you, and you fit the description.'

‘That's bullshit, though; you can't just search me because I fit someone's description – how do you know it's me? I never carry no fucking knife, man …'

‘I understand that, but see it from our perspective,' I said, as I unlocked the cuffs from behind his back. He moved his hands to the front of his body and started massaging his wrists. ‘The only way we have to figure out whether it
was
you is to search you. If you'd had a knife on you, we would have known we could arrest you and figure out whether you were involved with the episode in the park.'

‘Yeah, I get you,' he replied. ‘Still ain't fair, though. I've been searched like eight times this year, man, it ain't fair.'

‘I know what you're saying, but can you imagine why that's happening?'

‘'Cause I'm black, innit?' he replied.

‘I don't think it is because you're black,' I replied. ‘Have you noticed much police here on the estate this year?'

‘Yeah, of course. You guys are hard to miss, with your flashing lights and all that,' he said nodding to the police van parked not ten feet away. The van's strobes were bathing the estate in an eerie, pale blue glow.

‘Do you know why we're here?'

‘Yeah, you keep stopping me for no fucking reason, innit?'

‘Not you specifically. Do you know why we're stopping anybody at all?'

‘Drugs?'

‘That's right. This estate is known for the amount of drugs and weapons floating about. Quite a few gangs, too. We want to make this place safe for everybody who lives here, but to do that, we have to deal with the drugs and the gangs.'

‘Yeah. My sister was robbed the other day, man, that ain't right.'

‘Exactly,' I replied. ‘But we can't do anything about that until we do something about the gangs. To do that, we have to try to remove the drugs and weapons from the area. And to do that, we have to search people. We try to search only people we believe to be gang members, but that leaves us with a problem: gang members don't wear a neon saying: “I'm a gang member”.'

‘I see what you're saying,' Hakeem said.

‘What's that?'

‘Well, all the gang members are black, innit?' he said, with a lowered voice, keeping his eyes locked on mine, looking for my reaction.

‘Well, that's not quite the case – there are quite a few gang members who are white and Asian as well, but yes, many are black'

‘And I'm wearing the same clothes as them, so I look dodgy.'

‘Hakeem, it's not that you look dodgy, but I think you're thinking in the right direction here. The problem we have is that we can't identify a criminal or a gang member. All we have are statistics, and statistics aren't on your side, in this case. This is an area that has a lot of gang members. Many of them are black, most of them are roughly of your age and wear similar clothes to you.'

‘That's fucked up, man,' he concluded.

‘You know, you're right. But the thing is, I haven't got a solution for that. I guess one solution would be to leave everybody in this estate alone, but I doubt that would make things any safer for your sister.'

‘Man, why don't anybody ever explain all this shit when they search you?' Hakeem asked, with the half-smile of a man who's just solved a puzzle that has been bothering him for a while.

‘Y'know, perhaps we should,' I replied.

‘So are you saying I should wear a suit?' he asked.

‘No, you can wear whatever you want, but unfortunately, given who you are and where you live, you might find yourself targeted more often than others.'

It has been months since this episode happened, but Hakeem's words have been ringing in my ears ever since. He was right, it isn't fair, but I'll be damned if I can think of a way to make it better.

We were having one of those freak, unbearably hot summers. The type of summer you desperately long for when the sloppy London winter is doing its damnedest to work its way into your boots, but which, when it happens, you hate just as much as any winter day. To be honest, 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.