The Criminal Alphabet (11 page)

To
have a trade
with
Old Bill
means that you are bribing the police, either with
cash or stolen goods or by giving up other criminals. From the 1950s until the '70s,
it was an accepted part of being a professional criminal. A lot of career criminals
drank and socialized with CID officers, particularly the Flying Squad and the Vice
Squad. The police justified this by saying they were gathering intelligence and
making contacts in the criminal world, and criminals justified it by saying they
were making contacts that might be able to help them out if they got their collar
felt in the future. The divide between plainclothes police and professional
criminals was wafer thin and some police officers often crossed it by selling their
services – losing evidence, failing to question witnesses properly, and even giving
information about possible targets for criminals to rob. Some police squads had a
terrible reputation for corruption, and it all came to a head when a criminal, with
the help of two newspaper reporters, secretly tape-recorded two members of the
Flying Squad asking for a bribe in order to ‘lose' evidence in a case. One of the
officers
taped talked of the CID being ‘a firm within a firm' and
this led to a major investigation into police corruption that centred on the
Metropolitan Police.

This is an addition to police
Identification Codes – the shorthand for a person's national or racial origin;
IC8
is code for a ‘ginger male'.

See
Police IC codes

A
jam sandwich
is a
police patrol car, so called because of its white-and-red livery; the red stripe
running around the middle of the car looks like a smear of jam between two slices of
white bread. The term became popular in the early 1980s when the Metropolitan Police
started using the 3.5 litre Rover SDi as their patrol car of choice. A patrol car is
also sometimes called a ‘bacon sandwich', a sly reference to the fact that, to a
minority of people, the police are known as ‘pigs'.

The Kremlin
is what many
ordinary police officers call New Scotland Yard. It seems, from listening to
conversations between police officers over the years, that most of the lower ranks
in the police force have nothing but envy and disrespect for their upper-echelon
superiors and equate them to a foreign (Soviet) government passing down diktats and
edicts.

LOB
is police acronym
meaning Load of Bollocks, usually marked on forms and personal notebooks to indicate
that the officer does not believe a word of what they are being told.

See
NFI

A
meat wagon
is a police
or prison van used for transporting prisoners, after its cargo of living meat. The
vehicle was also once known as the paddy wagon or Black Maria. ‘Paddy wagon' is
American slang, particular to New York, where a disproportionate number of Irish
emigrants joined the police force, but the phrase was imported to the UK and ended
up with another meaning, related to the large numbers of drunken Irishmen picked up
by police vans in cities such as London and Birmingham on a Saturday night. In the
1950s and '60s a lot of Irish navvies came to England to help rebuild the cities
after their destruction by the German Luftwaffe during the Second World War. They
helped to construct the Tube network, the motorways and roads, as well as houses and
other buildings. Being, on the whole, single young men far from home, the navvies
would work all week and go out and get drunk at the weekend. Almost inevitably, some
would end up fighting or being drunk and disorderly, so they would be picked up by
the police and taken away in the paddy wagon. ‘Black Maria' comes from the Victorian
era when the horse-drawn police wagon was called a Maria, and the ones used by the
police were painted black.

Travellers call the police or anyone in
authority the ‘ming', from the Romany word
mingro
. So if you are driving
about, or on your way to or from a bit of skulduggery, and somebody says,
‘
Ming on the wing
,' it means there's a police vehicle within
sight of your vehicle. Some London criminals say that ‘ming' is short for Emperor
Ming the Merciless, who was the baddie alien in
Flash Gordon
, but then,
some people also think there's such a thing as a ‘kettle of scotch'!

See
Gavvers

This is a police acronym for Member Of
the Public, used as shorthand when filling in notebooks and reports. The police use
many acronyms, and different forces in different parts of the county often use their
own local versions.
MOP
, however, is standard for the majority of,
if not all, police forces.

MUPPET
is an acronym,
for Most Useless Police Person Ever Trained, used by the police for an incompetent
idiot.

NFI
is a police acronym
meaning Not Fucking Interested, usually marked on notes or reports that also carry
the acronym
LOB
(Load Of Bollocks) to indicate that the officer
thinks there is little or no point in pursuing the reported crime or offence.

Noble cause corruption
is a phrase used to describe the practice by some police officers of falsifying
evidence against a suspect, or suspects, who they personally believe is guilty. It's
said that a lot of the corruption involved in the major miscarriages of justice of
the twentieth century was perpetrated through ‘noble cause'.

The Guildford Four (four young people
who were accused, convicted and jailed for over seventeen years for terrorism and
bombings) were a prime example of this kind of police corruption. The police really
believed, despite glaring evidence to the contrary, that the accused had planted
bombs in two public houses in Guildford, Surrey, in 1974, and this absolute belief
led the police to torture the suspects until they admitted the crime, ‘lose'
evidence that would have proved their innocence and falsify other evidence that
could point to their guilt.

The sad thing is that noble cause
corruption is still quite prevalent in the police force today; a lot of policemen
believe that the uniform gives them the absolute right to decide who is guilty and
who is not. It doesn't help that it is they themselves who investigate their own
wrongdoings: despite so many cases of miscarriages of justice, institutional racism,
casual brutality towards members of the public and the many deaths at the hands of
the police it is still as rare as rocking-horse faeces to see a police officer in
the dock for any of it.

See
Fit-up
,
Verbals

Noddy bike
was a
nickname for the old police motor-scooters that were used for patrolling rural areas
in the
1950s and '60s. Named after children's writer Enid Blyton's
character.

The police have their own particular
slang, and
nondie
is one of theirs. It's short for nondescript and
is usually used as a name for undercover vehicles used on surveillance, as in ‘If we
are going on surveillance tonight then best we take the nondie in case we get
spotted by any of the local heads'. Police forces will have at least a couple of
nondies to use for surveillance work. Up until the early 1990s, the police, and the
London Flying Squads in particular, would hire their nondies from a nationwide
company called Budget Rent-a-Van (because it was cheap). As more and more people
were being arrested and noticing these vans (they all carried the company's logo)
being driven around or parked locally in the days leading up to the arrest, the
secret got out. Once it became known that the police were using this company's
vehicles for surveillance work, every Budget vehicle on the streets became suspect
and it was pointless for police surveillance units to use them. It is well known
that the Flying Squads have at least two black London cabs for use in surveillance
and for surprise arrests.

See
Ready-eye

An
obbo post
is an
observation post, a spot from where police officers can keep a target under
surveillance, for example a building that overlooks a target's home or place of
work, or a hiding place close to a spot where the police have intelligence that a
crime may be committed. Criminals
describe being under this form
of police attention as being ‘under obbo'.

See
Ready-eye

Old Bill
is such a
common term for the police that there was a long-running television series about the
goings on at a fictional police station called
The Bill
. I've never really
been able to find out for sure where this term originated, but I believe it started
in the twentieth century with the introduction of the Flying Squad. The Flying Squad
was the first to use motorized vehicles to combat crime. They were originally called
the Mobile Patrol Experiment (very catchy!) but nicknamed the Flying Squad because
they were the first police squad that had permission to cross geographical police
boundaries and ‘trespass' on the patch of any other force or district – fly in, fly
out – without getting permission from anyone. All of their vehicles had the
registration letters ‘BYL', which I think led to them being known by criminals as
‘the bill'. This eventually became ‘Old Bill'.

See
the Sweeney

Unfortunately, almost since the
beginning, UK police have had a bad reputation for corruption. In the 1970s an
investigation was started into corruption, specifically, initially, in the City of
London Police, but then spread out to the Metropolitan Police; the investigation was
code-named
Operation Countryman
. Operation Countryman exposed
widespread police corruption to the public via the media, the first time this was
done on such a scale. The operation was conducted between 1978 and 1982 at a
cost of over £3 million, and it led to eight police officers
being arrested, though none was charged or convicted. The investigation was launched
when a police informant claimed that some
coppers
, including
several from the elite Flying Squad, were taking bribes from criminals in return for
warning them of imminent police raids, as well as having charges dropped and
fabricating evidence against innocent men. Operation Countryman got its name from
using officers from rural police forces such as Hampshire and Dorset, as it wasn't
clear who could be trusted in the City of London and the Met area. The operation was
ordered by then Home Secretary Merlyn Rees and began by investigating police
activity around three major robberies – an armed robbery at the
Daily
Express
offices in 1976, which netted £175,000; a £225,000 armed robbery
outside the HQ of Williams & Glyn bank in 1977; and a £200,000 payroll robbery
at the offices of the
Daily Mirror
newspaper in 1978. During the
Daily
Mirror
robbery a Security Express guard was shot and killed. The HQ for the
investigation team was originally at Camberwell police station in South London, but
there were attempts by some of the target officers and their friends to steal or
destroy evidence and documents there, so the HQ was moved to Godalming police
station in Surrey, out of the immediate reach of the Met. The results of the
six-year investigation were presented to the Home Office and Police Commissioner
with recommendations that officers should face criminal charges, but no officer was
ever charged as a result of the investigation. The findings of the investigation
have never been made public.

See
the Sweeney

This term may be London specific, as I've
never heard anyone from outside the Smoke using it. It's a name for the police, as
in ‘I was just about to take the
joey
, when
the other
people
turned up'. It's often used in connection with
having a trade
, as in ‘Don't trust the geezer, I hear he's been having a trade
with the other people'.

See
Having a trade
,
Joey

In police slang
padding
is adding bits to evidence or reports to make it look as if the police officers have
put in more work than they have. Padding the crime figures means downgrading certain
crimes and giving the perpetrator a caution rather than making an arrest so it looks
as though there's been a drop in crime, thus making a station or district look as
though they have reduced crime figures when, in reality, they have done nothing of
the sort.

Panda car
was a nickname
for police cars of the 1960s, usually Morris Minors, which were painted with large
panels of black and white or blue and white. The Morris Minor had a rounded panda
bear shape, and in its black-and-white livery looked a bit like a sleeping
panda.

An old-fashioned name for the police
dating from the 1830s, when Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel pushed
through a bill creating the modern police force. In England police officers were
nicknamed
bobbies
after the shortened version of Peel's first name,
but in Ireland, where Tory MPs were held in a bit more contempt, they took the
nickname from his surname.
Peelers
did eventually catch on in
England, through the Irish communities there, and became popular slang for the
police.