Who'd Be a Copper?

by Jonathan Nicholas

  Usually the first indication that I would be required to perform a Lion operation was when I heard the bell and the rattling of the roller shutter in the basement as the traffic cops drove into the van dock, an area nicknamed ‘the bomb bay’. I’d trot down the stairs into the cell block and turn on the machine. The paperwork was a simple standardised form on which you merely filled in the blanks. One of the few professional opinions a police officer can give is whether a person is drunk, and if there’s one thing a drunken person is adamant in telling you it is that they are not drunk. The drunker they are, the more they protest that they aren’t. Try it next time you are with someone in that condition.

  Many people arrested for failing a roadside breath test will therefore be very loud and vociferous in protesting their innocence to anyone in sight. They will then demand their phone call because, according to them and what they’ve seen on the telly, it’s their right. Well, actually, it isn’t. The law doesn’t allow for anything to delay the process of being placed on the substantive breath testing machine. The argumentative ones were the worst. At every request made of them they would reply with a question and offer verbal, if not always physical, resistance. Apart from denying they were drunk they’d also tell us we should stop hassling innocent motorists and look for the real criminals instead. Everyone who says this sincerely believes cops have never heard it before.

  I dealt with a particularly stubborn woman who repeatedly stuck her tongue over the disposable mouthpiece, claiming it was blocked. Several times I removed the mouthpiece and tried another, but on every occasion she claimed a blockage. The mouthpieces were made of transparent plastic so quite what it was supposed to be blocked with, I had no idea. Then she changed her story by saying she didn’t have enough breath to satisfy the machine because she’d just had a cold. This same lady had failed a roadside test and so she clearly didn’t want the Lion to confirm she was pissed. I spent almost two hours gently coaxing her to give me a sample of breath. She was argumentative and awkward. Her speech was slurred, I could smell wine on her breath and she seemed to have trouble concentrating. In the end I gave up because other customers were waiting.

  I had an interesting afternoon in court with her, some months later. The date sadly coincided with the birth of our first child, though I wasn’t to know this when she was charged. My wife was admitted to hospital the day before and had been in labour for twenty-four hours prior to the birth at 9am the next morning. The same day at 2pm I was in court, having been awake almost all night. I was very tired and even a little angry at being there in the first place, but the adrenaline of the birth clearly kept me going. I think the anger to some extent came from the fact that certain members of the public very often underestimate the police, and individual police officers like me. I had become quite expert in the use of the Lion, and it was designed to be an extremely simple device. The clear plastic mouthpiece and tube leads straight into the machine with no possible means of obstruction, and yet this drunken idiot continued to claim it was blocked.

  The Lion had been designed so that a ten-year-old asthmatic with one lung could provide a sample, or so we were told, though I’m not sure of the provenance of this saying. In any case it was not the force of the breath but the volume, and nothing like the pressure needed to blow up a balloon. I showed the magistrates an example of the disposable mouthpiece which I always carried with me to court, just in case. To counter the argument the defendant brought with her a chest/lung specialist from the local hospital, at great expense to her, in order to inform the court that having recently suffered a bout of influenza, her lung capacity was estimated to be 17% lower than average. But this was not the issue of course. The point of law, and the offence for which she was charged was that she had deliberately failed to provide a sample of breath.

  At every opportunity I informed the magistrates that in my professional opinion the woman was drunk. I may have appeared quite confident but such confidence usually comes from knowing what you are talking about. As with any form of public speaking if you have a very good working knowledge of your subject then this will not only help dispel nerves but also make you sound very convincing. After almost an hour in the witness box and some very brief deliberating on the part of the bench she was found guilty. She was banned from driving for twelve months and fined £1000.

  I returned to Radford Road and appealed to the duty inspector for the remainder of the shift off work in order to go home to my wife and new baby. I felt very lucky to be granted the rest of the day off on compassionate leave. I was on standby for some short notice leave, which I was then granted. I had the rest of the week off. There was no such thing in those days as paternity leave.

  On some occasions the customers for the Lion, as with many other arrests, were extremely drunk. One chap was so intoxicated he had to be supported on both sides by police officers. As he leaned against the charge desk a vile smell began to exude from his person. A dark stain appeared around the seat of his trousers just as some runny little dollops emerged from his trouser legs onto his shoes. The floor area where he was standing gathered excreta in the same manner as a prisoner of war ridding himself of tunnelling material. He was promptly hoisted up and dragged into the toilet where he remained with the door firmly shut until his bowels were well and truly empty. This is one of the few ways to delay the process, if you fancy trying it.

  I’d like to know what type of lemonade some people drink too. So often I heard the comment, “I’ve only had two pints of shandy,” just before they blew four times over the legal limit. There’s some seriously strong shandy out there. In most cases I remained calm and professional, focussed on obtaining the sample. Better to spend time persuading them at this stage than having another day out at court. I would often spend an hour or more coaxing someone to blow into the machine, in one long, continuous breath until I told them to stop. “Keep going, keep going, keep going,” I would say, willing them to do so until the sample was obtained.

  The deceitful behaviour presented to me by some of the drink drivers when they insisted they’d only been drinking shandy was insulting. Driving when you are pissed is stupid and very dangerous. There is little wonder the penalties are so high.

  THE MIDDLE YEARS

  FOOTBALL AND GOOSE FAIR

  It’s one of life’s cruel ironies that when you have a young family you need to work longer hours because of the need to earn extra money. All occupations are the same. My wife quit work for seven years when our children were born, so money was tight, but we agreed to do this rather than spend huge amounts on day care. For the next few years I travelled to work on a moped which only required a few pounds of fuel a week. Riding home at 6am in ten degrees of frost is just bearable, and getting into a warm bed frozen solid was wonderful, if not for the person already there. Travelling to work in heavy rain the water almost always penetrated my clothing so on those occasions I was forced to carry spare socks and underwear. A wet arse was never a good start to a busy shift.

  I didn’t get many Saturdays off, but in winter I volunteered to work football matches. There were games in the week sometimes too when I was on rest day, and I worked them whenever I could. They were worth about £40 in overtime and we needed every penny. It was known as ‘own time football’ and we were usually briefed inside the ground along with the match stewards. On almost every occasion I spent the entire match standing on the cinder track around the pitch staring up at the faces of the crowd. We weren’t allowed to watch the game but it’s not always easy to ignore when thousands of people are following the ball and goals are being scored.

  The worst of any trouble seemed to be dealt with by the SOU lads, the Special Operations Unit as they were known. They herded the away fans to and from the railway station in a crocodile system, keeping them isolated from the home supporters. I remember one occasion standing in the sterile area between opposing supporters when it started to rain. There was nowhere to go so I turned up the collar of my greatcoat and carried on. Th
en I noticed there weren’t any clouds in the sky, and wondered where the rain was coming from. The opposing fans were spitting at one another so much it was as thick as rain. When they ran out of spit they threw coins. After the match I collected a small fortune.

  On another occasion a man quite high up in the crowd mouthed at me directly ‘You’re fuckin’ dead.’ I turned away briefly then looked back at him, and he did it again. I was shocked. What had I done to upset him? I walked to the end of the stand to find a way to speak to this chap. A few minutes later inside the stand the man had disappeared. Maybe I’d imagined it?

  On one of the rare occasions I found myself inside the custody area a senior officer was heard shouting for anyone with any knowledge of German. I was about to volunteer when someone presented themselves. There’d been some trouble from the only German person in the world who couldn’t speak English. He probably did but was just being awkward. It seemed despite various attempts to extract his name and details no one had managed it. A cop came forward telling everyone “I can speak German,” and he confirmed several times to the chief inspector that he could speak the language. Finally, and to a hushed gathering, he said to the German:

  “Vot iss your name?”

  I understand a little bit of several languages but I would never admit to being able to speak any of them.

  Public events such as football matches were very costly to the police, both in time and money. Cops frequently had rest days cancelled which if done in advance meant no extra pay for the inconvenience, and it is still the same today. But a cancelled rest day rightly meant that it was returned to be taken later. The original rest day was probably cancelled because of insufficient staff, but then the same staff whose day was cancelled then took this extra day off, creating another shortage later, and so it goes on. I’m sure successive Home Secretaries would prefer it if police officers never took time off at all.

  Every police force has its major events which the public sees as wonderful. For most cops these occasions are quite simply a nightmare. In Nottingham one of the ritual nightmares is the Goose Fair held every year on the first weekend of October. Crime doubles or trebles during the event and gormless people from around the country arrive completely unaware that Hyson Green is one of the worst areas of the city. In the early days of my career it was a huge event for the police. We had enormous mobile catering wagons nearby and cops were drawn in from across the county. Dragging staff from all over never made much sense to me, and they still do it today. People expect you to know your way around and yet they have cops working in areas they’ve never set foot in before, as though the aim is to deliberately make your staff appear stupid. I’ve done it myself many times, wandering around for hours or even days with no local knowledge of the area or its villains. From an operational point of view it’s only mildly better than being utterly pointless.

  Halfway through a shift on Goose Fair duty they’d ram down your throat some awful sloppy meat mixture that I wouldn’t feed to my cat today. But if I’m honest, I quite enjoyed it at the time. They were hot meals on cold nights and they were free. Cops are rarely given anything free these days. Policing the fair usually meant terminal boredom, frequently in the rain. I was once told that if you are ever bored as a cop then you are doing it wrong. Okay, try ‘fixed point’ at the junction of Holland Street and Radford Road for eight hours every night for a week. Standing alone on the same bit of kerb unable to move, save for the yummy slops at half time. On the second night of such unbearable excitement a colleague once brought a hip flask to work which certainly took the edge off the boredom. The public continue to stream by with their kids and balloons and we are told to smile at them. As the night progresses many of the public become quite drunk and so the fun just gets better. In 1990 we started working ten-hour shifts, so what joy that became, standing there for an extra two hours every night.

  In the 1980s it was fashionable for some of the locals to cause trouble on the Saturday night of Goose Fair. I remember running down Noel Street towards the fairground with other cops waving my truncheon around over my head and screaming. I think the kids just wanted some fun because as we neared them they disappeared. In later years I spent time in a van, cruising around the fair with other cops. Sometimes we’d turn the windscreen washer jets to the left and squirt unsuspecting members of the public as we drove by. Cleavage and fancy hairdos were prime targets. They’d never guess it was us. Groups of young ladies were obviously the main targets for extra attention, and ladies, if a cop ever tells you, “I’m sure I’ve come across your face before” it’s not meant as a compliment.

  On the rare occasions during the fair when I wasn’t working fixed point but working normally each shift was spent driving from one job to the next, as usual, taking details of crime. Very often it was from people visiting Nottingham reporting their car broken into. I will never understand why some idiots insist on leaving valuables such as wallets, purses and latterly laptops and other valuables in their cars. You may as well just leave them lying in the street. There are huge problems associated with the theft of a wallet. Credit cards are kept for years by offenders and any form of identity can be used to open store card accounts and all types of fraud. Your credit rating can be damaged for years.

  Luckily in those days if a string of offences were thought to have been committed by the same offender, then it was considered to be ‘a continuing offence’, and only one crime number issued. This was regardless of how many separate victims there were. One morning I dealt with nine cars broken into in a single street in the Aspley area of Nottingham. According to the reporting methods at the time it was one offence. Today the police are supposedly ‘victim led’ which means each victim gets a crime number of their own. This was one of the reasons why crime rose so dramatically when the more ethical recording methods were introduced.

  Statistics could prove anything of course, and they can be manipulated in whatever manner suits. I later saw some of this ‘massaging’ of the figures which resulted in Nottinghamshire Constabulary along with several other forces getting a very public roasting from the HMIC, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary. The police were caught like naughty schoolboys cheating on their homework, altering the figures in a manner that was euphemistically known as ‘unethical crime recording’.

  STATISTICS AND STARBURSTS

  At times of crisis in any organisation the management often run around like headless chickens, and so it was with our gaffers at Fraggle Rock. Those of us on the ground actually doing the work inevitably suffered. Frequent pointless changes were made in the hope the problem would mysteriously disappear. They changed the people in charge of individual sections, stations and entire areas, and they also tampered with people’s shift patterns.

  They might change the names of things just for the sake of it in the hope of improvement when all the time no real difference occurs. It probably looked good and someone at Fraggle Rock no doubt gained their promotion from it. This was a constant problem generated by the police promotion system. Sergeant and inspector ranks required the passing of an exam, but above that you needed to get yourself noticed and ingratiate yourself with those higher up. I love the analogy of the police rank structure appearing like a tree full of monkeys. Looking down all you see is faces looking up, but looking up all you see is arseholes.

  It seemed that ridiculous ideas were often as valid as the good ones, just so long as they improved your own profile. If your crazy idea didn’t work in practice but gained you promotion then it was a success, even if it cost the taxpayer huge amounts to rectify afterwards. To obtain promotion you needed a sponsor, and this still applies today in our wonderful world of equal opportunities. If you don’t have some high ranking gaffers looking down on you approvingly, then you’ve got no chance, or so I’m told. It seems nothing’s really changed since the good old days before all the current EO nonsense.

  Most of the changes from the small to the enormous were usually dismal failures. Some bizarre
decisions were made by management, most of them hopeless, and when you raise your hand to point out the same thing had been tried years before with disastrous results they will say you are a dinosaur, resistant to change. It’s not surprising that poor decisions are made by those sitting in an ivory tower insulated from the real world. They say Hitler was not told the truth by his generals until the Red Army was only 400 yards from the bunker.

  One of the sadder aspects of policing is that rank seems to be used purely as a means to avoid police work. It is extremely rare to see anyone above the rank of sergeant on the front line actually doing the job, as most senior officers seem to work nine to five office hours. The British Army has a philosophy of leading from the front, and a good leader would never expect their troops to do something they would not be willing to do themselves. Having a much anticipated weekend off with your family cancelled to wander about in the rain all night, knowing those who made the decision remain safe at home with their family can only cause resentment. Occasionally you might see a senior officer with a stick and brown leather gloves wandering about for a few hours appearing very sincere, as incongruous as Simon Cowell queuing for a pea mix in your local chip shop.

  In the 1990s crime exploded, and still no-one knew why. It was common to have fifty cars broken into in a single night in the council estates of Aspley and Broxtowe in the west of Nottingham. House burglaries were almost the same. In the Forest Fields area I attended a house that had been broken into seven times. Criminal damage offences were no exception, but the official figures were kept reasonably under control, mainly due to the ‘minor damage book’. Anything deemed to be minor in nature, such as a broken window that might cost £10 to fix, was given a minor damage number. This was permissible up to a maximum of £20. The crucial thing about this of course was that it didn’t generate a recorded crime number. It therefore didn’t exist in the official figures. The public were happy because they were given a vaguely convincing police reference number such as ‘23/July’, and the name of an officer, in case they needed to make an insurance claim. Like many procedures in the police it was something we’d always done but which through necessity grew well beyond its intended purpose. The numbering system started at zero every month, and as the ‘90s progressed the minor damage book became extremely popular. From a routine amount of around twenty-five a month it grew into hundreds each month, and every police station had a minor damage book, so the disposal of crime in this manner was force wide.