Who'd Be a Copper?

by Jonathan Nicholas

  As the crime rate soared the minor damage book began to be used in other imaginative ways. At the scene of a burglary if the offender hadn’t gained entry, instead of being recorded as an attempted burglary the crime was given a minor damage number for the broken window or damaged door. The same applied to thefts from motor vehicles, if the car was damaged but nothing had been stolen. Occasionally senior officers would feel obliged to say something about this inappropriate crime recording, and so for a few days we tried to do it properly before things inevitably returned to normal again. In cases where the damage was of quite high value it was always written as £19.99, the maximum allowable, even if it would obviously cost £100 or more to fix. We didn’t think we were doing anything underhand; it was simply the most efficient way of dealing with such low-level offences.

  We wondered why the public bothered reporting such things because nothing was ever done about them, but of course they didn’t know this. Recording minor crime therefore became something of an administrative inconvenience, all rather pointless, but grudgingly necessary. Failing to record crime correctly was just one ploy used by the police. Another was detecting non-existent crimes. This involved taking criminals ‘nodding’: driving them around in a plain car asking them to point out which houses they’d burgled. Bearing in mind these people were dishonest and it was in their interests to admit as many as possible. With little or no further corroboration the burglary at that address was then marked off as detected. It was an extremely inaccurate method and a source of embarrassment when occasionally an occupant revealed they hadn’t even been burgled.

  By the mid-90s crime was rising by almost 20% every year. It was so dramatic that the Home Office was becoming concerned. The biggest worry came when for the first time the media were interested. In 1983 there were 5.9 million recorded crimes in England and Wales. In 1995 The British Crime Survey estimated there were 19.1 million. There was increasing pressure to slow down the rise in crime and at the same time increase detection rates, which were so appalling that for certain crimes you had more than a 90% chance of getting away with it. I found it quite surprising everyone wasn’t committing crime, the likelihood of being caught was so remote.

  More imaginative ways were therefore sought to massage the figures. Changing existing detected non-crime offences into detected crimes was a brilliant method. On more than one occasion I saw a sergeant spend huge amounts of time searching through the hand-written prisoners list, a book where each arrest was recorded. Acting on the instructions of a gaffer each arrest was examined in detail in case it could be changed into a detected crime. A breach of the peace for example was not a crime, but if it was somehow changed to the offence of affray, which is a crime, then it was given a crime number. It was obviously detected because the offender had been in custody. The detection counted at that time, and so even if the prisoner’s list book was years old it still counted in the current year. The detection rates soared as a result. Though not illegal as such, it was clearly unethical. Most annoying about this little scam was a person complicit in it later worked in the PSD and approached their role with religious zeal, or so I’m told, showing no mercy to other colleagues caught being similarly unethical. This was hypocrisy of the highest order.

  Despite all these efforts Nottinghamshire still had one of the highest crime rates in the country, so you have to ask yourself what the other forces were doing in order to keep their figures down.

  At the start of the ‘90s each working day or night was spent relentlessly driving from one job to the next recording crime. Unless the offender was at the scene waiting to hand himself in to the police the majority of crimes were recorded and forgotten. It seemed we had somehow returned to the policing methods employed during the miners’ dispute.

  Uniform section had haemorrhaged staff into the new squads and experience was not being replaced. Despite a culture of marking off many crimes as undetected I frequently had twenty-five or more potentially detectable crimes in my docket, with little or no time to deal with them, and every day I picked up more. I should have followed the advice of many other colleagues who simply refused to take on any crime investigations. Some cops never had anything in their dockets. This was due to a combination of being bone idle, and the way they dealt with incidents. They would simply advise the victim there was nothing that could be done. I had a little difficulty with this. I still found crime interesting and if it was easily detectable then why not take on the job and see it through? As a result I began to sink under the pressure of work and needed a break from response duties.

  At the end of 1990 I escaped for a while and spent four weeks at training school learning to operate the HOLMES computer system. It was a very intense course but it was good to be away from round-the-clock shifts for a while. HOLMES stands for Home Office Major Enquiry System, and was a database primarily used as the name suggests, in large incidents such as murders. It was incredibly complex and I found the course quite challenging. One of the problems was that once trained in the system you were only ever called in to use it on an ad-hoc basis, and apart from occasional refresher courses it was a while before I used the system for real.

  In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s the British police began to take riot training a little more seriously. Even today it isn’t brilliant, mainly because in this country we don’t have an equivalent of the French paramilitary CRS. In typical Dad’s Army fashion the British ‘riot police’ are in fact ordinary coppers dressed up to look the part. Whenever there are riots in the UK it makes me smile when the media refer to the cops who turn up as riot police. We don’t have any riot police. Like me they were probably drawn from another role, given a few hours training and fitted with protective clothing. In the early days we used old army bases or airfields; anywhere we could find open spaces and empty buildings to stomp around in and chuck things at one another. I remember an occasion on the tennis courts at Epperstone Manor practising ‘bussing’ and ‘de-bussing’ as we called getting in and out of the van. We didn’t even have a van so we had to imagine it was there, ten blokes on a tennis court playing pretend. There was great hilarity when one member of the group thought he was exiting via the door but it was actually an imaginary window.

  Much of the riot training was good fun, but some of it was frankly baffling. The ‘starburst’ method for capturing a road junction was unnecessarily technical and involved precise numbers of cops running in distinct patterns across the road up to the corners of buildings. It seemed that if there were five or six corners instead of four the whole thing wouldn’t work. When a group has to practise a manoeuvre countless times it should be realised that perhaps in the heat of battle, at night, it may not go according to plan.

  The training was usually spread over two days and in the beginning the only protective clothing we had was a NATO crash helmet and overalls. The clothing didn’t fit properly and we looked like we were each wearing a dark blue Babygro. Day one was spent standing around learning the various manoeuvres, marching together between the various practice points. Part of our repertoire was the building entry, where a dozen of us using long plastic shields held together as a roof structure would trudge our way up to the door like Roman soldiers, and in turn enter the building. It acquired the nickname ‘trudging and wedging’ as a result. We were also pelted with real petrol bombs. If the flames came under the shield then you were supposed to drop your chin forward so the helmet visor formed a seal against the chest, but when you did this you couldn’t see where you were going. I forgot to do it once and lost most of my moustache. Human hair has a peculiarly strong smell when burnt, even more so when right under your nose.

  Day two was spent putting all the theory into practice. Students, police recruits and cops from another division gathered as an angry mob throwing heavy wooden blocks. The instructors would also throw petrol bombs. It wasn’t pleasant, particularly on hot days. Then we would be told an entire building was occupied by rioters and we were to go in and remove them. After a succ
essful building entry on the ground floor while being pelted with blocks from above, every room had to be taken individually, with snatch teams running in dragging the ‘prisoners’ away. In one part of the building we faced the ‘mad man in the room’ scenario. This involved the biggest member of the training team being completely padded, leaping about wielding a pick-axe handle and shouting “Come on ye bastards!” Three or four cops with long shields would run at the man and press him up against the wall while colleagues rushed in to restrain him. It sounds quite straightforward but it was usually done in complete darkness except for a member of the team flashing a powerful lamp around behind us. It was noisy, chaotic, sweaty and incredibly dirty work. I later formed part of a three-man team who did this for real one afternoon when a drunken neo-Nazi went berserk with a machete and a bottle of bourbon. It actually worked very well, and I was commended for my bravery, but then so were about a hundred other cops standing around at the scene.

  During one of the practice sessions I pulled my back, which was not surprising considering what we were doing. It was very painful but I managed to carry on. Some of my older colleagues told me to submit an injury on duty report. I hadn’t bothered before, but I was assured that once I had twenty-six and a half years’ service I could use it to get a medical pension, as was customary at the time. A lot of cops in their mid-forties were pensioned off early through illness or injury and the final salary pension was immediately index-linked. Such things are extremely rare today. If you’re not capable of full duties now you will probably just be sacked.

  At the end of the two days’ PSU (Police Support Unit) training, as it was called, we felt quite accomplished, but such training was only ever once or twice a year, so we never really achieved a higher standard. It was always practised with different people too, so you couldn’t become a close cohesive fighting unit. Again, as with so many extracurricular activities, it was done on a voluntary basis, with no extra money in it.

  Despite escaping from the front line occasionally, whenever I returned my docket was still full of unresolved work. The public don’t realise that unless the officer retires or dies, his or her work invariably remains with them forever. Even after lengthy abstractions or annual leave it stays with the same officer. This situation is unchanged to this day.

  I was driving around inner city Nottingham from one job to the next, with barely time for a meal break. I didn’t mind working hard but for the first time I noticed what was really happening. It had been a particularly busy morning and at midday I requested a meal break. I was turned down several times and informed over the radio: “You’re the only one out” so I had to continue. It seemed no-one else was available because they were all busy. I was eventually allowed to return at 2pm when the afternoon shift arrived. I was very tired and hungry. I was shocked when I walked into the station to eat my sandwiches. The canteen was full of cops, both uniform and CID, all sitting around watching England in the World Cup.

  HOLMES

  In 1992 a Nottingham milkman was bludgeoned to death in his garage. The scene was an incredible mess and at first it was thought he’d been shot in the head. I was told to report to a police station closer to the scene to be a HOLMES indexer for the first time. A conference room on the top floor became the incident room and I started immediately. All rest days were cancelled and it was hard work but financially very rewarding, with four hours paid overtime every day for the first three weeks.

  It was very interesting following a murder enquiry from the beginning all the way through to the end. The victim became known as N1, or Nominal Number One. From that moment every other person involved in the enquiry was given a similar consecutive number until eventually there were thousands on the system. I worked with a handful of other cops entering information into the computer, but there were quite a few civilian members of staff involved.

  A detective superintendent ran the enquiry, and each task he wanted performing was known as an action. These were in the main hand-written instructions on specific forms, such as ‘Seize victim’s clothing’ or ‘Conduct a fingertip search of the scene’ and so on. Completed actions were then fed into the computer. Inputting, or indexing as it was known, was mostly straightforward but some witness statements could take hours or even days to index correctly. Each address and name had to be searched for and if it wasn’t already on the system it must be created. Every piece of information then had to be linked to another and it was done to some strict rules and conventions, so that all the information was searchable, even the free text fields. Every piece of information was linked to something else; it couldn’t simply appear in isolation on the system.

  The work was very intense and was made even harder by an obnoxious fat bloke occasionally shouting abuse at people across the office. He’d obviously been to the same charm school as my tutor constable, and the only good thing about him is that he’s probably dead now. I don’t care who you are, there’s no excuse for rudeness.

  It was on this enquiry that two detectives spent a whole day looking for a Nottingham company called Unident. They thought it might be connected to the Boots factory in some way, or with the manufacture of dentures. There were dozens of dental practices in Nottingham; perhaps the van belonged to one of them? The action they had been given was to trace a ‘Unident van’. They finally returned to the office after an exhausting day to be told that ‘Unident’ is a HOLMES rules and conventions abbreviation for ‘unidentified’.

  As the enquiry progressed there were frequent visitors to the incident room asking “Has your wonderful machine found out who the murderer is yet?” in only half-joking comments. A huge piece of paper ten yards long and a yard wide was fixed to a wall and it was the first time I’d ever seen a mouse, not the furry variety, but the type linked to a computer. It was used to construct an enormous Anacapa chart linking everything together. The victim was researched extremely thoroughly. All his friends and family were identified, work colleagues, school friends, girlfriends, everyone he knew dating right back to his birth. They were all investigated on ‘TIE’ actions, Trace, Interview & Eliminate, and everything about his private life scrutinised for a possible motive. Think about your own life and how many people you may have upset over the years. It was quite revealing.

  Eventually it was discovered the victim had been seeing someone else’s girlfriend, and when the boyfriend found out he lost his temper. He was pumped up on steroids and smashed the victim’s head open with a baseball bat. It was one of the oldest motives in history.

  At first the suspects were ‘invited’ to the police station for interview and not arrested. I thought this was strange, and very different to how the police usually operate. In the early days of my service people were ‘banged up’ and left to sweat in the cell for hours and then repeatedly interviewed in order to get the cough. The PACE Act changed this of course. There was now a limited amount of time someone could be kept in custody, and the clock started ticking as soon as they were arrested. You’ll hear this on some of the more authentic cop dramas when they refer to ‘the clock’s ticking’. It’s easier to get a time extension for serious crime but why do this if the suspect would come in of their own free will?

  They were both interviewed under caution, but not under arrest, and then allowed to leave the station. Human beings are flawed creatures. In the next few days the suspects couldn’t help boasting to others about how the cops had nothing on them and they’d just got away with murder.

  They were both arrested and eventually convicted of killing the milkman. It was interesting to note that old fashioned policing still played a significant role in the offenders’ capture. Purely by chance one of them had been name-checked by a routine traffic patrol close to the scene just after the murder, which caused them both to be linked to it right from the start.

  In the same year I was given more overtime when I took part in Operation Container. As the crime rate soared British prisons began filling up and Nottingham’s Central Police Station took servi
ng prisoners for a while. It was very lucrative and quite interesting. Many of the prisoners were serving long sentences. No doubt they resented the conditions in police cells, they were far from ideal, but a lot of them didn’t bother to dress, shave or even wash, but why would you? Some had to be split up too, because they were doing questionable things to one another. I could only guess.

  Every year at the height of summer Nottinghamshire Constabulary held their Force Gala at Epperstone Manor. It was a huge event with stalls, games, live music and a few surprises. The mounted section provided wonderful entertainment, and the horses were particularly popular with children. The dog section’s display was dramatic, with a padded criminal running across the huge playing field being brought down and partially eaten by one of the Alsatian dogs. There were police cars and motorbikes available for perusal and it was a wonderful event widely advertised in local media and usually well attended. There was always an excellent family atmosphere with a beer tent and static displays, all fantastic for public relations.