Who'd Be a Copper?

by Jonathan Nicholas

  I was shocked when I heard years later the force had decided to sell the manor house. Everything was sold, including all the land. It was a sad day, but no doubt driven by increasing financial restraints. The ‘80s and ‘90s had seen huge investment in the police service, at a time when crime was rising sharply. I suspect people began wondering where their money was going. You can buy some of the manor now; it’s been renovated and turned into luxury apartments.

  In addition to hearing about the loss of Epperstone I later found out that cops were no longer being sent to RAF Dishforth. For a time Nottinghamshire recruits were sent to a training establishment at Ryton on Dunsmore, near Coventry, until even that came to an end. New recruits began attending further education colleges, mixing with ordinary students. In my naivety I wondered if they cleared the car park every morning at 6.30am for drill. I was astonished to hear they didn’t even learn any drill. No parades, no marching about of any sort. It was all gone, as were residential training courses. No more saluting, standing up for senior officers, pressing of uniforms and bulling boots. Little wonder that nowadays you often hear senior officers addressed by their first names, and cops openly challenging orders over the radio. The old forms of discipline, and to a certain extent pride in the job as a vocation, began to evaporate. It was gradually replaced by a kind of passive-aggressive, retrospective discipline, whereby even the smallest error made years before could now get you into trouble. Nottinghamshire also dropped the rather quaint title of Constabulary and became Nottinghamshire Police.

  When working on response duties my arrest rate was high, averaging between seventy and a hundred a year. If this doesn’t sound a lot then bear in mind the majority of these cases then required prosecuting. Another fact the public probably don’t realise is that the prosecution of offenders is usually done by the arresting officer. When the CPS, the Crown Prosecution Service, began operating in England in 1986 I thought we were in for some radical changes. I imagined cops would no longer have to prosecute offenders; it would all be done by the CPS. What a brilliant idea it was, freeing up police time in this manner. Sadly it hasn’t worked like this. Every bit of evidence still has to be gathered by the arresting officer, all the statements, exhibits, interviews, paperwork, everything connected to the case. The prosecution file for an incident with two or more offenders could take weeks to prepare, and even then it was likely to bounce back from the CPS when they asked for additional statements or exhibits. As a response cop these files still had to be done in-between responding to yet more incidents every day. It was a never ending cycle, like Sisyphus rolling his stone uphill forever. You could never achieve a point where you’d finished everything, and this continual absence of closure can sometimes feel quite draining. Nothing has changed. At least after the introduction of the ten-hour shift system things improved slightly. The biggest difference was that instead of just three days off after a week of night shifts we now had six consecutive rest days. This was wonderful. It meant of course that if you could book your night’s week off you’d effectively be given two weeks off work. I had a young family, so this gave me some quality time at home.

  Many of the arrests made on response were mundane but some were noteworthy. Good arrests usually occurred because I just happened to be in the right place, which was quite often considering the area and the amount of time I was there. I arrested a young lad for street robbery in the Forest Fields area of Nottingham and it was my first encounter with a person who was already gaining a reputation. He’d just robbed an elderly lady by grabbing her from behind, pulling her to the ground and then stamping on her head. I was driving nearby immediately after the incident. The first thing the lad said to me was, “You can fuck off till I speak to my solicitor!” He kicked, screamed and threatened violence, and was horrible. He was eleven years old.

  I remember my interview with this lad. His mother wasn’t interested in attending the station, and no-one seemed to know who or where his father was. Consequently I interviewed him with his solicitor, an additional on-call ‘appropriate adult’, and a social worker. There were four of us seated around this little lad all paid for by the taxpayer, while his legs barely reached the floor he was so small. I spent thirty minutes asking him questions about the offence while we all made notes. It wasn’t a difficult task to write down the replies because they merely consisted of either ‘no comment’ or ‘fuck off’, or both. I wondered what would become of the lad when he grew up. I noticed his name appeared every now and again on the prisoner’s list in-between years of absence. He was one of our most frequent customers, and he still is. The old lady recovered physically after several weeks in hospital, but she never ventured out alone again.

  Old ladies were not immune from breaking the law though. I visited a young couple in the Basford area of Nottingham who had been receiving hundreds of nuisance calls over several months. The caller never spoke, but just listened to them asking who it was, pleading and then shouting down the phone to the silent caller. I submitted a request for a trace to British Telecom and drove to the address. We have an image in our minds of such an offender perhaps being a strange, dirty old man, particularly if the calls were mainly answered by a female. The line belonged to a Nottingham address and when I knocked on the door a seventy-three-year-old lady was sitting alone watching Coronation Street. The phone was next to her on a table.

  She flatly denied making any nuisance calls. I began to doubt myself, she was so convincing. The computer printout from BT was unequivocal; this person was definitely the subscriber. She continued to deny it until I showed her the evidence. After some quiet contemplation she broke down. She’d selected the couple’s number entirely at random from the phone book. She’d tried many other numbers but they simply put the phone down. She enjoyed calling the Basford couple because they always spoke to her. She admitted she was terribly lonely.

  At Christmas and New Year if not rostered to work we were offered overtime. It meant double time and a rest day in lieu. I took the opportunity to work whenever I could, despite, or more accurately because I had a young family. Our second child arrived in 1993 and for years daddy either came home from work on Christmas morning, staying up for a while until they’d opened their presents or went to work after bedtime Christmas night. If you work shifts then you will know these things are the norm.

  In the summer of 1994 a new baby was stolen from Nottingham’s Queen’s Medical Centre. I spent several weeks working as an indexer on the HOLMES system, assisting the team of detectives to trace Abbie Humphries, who was only three hours old. I could only imagine what the parents must have been going through, and I had real sympathy because of the age of my own family at the time. We had a huge number of calls from the public, which then generated vast quantities of indexing, and Abbie’s parents even had a letter of support from Princess Diana. As usual at the start of the enquiry money was no object and we were working long hours on cancelled rest days. The atmosphere in the incident room was tense and there seemed to be a genuine sense of urgency more acute than in the milkman murder.

  After a long computer-aided process of elimination Abbie was found safe and well in a house not far from the hospital. She’d been missing for seventeen days. The offender was a young local woman who attended the hospital dressed as a nurse with the specific intent of stealing a baby. Security at maternity units was quickly improved as a direct result of this incident. My diary states I worked 166 hours overtime and claimed £86.84 in travel expenses that year.

  THE CRIME DESK

  In 1995 crime continued rising at a phenomenal rate and was completely out of control. There seemed no end to its upward progression despite the police being awarded double digit pay rises every year. As a response driver I wondered how much longer this situation could continue, we seemed to be busier every week. I drew a pyramid chart of job satisfaction and workload versus roles within the police, because it seemed to me that a tiny proportion of police employees, mainly the response cops, actually did anythin
g, despite the staff car park being full every day. Nothing’s changed; response cops continue to be the hard-pressed front line of policing. It’s another strange dichotomy that they have the most daily contact with the public yet within the job their status is lower than that of caretaker. If you stay on response for more than a few years you are seen by everyone else in the job as a fool and by the gaffers as a complete idiot. I asked a colleague who left response for the CID whether she felt sorry for those of us left behind at the sharp end. She simply shrugged her shoulders and said: “No, why should I?” Why indeed.

  The amount of crime we were recording was astonishing and it seemed we were on the brink of anarchy. A colleague who retired at this time was so convinced society was collapsing that he bought a croft in the Scottish Highlands in order to escape the oncoming calamity. The tradition of sending a police officer to all reported crime had to stop; there wasn’t enough time or staff available. Crime still had to be recorded, and the public hoodwinked into thinking we were doing something about it. How could this deception be achieved? The solution came with the introduction of the crime desk. I saw it evolve from one cop alone in an office with a phone and a kettle, to dozens of cops and civilians sitting in front of computers.

  The police service desperately needed an upgrade, as we were still using typewriters in the early ‘90s. Computer monitors began appearing in offices all around the station, and it seems odd looking back now, but I don’t remember any formal training being given in their use, or even any being offered. I think it was just assumed we already knew how to operate Microsoft Windows, which of course many of us did. I remember the first computer we had at home in the late ‘90s with dial-up internet costing £1,400.

  I had a slight head start having been operating the PNC and HOLMES systems, but Windows was entirely new and we learnt from each other. We were told to log in using our six digit pay code and to create a password of our own. Hardly anyone knew their pay code; it was something that was only used for overtime forms, so from then on it had to be memorised.

  No-one ever relished using a typewriter, and so when computers arrived in huge numbers the simplest tasks began to take hours. Instead of just two monitors in the control room they were suddenly everywhere, like Daleks at a Doctor Who convention. If you take a look inside a police station today you will see everyone sitting in front of a computer. It’s hard to remember the times we didn’t have them and we worked for a living instead. It seemed they were here to stay so I applied for as many training courses as I could and soon I had a job on the crime desk.

  I was busy at home with a young family and initially the crime desk worked more sociable hours, so it suited me at the time. No allowances were made for sleepless nights spent with sick babies and I needed a break from twenty-four-hour shift work. At its inception there were just two of us and our job was to deflect demand by ringing callers and giving them a crime number over the phone. We were breaking new ground and we were very often asked: “Aren’t you coming round to have a look?” or similar. In actual fact there wasn’t a lot of point visiting some crimes, but I admit a lot of evidence may have been lost on occasions. If the crime was potentially detectable we were supposed to create an incident and an officer was sent to the address for further enquiries, but we made sure this didn’t happen very often. We even asked victims to conduct some enquiries themselves. You might think this sounds ridiculous, but if my car had been broken into on the driveway I would ask my neighbours if they’d seen anything. It sounds simple, but we tried our best to resolve everything ourselves, that was our purpose after all. The work was easy at first and we had time to get our own affairs in order.

  In all my service I’ve probably only fallen out with half a dozen colleagues, but all of them were above me in rank. When I was on response I brought in a man for a meter break when I had been told to work response duties all day. The man needed nicking, and it couldn’t wait any longer. The sergeant took me into an office, telling me I’d disobeyed his orders. At first I didn’t know what to say to him, because it was true, I had disobeyed his orders, but he began to get personal, and because I wasn’t fighting back he threatened me with disciplinary action. This is the way bullies operate. They sense they are having an impact and then apply further pressure and project their own ineptitude onto others. I sat listening to the man ranting at me and eventually I said to him:

  “Okay. Try disciplining me for making an arrest and see how far you get,” and I walked out the office. Some colleagues were rude when faced with similar confrontations, but it wasn’t in my nature. Perhaps I should have simply told him to f-off. Nothing happened about the matter, and the man never tried anything like it again, in fact, he stopped talking to me altogether.

  The biggest such problem I ever had was with an inspector, and the sour relationship persisted until I retired. In 1998 a particularly awful family left the street in which I lived. I’d spoken to the family before when one of the adults allowed her twelve-year-old child to drive their Ford Sierra XR4 up and down the street, so they clearly didn’t like me. Some of the neighbours put balloons on their houses the day they moved out, the family were so unpopular. My mistake was allowing my wife to do the same. The mother of the child knew I worked at Radford Road and so she drove straight there in person, to complain about my wife’s balloons. I thought the size and shape of my wife’s balloons were our business and no-one else’s, but I was mistaken. A particular gaffer just happened to be on duty at the time. I have no idea what she told him but I passed the office and noticed she was wearing an extremely short skirt. When the woman had left I was then summoned into his office.

  “You’ve been causing problems for a family on your road.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You’ve been disrespectful and have been abusing your authority; you’ve been rude and officious.” This was even before I’d said a word. I explained the situation but he clearly wasn’t listening. I told him about the time I saw the woman allowing her son to drive and to my astonishment he said:

  “You should have rung the police and not got involved. You were abusing your authority.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “What if the child had run someone over and I’d not intervened?”

  “You shouldn’t get involved,” he kept repeating these same words. I was becoming very angry. I should have definitely told him to f-off, but I allowed him to carry on. I still held feelings of deference towards senior officers, and the shiny metal pips on his shoulders were glinting at me, as a reminder of who was talking. But I knew I was right and he was wrong. Eventually, after several minutes, instead of being rude to him I stood up to leave and began walking towards the door. He sprang to his feet and placed himself between me and the door, with his arms extended, blocking my way.

  “You’re not going anywhere!” he shouted

  “Yes I am!” and I opened the door and left. I walked around the building into the night kitchen and sat down. I couldn’t believe what had happened. In the next moment the man came into the room.

  “You can’t talk to me like this, I’m an inspector, and I haven’t finished with you!”

  I should have approached the matter differently. The man was clearly deluded, and the whole situation now reminds me of a sketch from Dad’s Army, with Captain Mainwaring desperately trying to assert his authority. At the time it wasn’t the least bit funny. A colleague heard the argument and agreed to sit in the man’s office with me. Another inspector sat with the man. He and I then spent twenty minutes bickering while my colleague and the other inspector watched on. Nothing ever happened about it and I wasn’t disciplined. It was all extremely childish and an example of very poor leadership from a man who seemed to relish bullying.

  The upward march of crime continued, and from dealing with half a dozen crimes a day, by 2000 it had become almost intolerable. From the initial two members of staff on the crime desk we then had three. We were located in an office adjacent to th
e control room and in winter it was bitterly cold and in summer it was baking hot. The first winter we occupied the office we asked for the heating to be repaired. A female civilian administrator came downstairs to feel the cold and a caretaker later fiddled with the convection radiators but still very little heat emerged. We resorted to boiling a kettle dozens of times a day in the hope the resultant clouds of steam would warm the room. In summer we were given an odd machine on wheels the size of a Dalek and told it was an air-conditioning unit. The control room next door had expensive air-conditioning installed which we found out was not for the sake of the staff but because the computers functioned better in a fixed temperature. Our air-conditioning unit was a bizarre machine that required gallons of water every day and a huge flexible pipe to be hung out an open window like a tumble-dryer. The resultant air from this thing was only slightly cooler but saturated with moisture. Everything became warm and clammy as a result and human skin glistened with sweat. I thought I was back in Brisbane at Christmas. The stupid machine was booted around the office for a while until it ended its days in one corner, sad and redundant.

  At the time we were using the CRIS system, the Crime Recording Interim System, to record crime. It was a truly awful database and required a small army of civilian clerks to input the officers’ hand-written reports. On many occasions huge amounts of money were thrown at it in the form of overtime just to keep it going. Very often it lumbered along weeks or even months behind due to the time lag involved in the inputting, so any searching for missing property or descriptions of suspects was pointless. It was a complete waste of time and yet we were all slaves to it. The tail was very definitely wagging the dog.

  One evening in the CID office at Radford Road I was working four hours overtime purely to input crimes into the CRIS monster when a visitor came into the room. There were several experienced detectives also working overtime on the same menial task, which was an astonishing waste of time and money. A man in early middle age sat beside me and enquired as to what I was doing.