Who'd Be a Copper?

by Jonathan Nicholas

  “Oh, well, it’s connected to some comments you made about Islam a few years ago. We can’t have you on the team because of it, sorry.” That was it. No recourse to appeal. Clearly someone had made a phone call. My ‘unofficial’ file had been consulted and the email discovered from four years before. It seemed I would continue pounding the corridors of the hospital.

  The appeasement of Islam in 2006 was typical of the dangerous politically correct nonsense in existence at the time. The situation grew progressively worse and in the last few years Islam has been deliberately singled out by many authorities in Britain for preferential treatment. ‘Equality under the law’ is the saying, but clearly some are more equal than others. I don’t care who you are, no-one should be favoured by a country’s law enforcement officers.

  I suspect the main reason for this is simply fear of upsetting Muslims, and fear of being accused of racism. It’s not the first time the police, and no doubt other public bodies, have been lenient in their dealings with a minority. I was even guilty of it myself at times. An accusation of racism can result in immediate dismissal from any job in the public sector today, and even imprisonment. In the latter half of my service I became reluctant to stop a motorist if the driver was from a visible minority, particularly if I was on my own. “You’ve only stopped me because...” was a common comment. The job was hard enough, so why would you want to create extra problems and scrutiny from the PSD? I’d heard a rumour that someone high up in the IPCC, the Independent Police Complaints Commission, had been heard saying about police complaints “There’s no smoke without fire”, which is outrageous if true. It would mean there is now a clear presumption of guilt on the part of police officers.

  The same thing happened in the ‘80s after the police were repeatedly given a bloody nose by vociferous members of the West Indian community. As with the miners’ dispute I could see both sides. Genuine grievances and feelings of being disenfranchised have an obvious cause and effect. Some of the greatest changes in society occurred as a result of civil unrest, but not without a great deal of suffering.

  Militant Islam is a fearful entity, and so almost anything is sacrificed in order to keep it securely in the box. It is easier for everyone to let something go rather than pursue it and cause trouble. The ultimate manifestation of this attitude is of course what’s happened in Rochdale, Rotherham, Luton, Derby, and other British cities where Pakistani men have been apparently deliberately permitted to abuse young girls. The unintended legacy of such leniency has now caused increased fear and distrust of Muslims, thereby causing further community tension.

  But the problem continues to worsen. Every year British police are given particular lengthy instructions regarding Ramadan, and how they should be careful when dealing with Muslims. The tone, if not the actual words, mean that cops should avoid them for a month every year. No other group in society is in receipt of such blatant favouritism. We were told not to eat in front of Muslim colleagues during Ramadan fasting, in case it upset them. There were around forty people in the last department I worked in and a single Muslim who wasn’t the least bit religious and didn’t care at all, but still we were given these orders. Why?

  In 2005 Trevor Philips, the chair of the Commission for Racial Equality warned of increased segregation between ethnic groups in Britain, and David Cameron admitted in 2011 that ‘multiculturalism’ in Britain had failed, and as a concept it was now dead. Ask yourself this question, how much do you known about Sikhism, Judaism, or Islam? How many friends and acquaintances do you have from other communities or faiths? If you live in middle-class suburbia I would guess it’s close to nil. A Sikh colleague once showed me some photos of a family wedding and explained the food, the dress and the rituals that took place. I asked her how long she’d lived in Britain, and she replied, “I was born in Derby.” I knew nothing about her way of life. This shouldn’t happen.

  People have a tendency to fear things they don’t understand. There are areas of Britain that no longer resemble this country. Minorities have been allowed to ghettoise themselves and have failed to integrate. This is a disaster for Britain. My suggestion for a solution to these British ghettos is a radical one, but it’s been done before. Every city in the country has undergone re-housing of huge numbers of people during the slum clearances. We have poverty in concentrated areas now, but it’s not financial. These areas need to be cleared and the people moved, welcomed and integrated into the rest of society, now, before it’s too late.

  We are all equal under the law, and preferential treatment should not be given to anyone, whoever they are. Neglect of duty should be feared more than upsetting any potentially vociferous minority. The current Home Secretary stated recently that ‘institutionalised political correctness’ was to blame for the Rotherham child abuse scandal. Only a few years ago the police were described as ‘institutionally racist’. You can’t have both, so make up your mind what you want, but do it quickly.

  The government created this mess; it’s their job to sort it out.

  CANNABIS AND CACK

  I attended more training courses. We regularly had first aid courses, which were mandatory and one of the few useful things I ever learnt in the police service, apart from being able to tolerate idiots. I also attended a Final Warning Clinic course. Restorative Justice was supposedly a new concept. The offender, usually a young person, was forced to confront their offending behaviour, sometimes with the victim. It had been trialled and was deemed to be a success. Usually it meant the offender was given a final warning, and next time he or she would attend court. This wasn’t a new concept of course. I’d been doing it unofficially for years, as many of us had. It’s called good coppering. This formalised the process and was interesting, even though there was so much mind-boggling waffle as to make it almost incomprehensible. We were supposed to read pages of formal jargon to the child and their parent/guardian/older sibling or whoever could be bothered to turn up with them, but most of it was dumped in favour of a common sense chat about future prospects in a life of crime. A twelve-year-old boy with ADHD not currently in school accompanied by a semi-literate, unemployed nineteen-year-old brother will not understand lengthy legal claptrap.

  A small number of us were trained in it, and we took it in turn to host the clinic usually during an evening for a couple of hours. It sometimes meant shift changes and typical of most such extra work in the police there wasn’t any additional money in it, you did it for the experience.

  On 1st April 2007 staff at Fraggle Rock or their partners at the city council, or both working together, decided to rename my beat area and the surrounding beats with a fantastical new title. It was henceforth to be known as the ‘Natural Neighbourhood Co-terminus Super Output Area’. I checked the date, but it was real. Someone was being paid a lot of money for this. I imagined the inventors of the title sitting around at home one night listening to Pink Floyd, off their tits on weed, suddenly having a Eureka moment when it popped into their head. It was like a postwar Stalinist five-year plan, more idea than substance. Yet again it was telling us to do something we were already doing.

  The beat manager, as my role was now described, worked with a team of PCSOs, the Housing Patch Manager, a special constable and some CPOs. I never had a ‘special’ working with me, perhaps because I was now too old and grumpy, but more probably because my beat area was deemed to be ‘not busy enough’. It wasn’t busy because I’d worked damned hard to make it that way. My opinion of special constables was quite low anyway, and I was glad I didn’t have one. When I was on response in the ‘80s and ‘90s male response drivers were given female specials to be chauffeured around for a few hours in the day-time, but never at night or weekends when it was busy or dangerous. I once attended a domestic incident in Basford when driving a police van full of specials on an evening shift. I remember standing in the tiny living room of the terraced house in Isandula Road when quite suddenly my police radio became incredibly loud. I turned around to see nine specials crammin
g themselves into the room behind me each with a gormless grin and their radios on full volume. A colleague once remarked that if you told a plumber “Here you are mate, take these people around with you for a day, they know fuck all about plumbing but take them with you anyway,” they might not be too impressed. All they can usefully do is watch. I know the Met once spent a fortune on recruiting hundreds of specials and after they all resigned the sum total they had gained after spending millions of pounds amounted to just one person. Policing today is difficult and dangerous, and I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to do it, paid or otherwise.

  Nottingham now had CPOs working with the police. These were Community Protection Officers, employed by the city council. They also wore police uniforms but had flat caps on their heads like the PCSOs. Only real cops wear helmets, so remember that if you ever want one, though specials can wear them too. The CPOs have a vital role in ensuring the safety of Nottingham’s population in that they have to find a minimum number of dog shit offences each month. They are also told to issue tickets for general littering, which includes chucking things out of car windows. Catching people for this is easier than you might think. If a cigarette end or any litter is launched into the street from a car window the CPOs make a note of the registration number and check the vehicle. They have full access to all the police computer systems. I was trained for months on these systems with warnings about data protection and so on, but now these council employees have been given full access. What continues to amaze me is the fact that most people pay these fines of up to £70, when it seems to me there is little or no evidence to prove the offence. There’s a story of some CPOs with binoculars sitting in a police station near traffic lights all day looking for littering drivers, but I haven’t seen it myself, so I don’t know if it’s true.

  Traffic wardens were disbanded, and parking tickets were taken away from the police. The council set up parking wardens instead. These were yet more people who were allowed to wander about looking like cops. Traffic wardens and cops had been quite used to potential trouble from abusive motorists but the new parking wardens found the great British public a bit of a handful. For years these wardens had to be accompanied by a police officer, particularly at night, to prevent them from being assaulted. So the warden idea was presumably created to save money and yet they needed a cop for protection, usually while being paid overtime. I made quite a bit of money from the scheme so I wasn’t complaining.

  In the same year I attended Warwick Crown Court to give evidence. Crown Court appearances are relatively rare, particularly for a ‘wooden top’ as uniformed officers like me were generally known. The CPS won’t run anything unless there’s at least a 70% chance of success at court, which usually ensures a guilty plea, even if it is at the last minute. There were ten of us cops at court to give evidence against the accused, and it must have cost a fortune. The difference in this case was that the man in the dock was a colleague. He’d been suspended on full pay for three and a half years, pending the trial. He’d been accused by the Nottinghamshire Police Professional Standards Department, the PSD, of corruption relating to witnesses and I was there because I’d provided a witness statement. I had been asked if I’d ever seen the officer in possession of blank but signed witness statements. I said no. Had I ever been asked by the officer to obtain signed but blank witness statements? I said no. This was the sum total of my input. I wondered why I’d been called, as it seemed to me that I had no evidence to offer. I swore the oath and gave my evidence in court, dutifully scanning the jury as I did so. In my opinion I hadn’t seen the accused doing anything wrong. In the waiting room afterwards I spoke to other colleagues who had a similar story. None of us understood why we were there. It seemed halfway through the day the judge came to the same conclusion and threw it out of court. You have to ask yourself how much the whole sorry mess had cost the taxpayers of Nottingham.

  You could find out under a freedom of information request just how many cops in your local force are currently suspended on full pay. Ask them how many lengthy and very costly suspensions resulted in little or no action. Then you could ask for a rate rebate, and see how far you get.

  As an award winning cop I was asked to sit on a committee known as the ‘On the Streets Working Group’. It was chaired by the deputy chief constable and at the first meeting there were a dozen of us seated around one of the main conference tables at Fraggle Rock. In essence it seemed the gaffers had lost touch with the sharp end and they wanted to canvas opinion. To be fair, most gaffers were promoted off the streets quickly and so it wasn’t surprising. I remember a superintendent once made a comment which clearly indicated his distance from the front line by telling a packed briefing room that members of the public had to ‘pass the attitude test’ in dealings with the police. There was some truth in it of course, but by then it was years since anyone could actually say such a thing aloud.

  It was nice to think they might listen to us and we were encouraged to be frank, without fear of reprisal, though none of us believed this second assurance. One of the PCSOs present made a comment about not taking action when faced with a gang of youths in a dark alley, for fear of getting her head kicked in. The deputy chief thought she was joking, and was astonished to think that one of his hard working staff wouldn’t risk a damned good kicking and three months in hospital for twenty grand a year. We told him some very awkward home truths and despite warm assurances we would meet regularly there were only a few such meetings before he suddenly became too busy. This was a shame. Those at the top of any huge organisation do lose touch with the workers at the bottom, and to be fair it’s understandable, but command with no consultation or knowledge of the sharp end is simply disguised arrogance, because it certainly is not good leadership.

  Cannabis factories were springing up everywhere in Nottingham in 2007, and continue to do so today. How the offenders think they can ever hide the smell of five hundred or more mature plants is a mystery. A large town house in the suburb of Sherwood had all its windows covered and was issuing the characteristic sweet smell. We bashed in the front door and charged in. It was like disturbing a hornet’s nest. Six oriental males ran from the rear of the property, diving out the windows and doors into the waiting arms of colleagues. I volunteered to stay on and help deal with the arrests. Four of them were called Nguyen, which is the Vietnamese equivalent of Smith, and none of them could speak English. We had to wait six hours for an interpreter to arrive from London, and they all wanted a solicitor, paid for by legal aid of course. Certain drug offences carry the death penalty in Vietnam and so when they were advised that no such fate awaited them other than perhaps three meals a day for a couple of years in a warm furnished cell they began to cooperate.

  After initial reticence they eventually told us everything. They had all entered the UK by hiding in a lorry and escaping the vehicle halfway up the A1. At least one of them told us he’d paid the equivalent of £20,000 to get into Britain. I was shocked. Many people would be willing to pay that to get out of this country. Every room of the house contained a jungle of tall cannabis plants close to maturity, and there was a formidable system of irrigation and lighting, all run from a dangerous and illegally by-passed electricity meter. It was very slow work interviewing and reinterviewing all six and it took most of the night. We’d started work at 6am and finally finished at 7am the following morning. It was another relatively rare ‘good job’ coppers enjoy. The Vietnamese lads, who ranged from seventeen to twenty-eight years of age, eventually shared an eleven-year prison sentence. Immigration forms were issued to them at point of charge so when they’d served their time they would be deported. Sadly our inspector wasn’t very pleased with us. Despite removing a huge drugs factory from the streets of Nottingham he was clearly thinking of his devolved overtime budget when he said to us: “Don’t do this again without asking me, it was only one detection after all.” With this comment in mind and the fact that it took him six months to sign through our overtime forms we decided
against doing any more.

  I joined more committees on my beat area. These included the hospital Trust Security Working Group, and the hospital Trust Security Management Group. I could provide the hospital with detailed, up-to-date crime figures and in return they would ask their teams to improve security at all the crime hotspots. It worked very well and crime continued to fall. When I took over the beat area one of my personal targets was to achieve a crime free weekend at the hospital. Latterly it was common for the entire campus, one of the largest in Europe, to be crime free for a week or even two weeks at a time.

  I seemed to attend a lot of meetings. Multi-agency partnership working was seen as the way forward, the ‘coterminus’ part of my beat title, and I couldn’t escape it. I was a member of several committees which met regularly for child protection, neighbourhood action, youth services and crime prevention. Most of them were worthwhile, but some were clearly not, and for those the Wank Word Bingo sheet came in handy.

  In January 2008 I took part in a very dignified rally in London with 27,000 other cops. We were complaining about the government’s delay in back-dating a pay rise. On reflection, and taking into account of what the government are currently doing to the police service, this now looks so very trivial. I attended a similar rally twenty years before at Wembley when the Shadow Home Secretary of the day, Tony Blair, assured the gathering of 23,000 cops that the service would be safe in the hands of New Labour. I have to say that these assurances proved largely correct. Cops had until then been mainly Tory supporters, unofficially of course, and they were wary of a Labour government. Margaret Thatcher is now seen to have been the guardian of the police service. I wonder what she would think of the current wholesale dismantling of the British police.