Prisoners, Property and Prostitutes

by Tom Ratcliffe

  A momentary pause.

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘Because I was driving at 50 miles an hour on a dual carriageway when your client got his foot up and kicked me in the head. I could have lost control if he had carried on, so my only hope was to disable him from doing it again. I was trying to render him unconscious but I regret I didn’t quite manage it. If he had kicked me again and I had lost control of the car he could have been injured. It was my duty to prevent him being hurt.’

  A superb reply, and who could criticise such care in looking after a prisoner?

  If pushed, Solicitors would also use any ploy they could think of to discredit evidence (mind you, early in my career it wasn’t a bad idea, given some of the excesses that went on) and some would try personal attacks too.

  On one occasion a Magistrates’ Court trial was under way for some minor assault, and the defence line was once again that excessive force had been used when the arresting officer had used his truncheon on the prisoner. If the force was deemed excessive, the arrest became unlawful and the case would almost certainly fail. To make matters worse, the defence had learned that the arresting officer was known among his peers as ‘staffer’, due to a readiness to use his ‘staff’ at any opportunity.

  After the evidence regarding the use of said ‘staff’ came the inevitable line of questioning:

  ‘Constable, I believe you have a nickname within the Police Station.’ (It would look better if the officer admitted to his own nickname rather than having it put to him).

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Would you please tell the Court what that nickname is?’

  ‘Your Worships, I don’t think my nickname is of any interest to the Court, or of any relevance at all to this case.’

  The solicitor responded quickly – he could smell victory.

  ‘Your Worships I think you will find the officer is wrong on both counts and I must insist he tells the Court his nickname.’

  After a few moments’ deliberation the Magistrates sensibly decided that they should hear the nickname and would then be able to make their own minds up regarding its relevance.

  ‘So,’ said the defence, ‘your nickname please?’

  ‘Well, if you must know,’ said the Bobby, ‘they call me “donkey dick”.’

  There was an awful silence for a few moments, and their Worships decided that the nickname was indeed not relevant to the case.

  To be fair to the legal profession, (even if such a stance is not always reciprocated) while some are on a little crusade, they are in most cases just doing a job. It is right that everyone suspected of an offence should be able to have legal advice to ensure that their interests are properly represented. Some lawyers do a rather too enthusiastic job, others do a bare minimum. But there was considerable surprise when a solicitor called to represent four suspected thieves made what can only be called a very lame effort in representing them in interview. He was the type who could normally be relied on to advise ‘no comment’, especially if (as in this case) the evidence was a bit on the thin side. The suspects had been arrested miles from home, in a cul-de-sac in an affluent area, but had said at the roadside they were lost, and the screwdrivers and other tools in the boot were for their own use if the car broke down. Our point of view was that they were ‘going equipped’ for theft. All had numerous convictions for theft of and from cars, but previous convictions would not be used in Court except at sentencing. A great deal hinged on the account they gave of themselves in interview, so really the chances of any prosecution being formally instigated were slim. But instead of the ‘no comment’ we expected, a written statement was produced from each, giving conflicting stories with no real explanation for what they were doing or what they had with them. Consequently they were prosecuted, and to our surprise and satisfaction, duly convicted.

  I spoke ‘off the record’ to the solicitor some while later. I asked him why he appeared to have done such a below par job in the prepared statements. He was quite indignant – ‘I represented them as I do all my clients. I put their accounts to the court so the magistrates could make their own minds up about the case.’

  ‘Did the fact you live in the cul-de-sac they were stopped in, and had just taken delivery of a shiny new Jag have any bearing on the advice you gave them?’

  He paused and smiled.

  ‘No comment,’ he replied.

  Nine

  The whole business of arresting people, gathering evidence and presenting it would almost inevitably sometimes lead to complaints which our little-loved Complaints and Discipline Department would deal with. They were widely feared and distrusted – after all, if you had done wrong you didn’t want them anywhere near, and if you hadn’t done wrong they didn’t seem to care and treated you as guilty regardless. It was ironic to see some of the more senior figures who were appointed to that department over the years. Of one such appointment a colleague said, ‘No wonder they’ve put him in as boss there – talk about poacher turned gamekeeper – there isn’t a disciplinary offence he hasn’t committed and got away with, so he knows every trick in the book.’

  Everyone accepts that they may occasionally make mistakes, and some actions may require disciplinary action, but it was the approach of the Complaints Department that really got up people’s noses. They worked on the basis that if an allegation of (say) theft was made, then they would investigate it. No problem with that – however, the allegation could be investigated and found to be entirely false, but the newly vindicated officer would then find themselves being punished for some minor misdemeanour which had been accidentally stumbled on from ages ago, but that had just happened to be found in the enquiry.

  It was often said that if they applied the same verve to hunting career criminals as they did to hunting their own kind, the crime rate would plummet.

  In a fit of innovation a ‘reporting hotline’ was set up. If there was something going on that you didn’t like the look of, you could ring the Complaints people anonymously and pass on any information. The publicity surrounding this ‘hotline’ explained that any such information would be treated in total confidence, and the reporting was quite anonymous if you didn’t want to leave your name. This promise was shown to be rather hollow when as we paraded on one day, a ‘wag’ dialled the hotline number, blew a raspberry into the handset, and replaced it.

  A few moments later the phone rang.

  ‘Who just phoned the hotline from this phone?’ asked an angry voice from headquarters.

  ‘I thought the hotline was anonymous,’ said the Bobby who had picked it up at our end.

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked the headquarters voice.

  ‘Don’t you know?’ he responded.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well sod off then,’ he said, and put the handset down again.

  Summer came to Newport, and once more working earlies was almost a pleasure. Getting up at 5 o’clock in the morning was hard work, but driving to work on empty roads in bright daylight was very pleasant. Later in the day the rush hour started and I would watch frustrated men in company cars all struggling to get to their desks for 9 o’clock. My ‘office’ was their road, and I was often glad that my applications for so many real office jobs had been fruitless. For night shifts I preferred the Winter months, as you would go out to work in the dark and return home in the same night. To have darkness come and go inside a shift I found a torture. At least in Winter you could kid yourself you were still going to bed at ‘night’, provided of course that you could stay awake long enough to drive home without falling asleep and ending up in a ditch.

  One bright summer morning we sat in the parade room shortly before 6 o’clock, waiting for the Sergeant to come and do the briefing. The windows were open as it was warm even at that time, and a gentle breeze wafted in, bringing with it the sound of the odd car passing and the occasional birdsong. Then the unexpected – a brief screech of tyres, a loud thud, and silence. In a film there would have been sounds of smashing
glass, roaring engines, and debris falling from the sky for half a minute or more. In real life it was short, not very sweet, and almost disappointing in its brevity.

  Looking out of the window towards the crossroads outside the station revealed the problem. A milk float was directly across the road, with a motorbike embedded in its side, still upright. The rider lay motionless on the ground beside it. Several of us ran out to the scene. One of the two very long serving traffic men on the block spoke to the milkman who gave his explanation –

  ‘Well I ’d just come over the lights, going up to the Setton estate to do my round, and then I realised I’d forgotten my round book, so I just turned to go back to the dairy.’

  The approaching motorcyclist had never imagined the milk float he was preparing to overtake would suddenly go ‘hard a’starboard’ right in front of him, and had hit it full amidships.

  I went to the rider whose eyes were fixed wide open, staring through the open visor of his crash helmet.

  My first aid training said that before anything else you should try to elicit a verbal response from the casualty, so I spoke to him.

  Sensible question first -

  ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘Yeah, yes,’ came the groaned reply.

  Then, said the training, you find if they are in any way paralysed or lacking feeling in the extremities before administering first aid proper.

  ‘Can you move your toes?’

  The feet moved slowly.

  ‘Yeah, I can.’

  ‘Can you move your fingers?’

  The gloves twitched.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can you feel any pain?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where does it hurt?’

  ‘It’s…it’s me bollocks!’ he moaned. No wonder he was lying still. I thought I had done my bit at this point and left any further first aid to the ambulance crew who had conveniently just arrived.

  The rider had hit the side of the milk float in such a way that his impetus had threatened to hurl him across the crates full of glass bottles, so he had made the split second decision to hang on to the handlebars like grim death to prevent being ripped to pieces by several gallons of gold top. The consequence of this was that he was slammed testicles first into the protruding filler cap on the bike’s petrol tank. In the long term it was probably the lesser of two evils, but at the time he was paying a high price and wondering why he hadn’t taken his chances with the glass.

  Motorcyclists usually come off second best in accidents, unfairly in many cases as even if the driver of the other vehicle is at fault, the soft target gets the most damage. Blamelessness is no protection at the time of impact.

  One of the oddest motorcycle accidents I ever heard of was dealt with by a long-retired colleague a good few years before I joined. He was called to a report of an accident involving a van and a motorbike on a very busy dual carriageway in the morning rush hour. When he got there he found the motorcyclist being more or less mummified in bandages by the ambulance crew, and the van parked at the side of the road. It was one of the old Bedford J4 vans, being used by a group of building labourers for transport to and from the site each morning. Oddly however, there was no sign of any motorbike. He approached the van driver for an explanation of the accident.

  ‘Well it’s like this,’ he said ‘I drive the van and pick the lads up each morning, and this morning we were on our way to the site when we came across Joe here on his motorbike. It had broken down you see, so I stopped and we all had a go at fixing it, but it still wouldn’t go. So I says we’ll give him a tow. I got the rope out, put one end on the towbar on the van, gave him the other end and said to give me a wave when he was ready. I got in the van, he gave me a wave and off we go. We’d gone about two or three miles when one of the lads in the back says “I think you’d better stop”. How was I to know he’d tied the rope round his middle and not to the bike?!’

  It must have made a bizarre sight – a bunch of donkey-jacketed labourers reading their papers and smoking their cigarettes inside the van, and behind them a man on a rope flailing about and doing a full-blooded impression of a Wild West film stuntman.

  The blame for that one really has to lie with the motorcyclist.

  My learning curve at Newport sloped happily upwards, and shortly after my third anniversary of joining I was sent on my driving course. This was a three week affair back at the Training Centre, and my first return there since the last of my Probationer courses almost 18 months earlier.

  It felt strange to return and see the uncertain faces of the new recruits as they started the long haul from induction to confirmation. I realised that as time went on in the job it wasn’t so much that you learned more, but you began to appreciate better how little you did know, and developed an ability to cover your mistakes with a veneer of competence.

  Experience, they say, is what enables you to recognise a mistake when you make it for the second time.

  On the first day of the driving course we had a number of clerical procedures, first and foremost showing the instructor that I actually did possess a valid driving licence. It wasn’t something they used to insist on seeing, but after one man completed most of the course before accidentally disclosing he was actually disqualified, they adopted this minor yet fundamental formality.

  Then there was an eye test to make sure you could see enough to get by, and then some simple instruction about the car before we set off to drive it. Things like which seat to sit in, how to turn the wheel, and basic maintenance like tyre pressures, oil levels and so on.

  It all seemed very elementary instruction, but it made sense to tell us because then when it all went wrong on division at least we couldn’t say we hadn’t been told.

  I had always had a love of driving – thanks to living in a house with a long drive, by the age of 13 I was reasonably competent behind the wheel of a car and had passed my driving test just 2 weeks after my 17th birthday. I imagined this course would be a piece of cake. How wrong I was.

  We drove to what was called ‘the system’, a very rigid discipline of driving rules, and of course I had been doing it my own way for the last 9 years. ‘The system’ was defined as “a system or drill, each feature of which is considered in turn by a driver at the approach to any hazard”. It made sure you assessed and reassessed every feature of your driving, and the way you dealt with every situation, by the same logical procedure. It sounded odd to me at first, but I soon found it actually worked very well. Thanks to a patient and persistent instructor I started to make better progress. I quickly realised that not having run into anything in nine years did not make me a ‘good’ driver. Being systematic in anything was alien to me, so the consistency of discipline in driving soon started to chip away at the bad habits I had picked up over the years. Consistency also extended to a check list of equipment carried in each car used for training, obvious things like a spare tyre and a jack. Things which you never thought about until you neded them, when it was too late to discover that the previous driver had already had a flat tyre and left you without a spare because he was too idle or forgetful to do anything about it. On division the checklist was longer and included things like a torch, inevitably with flat batteries; a few cones which would blow away in the slightest breeze; a first aid kit which usually contained a long piece of unrolled dirty bandage, two enormous plasters and an empty disinfectant bottle, and a pair of Wellington boots, almost always a size 8. This summed up the administrative mania in the service – someone had decided that each car should have a pair of wellies in it, but ignored the fact that different people have different size feet. Maybe this was catered for when the footwear provided had one a size 8 and the other a size 6, as happened on occasion.

  It was the sort of logic that says a watch that loses a minute a week is always showing the wrong time, but one that is permanently stopped is correct twice a day. The Police mentality would take the stopped watch in preference to the slow one in the same way it issued a
pair of wellies that fitted hardly anyone.

  Once the equipment checks were done, you had to put a tick in the checklist record in the back of the car’s log book and sign it. The space allowed for the signature was about 5 millimetres square, so to write any recognisable signature or even initials was impossible. The tick and signature took about 3 seconds, whereas actually to do the checks took several minutes. Occasionally it was tempting to reduce the check to a quick open and shut of the boot and kick the tyres. If it was raining, windy or cold, this would be reduced to counting the tyres and making a reasonable assumption that most of the kit would still be in the boot, or if not then another patrol would not be far away with whatever you needed. So the line of indecipherable signatures in the back of the log book was by no means a reliable reflection of the history of checks made on the vehicle.

  Traffic cars were generally better looked after and more carefully checked, as they were the ones normally first on the scene of the bigger incidents, and there was more at stake in such circumstances. Brian Tweed, a good friend of mine, was once asked to take his traffic car to a school to do a presentation. He got the class gathered round the car and started a question and answer session to make the little darlings think in a constructive and involving way.

  ‘What would you expect to find on a Police car that you might not have on a normal car?’ he asked the audience.

  ‘Blue lights,’ came the first reply.

  ‘Good, blue lights,’ said Brian, and continued the session as they came up with things like two-tone horns and radios, and then he moved on to the ‘what’s in the boot’ part of the quiz. The class were quite bright and correctly suggested cones, lights, torches and eventually a first aid kit. These items were produced in sequence from the boot, and an impressive array of equipment was laid out on the grass. The large box that was the first aid kit was among them, and Brian became more detailed –