Significant Memories - Part II

So, I’ve come up with a few more best, worst type shifts / aspects of the police to comment on to continue my Significants Memories series.  I’ll get straight to the point.

Most Scary Incident

Funnily enough, the scariest thing that has happened to me during the police or since was very recently when I was attacked by some low-life in a hoody for not giving him money or a cigarette.  In typical police fashion, I donated my jumper, the left sleeve of which was covered in the hoodie’s saliva after being wiped from my face, to the crime-fighting cause of catching the scumbag who did it and who has likely done this to many other people more vulnerable than himself, giving the police solid evidence as I am certain this individual will have been arrested by police before for a recordable offence, therefore having to provide a sample of DNA, and what gets done?  Nothing!  Is it any wonder victims I dealt with in the past were so disgruntled with the police when so many cases are dealt with in a slap-dash, haphazard manner?  As I expected, about a month on from the incident, I have heard nothing and nothing has been done with my jumper.  It remains in the stores at Wandsworth Police Station, where it will undoubtedly get lost with a knife used in a murder.

But, back to police incidents.  There have been many things that have happened to colleagues which have been terrifying like, for example, two colleagues who had acid thrown in their face after stopping a male wanted for a serious crime, scarring them for life, but to me personally, I think the scariest time was when we just went to deal with a fairly standard call of some kind of neighbour dispute in a council estate.  This is the danger with working in the police, you really have absolutely no idea what you are going to and how dangerous a situation may present itself to you.  The text of a call can be very misleading and often inaccurate so you really have to treat every call as a potentially dangerous situation until you know otherwise.  This call was in a council estate in Roehampton where the blocks of flats were in a big square with an empty court / grassed area in the middle.  It was an estate where there were regularly problems and many people living in the estate that hated police (not at all  an uncommon thing in this part of town).  The call we were dealing with wasn’t about anything particularly serious in the end from memory and turned out to be no cause for police action but while we were there, things were getting more and more heated and one particular male was shouting louder and louder at us as we were out on the balcony which looks over this court and I noticed a significantly large number of people were gathering.  I remember seeing about 30 people all together shouting various forms of abuse to me and my one colleague on scene stating how they would kill us and are families etc. (fairly standard stuff again) and I remember absolutely cr@pping myself and thinking, how the hell are we going to get out of this without being seriously assaulted.  We called for more units and some time later, as most were tied up doing non-essential paperwork, enough units arrived for us to escape with all limbs in tact but for a moment there, I feared it may not happen and I think I had to change my badly designed police trousers fairly promptly.

Best Aid Ever!

Aid is something police officers, particularly those on response teams, have to do a fair amount of.  Aid is basically where you are taken off your normal duty to perform some other function, often off your serving borough (although it can be on your borough) for, well, pretty much any reason at all.  There are many, many examples of aid, such as policing football matches, demonstrations outside parliament, Counter-Terrorisom patrols (otherwise known as standing like a flourescent banana somewhere you are not familiar with with 100s of other officers and being constantly pestered for directions - I tell you, it’s tedious) etc.  Aid is normally fairly tedious, and like many things in the police, completely not thought through with hours wasted before you are actually needed and then hours of overtime being paid at the end as we are forced to continue working well beyond the shift was due to finish.  Poor planning and lack of common sense are normally responsible for this.  Anyway, occasionally aid is considered to be very good and lots of fun and one such aid is policing the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament.  In my first year as a Met Officer, I was lucky enough to be randomly selected for this and I loved it and had an absolute ball (looking back, it is the only time I can truly remember really enjoying the job for any sustained length of time).  The aid lasted two weeks and it was very long hours, which we all knew about, and lots of overtime money too but it was also loads of fun.  I was working in a really great team with people who knew how to work hard and play hard and I can honestly say it was a most pleasurable two weeks.  We started every day at 8am and finished most days about 9pm and it was absolutely boiling hot.  It was tough standing all day in the heat with met vests and long sleeved shirts (some pointless initiative from someone fairly important - no short sleeved shirts allowed) but there was such a fantatsic buzz around the streets and the ground that you couldn’t help but get sucked in by it.  We got to watch some of the games on the centre court and court 1 too and we got to get up, close and personal with quite a few celebrities and I even managed to do a stop and account on Audley Harrison without realising who he was.  Getting to talk to Patrick Vieira was probably the highlight of the two weeks but I think what made it special was the people we worked with for two weeks.  It almost brings a warm feeling inside me thinking back on it, which just so rarely happens when I think back on police experiences so it’s nice to have that.

All Time Most Frustrating and Crap thing about being a Police Officer

I’m fairly certain I’ve mentioned several times throughout this blog the absolute disgrace of a shambles that is court but I couldn’t help but mention it just one more time as it was a fairly large contributing factor in to why I left.  Briefly again to summarise - for less serious cases that would go to magistrate’s court and are likely to only last one day, a date is fixed.  If for any reason the case doesn’t get heard that day, a new date will be allocated about 4 weeks later or something similar, so, for magistrate’s court, despite the fact that there is no planning conducted by the CPS about who they actually want to take the stand for a case so 90% of the time you sit around all day waiting to be called only to find out you are not needed, at least you know where you are with it and what dates you will be there.  Now, at Crown Courts, where slightly more serious cases will be heard, and where cases will often go over a day, there is no fixed date.  A two week period will be fixed where at any point in that two week period you may be warned the night before (normally around 6pm) to attend court the next day.  It matters not whether this is your rest day after working for 10 days on the trot, whether you have just come off a night shift etc., if you are warned to court, that’s it, you simply have to go.  Now, that’s all well and good if you only have one case going to Crown Court but imagine when I worked in the Burglary and Robbery squad.  I, at one point, had two week overnight warnings constantly for about a 4 month period meaning that essentially, I couldn’t do anything or go anywhere without fear of it having to be cancelled.  I wouldn’t mind if each time I attended court I was needed but those who make the decisions about who gets called for court have absolutely no respect for police officer’s private lives or any understanding of how poorly the whole thing is managed.  The Old Bailey, for example, will often have you on a three month overnight warning!  Three months I ask you?  Is it reasonable to be expected not to plan anything or go away in that whole three month period?  To me, absolutely not, but apparently, that’s just the way it is and if I didn’t like it, I needed to leave.  So, that’s another big reason why I did.

OK, that’s it for now.  I am sure there are many other stories I could tell in this category so I’ll try to collect some in my head and get them ready to share with the world soon.  Be safe.