26 December 2004
Week Twenty Four
There comes a time in every police officer’s career when you must get thoroughly fed up of all the little phrases of hilarity that come your way each time you meet your friends and family. Five minutes in the job and I think I have already reached it. I try to crack a smile as people say to me, “‘ello, ‘ello, what do we ‘ave ‘ere then?”, “Careful, don’t do that or she’ll arrest you” and, “Do you take your handcuffs home?”. The list goes on, I tire even writing it. The thought of putting up with that for another 29 and a half years is not a nice one. I am sure the novelty will wear off. It is amazing how fascinated people seem to be in this job, nice amazing though. It never quite had the same affect when I said I was a software tester.
As I said last week, I have just finished 4 days of 12 hour shifts from 1500 HRS to 0300 HRS finishing on Christmas day morning and for a change, I am absolutely shattered. What made it worse is that I am now certain I have caught a strain of Man Flu as I feel like boys feel when they have a common cold - pretty shocking. It’s easy to sort of stave off an illness when you are running around at work, it’s just when I stop that it catches up. Still, I am not back at work until Wednesday so I hope to be fully recovered by then.
It’s been another pretty interesting week, I think I will always find this job interesting really. We were sort of on Rowdy Patrol this week but there actually wasn’t that much rowdiness around. As usual, the calls coming from the CAD room, particularly the couple of days before Christmas, were mostly domestic incidents. It’s interesting how no units seem to be available when a domestic call comes out because they are just pretty much all round unpleasant to deal with but as soon as a fight kicks off, all units are available to run to it. Everyone seems to enjoy a good fight! I don’t really though as I am not the most handy person in the world with my fists.
It’s funny how the things I thought I would find the least pleasant and most challenging are in the most part quite different from the things that challenge me the most now. Domestics still terrify me and I haven’t even been inside the property at one yet, just listening from the street is scary enough. Dealing with drunk people giving me lots of abuse though was something I thought I would find really difficult but it doesn’t bother me at all. You know that people are abusive to you because of the uniform and not because of who you are otherwise you would get it in your life on the ‘outside’ as well and it is surprisingly easy to not be remotely bothered by people directing their anger at you, because it isn’t personal. I am a reasonably sensitive person and tend to take things to heart so I am glad I am able to distance myself a little from the people who basically just hate the police, which is largely most of the people that we end up dealing with.
I felt very helpless on Thursday of this week, it was my first taste of anything like this happening. Cath and I were busy dealing with another shoplifter when at about 2100 HRS, the rest of our Street Duties team, three instructors and two fellow pupils got involved in quite a nasty incident where four males were trying to escape from a robbery. One of the instructors caught one of the suspects but the other three or however many decamped in to a car and sped off. Unfortunately, the two other Street Duties instructors, instinctively tried to get in to the car before it sped off to drag the suspects out. Allegedly, the car wasn’t moving at the start but anyway, the car sped off with both instructors attached, one receiving a nasty leg injury and the other possibly dislocating his shoulder and pulling all of his arm ligaments. My point though, is that it was horrendous hearing all this going on on the radio and being able to do nothing to help. I felt completely useless and was so worried about my buddies. I have mentioned it before but you do form incredibly close bonds in this job and your team are a little extension of your family and all I could hear is that two officers were quite badly injured and their shoulder numbers. It was some time before we heard that they were OK, well, as well as you can be after an experience like that, but I was so worried about them.
I remember when I was at Hendon, some of the instructors saying to me that we will definitely have moments in our career where something happens that you just instinctively go with at the time and then after the fact you reflect and think, sh*t, that could have gone very differently, I was very lucky that time. I think that is how my two colleagues are feeling at the moment and it only hit them afterwards that it really could have turned out very nastily. They better not do that again as I was terrified they were seriously injured, naughty boys. We all value our careers but this job just ain’t worth dying for.
I am starting to get a few cases build up now where people have been bailed to return (i.e. I have to do some more investigation before they return to the station for it to be considered whether to charge them or not) and I am getting a little worried that I am about to find out there are hundreds of things I haven’t done that I should be doing! I guess I will learn the hard way if this is the case, I am trying to stay on top of it all but often you just get dragged off to incidents and other things have to wait.
What else this week, well I had to do a couple of strip searches this week which are no more pleasant for me than they are for the prisoner (despite them shouting at me, ‘You enjoying this you f&^%ing bitch’ and similar comments) but they are all good experiences that help me to deal with things better. I also had my first ‘No Comment’ interview which threw me a little as I was fully expecting the young lady to go full and frank as she had admitted the theft at the scene to me and signed my IRB to that effect but somehow, after taking advice from a very old and not so wise duty solicitor, thought it might be a better idea to go with the ‘No Comment’ strategy. No comment interviews are quite tedious really as you know the minute they speak that’s all they will say for the whole interview but you still have to keep asking all the valid questions all the way through.
I’m still having issues with Stop and Search, in fact, I still haven’t done one. I am trying very hard not to shy away from them and it’s not that I am afraid of carrying out the searches but I actually find it very difficult to ascertain whether I have enough grounds. Because of the Stephen Lawrence enquiry, at Hendon they drum it in to you again and again about making sure you have enough grounds and it has meant that all the new recruits coming out are terrified of doing searches just in case there aren’t enough grounds. I need to get over this though as it’s a huge source of catching people up to no good and I do understand the reasons why they have to be done.
For all the sacrifices I feel that I have made for this job and apart from enduring all the things that I find the least pleasant, of which I think there are quite a few – the far larger than I would like pay cut; the impact it has had on my personal life; the incredible tediousness of the entirely unnecessary paperwork duplication / triplication and quadruplication; the not often getting time to eat, pee or drink enough water; and the feeling so god damned tired all the time - I love the job! There has not been a single moment since I have been doing this job for real where I have doubted that I made the right decision to do it. It fascinates me and makes every single day different, challenging and interesting. I love the fact that nearly every single day I have to force myself to do something that scares me, physically or mentally and get to see that each time I push myself to do these things, it gets a little easier. I honestly can’t imagine myself ever doing anything else now and it is a nice feeling to feel that you have found the job that suits you, that you were made for, I think a lot of people never do really, so I consider myself pretty fortunate.
Anyway, so my birthday and Christmas have come and gone so quickly and unnoticeably. I found it so hard to get in to the Christmas spirit this year as I have been so so very busy but hopefully by next year things will have calmed down a wee bit and I will get round to decorating my tree and eating my advent calendar. Apologies again for not sending any cards this year folks. I will endeavour to make it up to you all but you can be assured by the lack of red wine I have drunk over the past five weeks, that I just haven’t had time to do anything really, my poor shelves are bear and I am running out of everything in my little pad!
Oh, there was a moment this week that I wish to reflect on here also. As I have said before, one of the reasons I was looking forward to working strange hours is that it meant I would get to watch more of the weekly day time TV programs that I love. Largely, I haven’t been able to do that too much but this week each day, my getting out of bed time has coincided perfectly with the start time of the Judge Judy triple bill on ITV2. There was a moment this week when I was sitting in bed, with a bacon sarnie, a nice cup of tea, all cosied up with my favourite Judge taking no crap on my TV and I thought, ‘Life doesn’t get any better than this’. It is the little things that please me and two hours with Judge Judith Sheindlin gets my vote any day of the week.
So next week, we are on for just three days, thank goodness and then have another much needed four days off. We are due to finish at 1800 HRS on New Year’s Eve and I am praying no one goes and gets themselves arrested by me anywhere near that time as I really don’t want to spend my New Year’s Eve in Wandsworth custody suite so please, people of Wandsworth, be good, or at least save any naughtiness for the Night Duty team! I want to get drunk, I need to get drunk, it has been too long (apart from my birthday where I still have a very big bruise on my right cheek and I ain’t talking face cheek – I still maintain though that I just lost my footing down the stairs, it was nothing to do with the shots of Sambouka I was forced to consume).
Happy Christmas one and all, I hope Santa brought you everything you wanted and I wish you all a very Happy New Year. May 2005 bring nice things for everyone.
Woody
Xxx
