I wanted to write a post about my best, worst, hardest etc. shifts / incidents dealt with in the police as it allows me to share some specific memories and stories for no other reason than just because I can! I’ll start with the easiest one to categorize as it’s one I often thought back to when I was having my more uncertain moments about whether I should leave the police or hang on for a little longer.
The Most Boring Shift
I remember this night so clearly as it was my first taste of the very many tedious things that police officers have to do. People often wrongly imagine that the police are always running around dealing with one incident after another and that the job is full of excitement. Ahem, not so! There are three things as a fairly new PC that you don’t like to hear in briefings as you know it is going to be you covering that duty: constant watch (where you sit at the door of an open cell in custody to ‘constantly watch’ someone who is either violent or likely to harm themselves); hospital guard (the name speaks for itself); or crime scene cordon. All three duties are such that you are unlikely to engage in any brain activity whatsoever for the whole shift, you are unlikely to get relieved for food and toilet breaks and you are likely to get relieved very late at the end of your shift as the next team replacement will not be in a rush to start this duty. This was my very first night shift, a 12 hour one, with my new team after finishing Street Duties and this most boring of shifts involved a crime scene cordon. There had been a murder in Putney on the common and most of the common was cordoned off as it had yet to be searched properly. A unit was sent to each corner of the common to guard the cordon and make sure no one entered the restricted area mostly. I was posted with a chap from a different parade site who I didn’t know at all and for most of the shift we were stood at different ends of the cordon. It was winter and it was freezing and there I stood in the middle of Putney Common, underdressed for the occasion, with no relief for the toilet, food or drink and I waited. I waited for 12 hours and I counted nearly every minute just praying for the end of the shift and I remember this being the longest 12 hours of my life. It’s hard to imagine anything like it unless you are a police officer and then you will be all too familiar but just imagine someone told you to go and stand in a field overnight, when you can’t even call your friends and family, and just left you there for 12 hours. You would go out of your mind! I did. This wasn’t even that rare a shift, but this one, this was the worst and a nice taster of what was to come.
The Hardest Thing I Ever Had To Do
This one, again, is very easy to recall as it really stands out from everything else I dealt with in the police and whilst I dealt with most fairly horrific or tough circumstances fairly well, this day left me feeling really quite depressed for a couple of weeks. This one concerned the infamous ‘Death Message’. Again, I was only about two weeks out of street duties and on a Sunday early turn (7am start), the Sergeant at briefing explained that there was a death message to deliver and that it would be a fairly tough one. No death message of course is easy, don’t get me wrong, but, a large majority of the time, they concern an elderly male or female whose family are largely expecting the news. Being a brand spanking shiny new over keen probationer I foolishly offered to deal with this CAD (the record initially created about an incident) and went to the control room to pick up the extended details. I am not going to go in to the details on here but the death was a 17 year old boy who had been away travelling. I found out as much as I could from the embassy number available and made sure I went round to the address armed with every bit of information I could possibly get and off we went. Myself and my driver turned up at a lovely big house in one of the posher parts of our ground and we sat there. We sat there for about half an hour in fact. It was a Sunday morning, about 8am by this time, I was sure the family were in as the curtains were drawn and two cars were parked in the driveway. I just couldn’t bear the thought of turning their world upside down and I felt like until I told them, in their world, it hadn’t happened. Eventually, my colleague and I decided we had to just deliver this news no matter how hard it was. And we did, and it was hard. So so hard. I will never forget the little things I saw when I went in the house with the measurements up the door frame for the little boy at various ages and the family photos everywhere and the way the parents screamed and cried at the same time and the way I felt like crap for being the one to tell them. How do you tell someone that? We don’t get any training for this kind of thing, you just do it and in some ways I’m glad it was me that turned up that day as there were some officers who would have delivered this news in a far less tactful manner but even so, they were of course devastated. We left the address about half an hour later and were called straight to deal with four juvenile females who had each stolen a scrunchie from Primark (no, I’m not joking) and I didn’t get a moment to reflect on this first incident until I got home and I cried my little heart out. For days I couldn’t stop thinking about the family and how they would probably never forget my face as the person who told them this world shattering news and what they were going through and I felt so awful for them. Anyway, so, that was a tough day.
My Best Case
Sadly, there are far more bad memories from being a police officer than good but for all the hard work involved in this case and the many late shifts where I single handedly gathered the crucial evidence and put the case file together, this was a good and very satisfying case! Without getting too much in to the nitty gritty, this case was one of my first major ones in the burglary squad after joining CID and it was a case of aggravated burglary. Now, people often assume burglary is only about entering as a trespasser – and stealing or intending to steal – but actually there are other offences that once done after entering a premises as a trespasser, or intended to be done, constitute burglary, GBH being one of them. This was a case like that, aggravated by the fact that the suspects entered the premises with weapons, namely a rather large hammer and a crowbar. The victim (who had been a suspect in many other cases) basically got beaten to a pulp by these two dudes who were making such a noise about it that the neighbours had only gone and called the Old Bill who turned up at the door to catch them stood there with said weapons in their hands and said victim in a crumpled heap covered in blood. Anyway, a long investigation ensued and I ended up getting some really good evidence which was just impossible to argue against and about 6 months later when it made it to court, the two suspects pleaded guilty and actually got some prison time, in this case, two years (out in one)! You may be surprised that I would comment on the custodialness of this sentence but it is such a rarity to get custodial sentences, even for the most serious of crimes, that this was quite an achievement. In my view, anything that keeps some very nasty dudes off the street for a year is a good thing and I was satisfied to be a part of that – these are the things you join for.
The Most Humiliating Moment
This, I’m sad to say, was partly an error in my judgement and partly the result of me being far too keen again! About a year in to being on response team, the Sergeant at briefing explained that two people were needed for a photo shoot for a police magazine and that they preferably needed a female and a male ethnic minority for the picture and no other details were disclosed at this point. This occurred on a spare shift so from memory, there were only four of us on and I was the only female so I asked a bit more about it, knowing I’d probably have to do it anyway. It turned out a photograph was needed for the front cover of a police magazine called The Sharp End showing two officers poised on the athletics track at Battersea to showcase an article all about the police preparation for the Olympics. My very reluctant colleague and I agreed to go as I had never seen this magazine anywhere in our borough canteens (and I was familiar with all the usual police mags) so I assumed I would be relatively safe from public ridicule. Little did I know this was the first issue of what turned out to be an extremely well distributed magazine around not only the Met but the whole of the UK and my incredibly unphotogenic face was to be centre stage of this well distributed publication. Anyway, the long and short of it is, I had the p*ss taken out of me for months and every station I attended to deal with a case, there seemed to be copies everywhere I turned. They were slipped inside every glass cabinet at work with moustaches etc. drawn on them and frankly, I was sick of the sight of my own cartooned face! Oh God, I have just found a picture of the front cover of this issue on the web (without very much effort I am disturbed to say). For your amusement and my ongoing ridicule, here it is:
I’m going to break for now as it tires me out to visit my institutionalised memory lane but I do enjoy bringing to life some of the old memories as for all the bad things about being a police officer, I was certainly never short of stories to tell! I’ll continue this soon…
