Confessions of a Police Constable

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Who am I?

Pleased to meet you …

Can’t we all just be friends?

The A-hole who dropped the N-bomb

Hell hath no fury like an 11-year-old without BBM

A pinprick is nothing like a paper cut

Sudden Death

Bringing them back from the dead

So … you’re saying you were attacked by a ninja?

The mysterious case of the Belgian bike burglar

Is that a baton you have in your pocket?

Tinker, Tailor … Spy?

Crossing over to the other side

‘Going the Way of the Dojo’

You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone

A victim of fraud

A Day in the life of a special constable

A long climb

Twisted Sister

An irate customer

Stopping and searching

Slowing down for the weekend

The stolen iPad

One of those shifts

The arrest enquiry

A shot to the heart

Ambushed in the Riots

Epilogue

Footnotes

Glossary and abbreviations

Identity codes

Police ranks

Acknowledgements

Read On …

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

The stories in this book describe my experiences working as a police constable in London. To protect confidentiality, not everything I write can be one hundred per cent the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth – some parts have been fictionalised, and names and locations have been changed. I’m unable to share some of my favourite stories because they are part of investigations in progress. Others I must amend slightly because I don’t want to put my colleagues at risk by revealing operationally sensitive information. Most importantly, I really like my job, and I would rather not get dismissed.

Who am I?

Hi, my name is Matt Delito.

I am a police officer in London’s Metropolitan Police Force. Service. I mean Service. In the immortal words of Nicholas Angel in Hot Fuzz – which, incidentally, should certainly be introduced as mandatory viewing for new recruits to the Metropolitan Police – ‘We’re not calling it a “police force” any more; that’s too aggressive.’

You don’t have to call us the Metropolitan Police Service, or even the MPS – ‘The Met’ will do. Of course, I’m aware that people have an awful lot of other names for us, but many of them aren’t fit to print in a fine publication such as this.

When I’m on duty, I am usually on ‘team’. This is short for ‘response team’. We’re the guys who come rushing to your assistance when someone breaks into your house and you dial 999. The borough I work in is one of the busiest in London, and I’m part of one of the best teams around. If we are on duty, and you live, work or play in my part of town, you’re in good hands …

Okay, I haven’t been entirely upfront: my name isn’t, in fact, Matt Delito, although it does have a pretty good ring to it. And my collar number is not PC592MD, and I am not based at Southwark (which is what an ‘MD’ shoulder number would usually indicate).

If it turns out there’s a PC592MD: I’m sorry, buddy, the number was picked at random.

Matt Delito

Pleased to meet you …

I was slumped back against a tree stump at the edge of the park, watching the two youths run off into the distance. I was only dimly aware of the electronic device I was holding in my hand.

‘Hello? Hello!?’

The little machine was making sounds, but they barely registered in my consciousness. Somehow, I made out the noise of my watch beeping twice, signifying that it was 3 a.m.

‘This,’ I thought to myself, ‘has been a particularly rotten day.’

But I’m getting ahead of myself – introductions first.

I’m Matt.

I’m a police officer, but I haven’t always been. I’ve had quite a few different jobs in my time, including working in a petrol station (I would tell you that it was a barrel of laughs if it wasn’t such an easy-to-detect lie). I also worked as a runner for the BBC one particularly memorable summer. That was exciting; I got to meet all sorts of interesting people. Jeremy Clarkson, for example. He told me to fuck off once, which was probably the highlight of my pre-police career. I suppose that goes some way towards explaining why I prefer to talk about my career on the force than about life before I zipped up my Kevlar Metvest for the first time.

I’d like to invite you, for a minute, to think about what your average day consists of. No, go on, I’ll just sit back and have a few sips of my coffee whilst you ponder. Unless you’re my OP/IRV (this is the operator – aka the person who isn’t the driver – on an Incident Response Vehicle), your days will probably be slightly different from mine.

But what do I do all day? When I got tired of explaining this to my enquiring friends (and listening to their complaints about police officers: ‘I don’t like you lot – you gave my sister a ticket for speaking on her mobile when she was driving’), I decided it was time I started writing some of it down. That was well over a year ago now, and the result is the stack of dead trees, or the weightless, electron-powered virtual version thereof you are holding in your hands.

But I digress.

Where was I? Oh, yes, slumped against a tree.

I had just come off duty after a particularly long and dreary shift. It was late on a hot but rapidly cooling July evening and I was cycling home. Yes, ‘cycling’. I would not normally cycle so late but my motorbike had been involved in an unfortunate run-in with a bin lorry whilst it was parked outside the police station. I can’t really be sure that it was an accident rather than a particularly potent anti-police lash-out, but either way, the result was that my poor motorbike was stuck at the Yamaha dealership, and I was downgraded from triple-digit horsepower to zero-point-not-a-lot of horsepower, sweating and swearing in equal measure as I wrestled my pushbike along the godforsaken bicycle paths.

I was cycling through the park, through the dark, through the night, when out of the corner of my eye, I spotted some movement. At nearly 3 a.m., in a less-than-glamorous slice of town, movement generally signifies bad news, so I slowed down to take a closer look.

Slowing down, as it turned out, might very well have been a good idea; it may have saved my life, in fact. The next thing I knew, I was thrown from my bicycle. It transpired that the movement I’d noticed was a teenager ducking behind a tree, after he and a friend had spanned a length of steel wire across the cycle path, at roughly neck level.

This is an old trick: get the cyclist off the bike and then nick their bike and possessions whilst they are dazed and confused. Or, in some particularly unfortunate cases, dead.

As I lay flat on my back, the two youths came out of the darkness. One of them grabbed my bike, jumped on, and pedalled like a youth possessed into the night. The other quickly dug through my pockets, before running after his friend with my gym bag in his hand.

‘Hello? Is there anybody there? Can I help you? What is your emergency?’

I looked down at my hand.

My old, crappy Nokia was gripped between my fingers – clearly the thieves had not wanted it. The screen was lit up. It read 999. I realised that I must have dialled the emergency number, despite my barely sentient state.

‘Hello, this is Matt Delito, I’m a police constable, Mike Delta five-nine-two.’ I gave the operator my shoulder number completely automatically; I’m not actually sure whether they cared in the slightest.

‘I’ve just been attacked with a garrotte wire in the park by two youths. Both are IC11, around sixteen years of age, slim builds, just over five foot tall, both wearing black tracksuits. One had white trainers; the other was wearing a baseball cap. A red one, I think. Also, I need LAS. I think I may have broken my wrist.’ LAS are my brothers in arms: the London Ambulance Service.

Within moments of giving my details to the 999 operator, I heard the sirens of a passing police car flick on, and before long saw the silhouettes of my trusty colleagues Pete and Kim running towards me. A second car showed up minutes later with two more of my colleagues, and more importantly one of my assailants – the one with the red baseball cap.

I was still on the ground, heart pounding, with a god-awful pain in my wrist. I looked up at the young man being paraded towards me.

‘You’ve made a few pretty big mistakes today, young man,’ I said, as he half-heartedly struggled against his handcuffs.

‘You’re lucky I am tall,’ I continued. ‘If I’d been six inches shorter, that cable could have taken my windpipe off, and you would have found yourself staring at a prison wall for the foreseeable future.’

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that his other mistake was not stealing my little Nokia. It’s hardly the fanciest piece of equipment, but being able to dial 999 immediately was probably the only reason the boy was caught. If I had waited for even a couple of minutes, I have no doubt they would have got away with it.

The boy was bundled into a caged van a few minutes later. I sighed: I had already done a 14-hour shift, but I knew I’d be spending the next ten hours having my wrist set at the hospital, being lectured about concussions, giving witness statements back at the police station, and shaking my head at the idiocy of it all.

The arm hurt, and my chest ached from where the wire had cut into it. I’ll be honest with you, though: most of all, I was pissed off that I wouldn’t get a good night’s sleep.

God knows I needed one.

Can’t we all just be friends?

‘I want him out of here,’ the woman screeched, as she reached over my shoulder, the fingers of her hand curled into a claw, and her impressively long nails slashing, musketeer-style, through the air in the direction of her partner.

‘Shut it, you fucking whore,’ he barked back, and made a break for her, his hands balled into fleshy, white-knuckled fists.

I deduced from the trickle of blood coming from the man’s face that she’d managed to land at least a few scratches before we’d made it into the flat. Her face told a tale as well: her eye was practically swelling up as we stood there.

Seven minutes earlier, we’d received a call over the radio: ‘Domestic in progress, graded I, India.’

Our calls are graded in three levels of urgency: E-grade (or Echo) is, basically, whenever you can find the time to rock up. Court warnings, routine appointments and simple follow-ups tend to be graded E. The next step up is an S-grade (or Sierra), where we are meant to make it to the caller within the hour. Dealing with shoplifters, looking for suspicious persons, anything not super-urgent gets a Sierra grade.

Finally we have the most urgent calls, graded I, India. I-graded calls have to be responded to within 12 minutes, so that’s when my advanced driving gets put to the test. The flashing lights go on, the sirens are dusted off and put to good use, and my engine and brakes get a good workout.

This time, the address that showed up on the MDT2 as relayed by the CAD3 operator made my heart sink. I knew the house well. It belonged to one of those couples that ‘love each other’ so much that they seem to celebrate their passion largely through beating seven bells out of each other after consuming a drink or 18 between them.

We would attend this address at least a couple of times per month. The training school at Hendon4 loves to remind us that ‘domestic violence intervention is murder prevention’, but I’ve got to admit to having thought more than once that perhaps we should just leave this particular couple to it. For as long as I have been a copper in this borough, they seem to have been completely hell-bent on putting new dents into each other, and it’s a pitiful mess every time.

‘Take him away! I don’t want him here,’ she squealed, as I walked in through the front door.

I was the second car on scene, which is just as well, because I’m single-crewed. The car that beat me there was triple-crewed – unusual, given that, in these times of relentless belt-tightening, we’re usually one-up in a car, not three. I was glad to see that my colleague Tim was there; he knows the couple well. In addition to Tim, there was Charlie, a relatively new probationer, fresh out of Hendon, and Syd, a special constable.

Specials are volunteers. Many people seem to confuse them with PCSO5 staff, but there are crucial differences between them, the main one being that special constables don’t get paid. Also, not many people realise this, but special constables have the same powers as myself: they have been sworn in, are warranted by the Queen to do arrests, talk sternly to inebriated teenagers, wag their fingers at people failing to wear seat belts, heroically rescue kittens out of trees, and so on and so forth.

I sneak a look at this particularly solidly built special’s Metvest. I think I’ve seen him before, but I can’t remember his name; his nametag reads Smith, which is profoundly unhelpful.

He was doing his best to keep the man from getting to his lady-love. Meanwhile, Tim was trying to reason with the woman, in the hope she would come down from being a squeaky, hyperventilating ball of fury.

‘Oi!’ I called out. ‘Can we all just shut up for ten seconds? I can’t hear myself think in this racket.’

Weirdly (and unusually), they listened to me. The flat fell quiet for a couple of seconds, except for the man’s heavy breathing, leaving all six of us staring back and forth at each other for a few seconds.

‘Right,’ I said, taking control of the situation in the brief moment of silence. ‘You—,’ I pointed at the man, ‘let’s go to the living room and have a chat.’

Tim started leading the woman out of the kitchen and into the bedroom. Good thinking. Kitchens are the most dangerous rooms in a house when there’s a chance a fight will break out. Heavy pans, plenty of knives, boiling water – it rarely ends well.

I waved the special over to me, and after we’d had a brief chat with the king of this particularly squalid castle, we explained to him that he needed to be arrested so we would be able to interview him properly. I decided to let the special get the body (which is police slang for ‘making the arrest’), mostly for my own amusement, but he promptly ruined my entertainment by knowing what to do, and the arrest went smoothly.

Or at least, it looked to be going smoothly … until the man suddenly changed his mind. Immediately after the special applied one handcuff to him, he decided he didn’t want to get arrested after all. At first, he started struggling half-heartedly, but then he found some strength and with it a burst of uninhibited inspiration for mayhem. He booted the special in the shins, and managed to swipe my legs from under me. I hit the floor with a rib-crunching crash, hitting the back of my head against the side of a table. Pain shot through me briefly, before fading away again.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ I shouted. In response, the probationer – PC McOwen – came running to help us out. And so developed an all-out fight between the three of us and the man. The TV was kicked – I have no idea by whom – and crashed into the wall. Chairs were knocked over, a series of pictures that were balanced on a shelf went flying across the living room, covering the floor in shards of glass, and the table I had already landed on once ended up in several pieces on the floor.

Amid the chaos I heard McOwen scream, ‘SPRAY, SPRAY.’

He had taken his CS spray out of its holder, and was applying a generous dose of noxious liquid (which is not entirely dissimilar to pepper spray) to the man’s face.

The man calmed down rapidly, which is great news, obviously, but in the process, I caught some of the CS splash-back, and my eyes filled with tears and a burning sensation I haven’t felt since The Stag Do That Must Not Be Mentioned.

I react terribly to CS. Generally, I’d prefer we didn’t use the stuff in any circumstances. In the probationer’s defence, I suppose it was rather effective in this case; chances are we would have continued our living-room-trashing wrestling session for at least a couple of minutes more.

We finally managed to get the man in both cuffs, lying on the floor with the special constable sitting on his legs, the man reeling off a vituperation of obscenities about our mothers, and the probationer holding the handcuffs.

Having reached this position of relative control, we allowed ourselves to relax. It was all over, right?

Right?

Rarely do we have such luck; charging out of the bedroom came the man’s girlfriend, holding a rather large box set of the TV series Friends.

Yes, really.

‘Leave him alone, he hasn’t done anything to you,’ she shouted, before lifting the box set above her head, and bringing it down on the special.

Tim came running into the living room after her – I am still not sure how she managed to give him the slip – and tried to grab her. She struggled violently, elbowing him in the face and sending him to the floor. Yowling like a doom-wraith she hit the special with the box set again, this time with enough force that it disintegrated. A flurry of CDs, booklets and bits of torn box flew everywhere.

Between the four of us, we restrained her as well, and started taking the man out of the flat, where a caged police van had just arrived with further reinforcements and a way of transporting the fine specimen of gentlemanhood to a night in the cells.

As we hauled the man off, the woman was roaring from within Tim and McOwen’s grasp.

‘LOVE YOU,’ she called to her partner, before directing her anger at us. ‘You are hurting him, I love him, leave him alone!’ she half-sobbed, half-shouted, conveniently forgetting her insistence that we take him away not ten minutes earlier.

We arranged another van to take her away as well, and they both spent the rest of the night in separate cells, shouting across the hallway between the cells, declaring their mutual undying love approximately 68 times, much to the chagrin of the sleep-deprived custody sergeant.

The next day, lover-boy woke up to yet another ABH (Actual Bodily Harm) charge for beating up his girlfriend for the hundredth time. Meanwhile she was awarded with an assault charge for her valiant rescue attempt.

Before long they were back in the flat, continuing on their previous path of loving each other to death.

The A-hole who dropped the N-bomb

‘Hey, Delito,’ the sarge said to me that morning, in the daily briefing. ‘Thompson is off ill today, can you take care of the Sierra Delta gang?’

Sierra Delta – or SD – is Street Duties. It is a programme where new police officers are put through their paces, dealing with cases from beginning to end. They might do an arrest for a shoplifting, for example, and go through the whole process, from alpha to omega. Arrest, booking into custody, interview on tape, investigation, and so on and so forth: the whole process right through to court. It means that each case you deal with takes a lot of time, but you also get a full understanding of how the processes work. It’s incredibly interesting, and I recall my street-duty sessions fondly – the PC who was my mentor/instructor is still one of my best friends to this day.

‘Delito. You listening?’ Daydreaming already? Oh dear, today really was going to be a long day.

‘Sure thing, sarge, I’ll do my best,’ I replied.

At the end of the briefing, I headed over to the classroom to meet Sasha and Pete, the street duties probationers. They were coming up to the end of their street duties, and they generally had their ducks in a row.

Pete is one of those people who seem to be fuelled purely by air and love for The Job. He also has a look that – when combined with the uniform – makes women swoon when they see him. In some officers – the ones able to pretend they don’t notice, or don’t know – that can be a fantastic trait, because it makes certain quick quests for information all that much quicker. Pete knows what he’s doing, and he’s a solid police officer. If the women think ‘He can fuck me’, the men think ‘He can fuck me up’. In short, Pete spends every minute he doesn’t spend in uniform in a gym. I’ve run into him at the gym a couple of times, and he doesn’t mess around; he may very well be the fittest officer on the entire borough. He’s not particularly tall – about five foot seven – but he’s built like a row of brick-and-mortar outhouses, and inspires confidence through and through.

Sasha is not entirely unlike Pete in many ways: she’s witty, knows her laws and white notes6 inside out, and she’s no slouch either – she regularly runs half marathons and is apparently trying for her taekwondo black belt. She’s about as tall as Pete. Her slender build, short hair and fragile-looking glasses make her positively androgynous-looking – especially when she’s fully kitted out in her Metvest. She famously disposed of the rumours of her being a lesbian by sleeping with Pete just for long enough that everybody knew about it, before dumping him and returning to single life. The ‘everybody knew about it’ part was secured when she, early one Tuesday morning, transmitted over the radio, on the open channel, ‘Mike Delta two-two-three, do you have any johnnies?’

She got into some trouble with the brass about that one, but she gained major points with the rest of the team, and she’s now well known as someone who doesn’t mince her words – quite refreshing, really.

Once we’ve all said our hellos, we sit down briefly and talk about some questions they have, before breaking out the boot polish, giving our shoes a quick shine, and hitting the streets. Street duties involve a lot of foot patrolling, so you get a proper workout in the process, but seeing as I spend most of my time either driving around in a car or doing quick sprints after naughty little toe-rags, I usually find a walking session to be no bad thing.

It was a pretty slow morning. The radio was so dead that people occasionally ran a radio check, just to make sure their radios hadn’t stopped working. So, without anything better to do, we decided to head out on ‘reassurance patrol’.

Reassurance patrolling is usually done in areas where something bad has happened recently. Not long ago, we’d had a series of stabbings in one particular part of the borough, so we decided we’d take a stroll down the streets that had been worst affected, stop to have a chat with some of the shop owners, and just see how things were looking, on the whole.

By the time the morning had crawled to an end, we’d handed out five traffic tickets (all for mobile phone use), taken weed off some young troublemakers and issued them with a formal warning, and spent a bit of time running after a shoplifter who was unlucky enough to come across our path, before continuing his unlucky streak by running straight into a blind alley, where Sasha quickly got her arrest in. We dealt with it swiftly – both Pete and Sasha had made dozens of arrests by this point – and once we were done, we decided to pop into KFC for some lunch.