Confessions of a Police Constable (25 page)

To my surprise, Sandra took Kim's suggestion, and put the phone in her trouser pocket, before leaning against the brick wall surrounding the courtyard of the estate. She folded her arms across her chest and glowered at my colleague.

‘What?' she said.

‘I hear there was a fight at school today,' Kim started.

‘Yeah? So?'

‘Well, the thing is, one of the girls who was in the fight got injured.'

‘She's a bitch.'

‘I can't really judge that; I don't know either of the girls. However, when there's a fight and somebody gets hurt, it's my job to find out what happened.'

‘Did she call the cops? Fuck, that's so like her,' Sandra said, before realising she had sworn. ‘Er, I mean … I didn't mean … I'm … Eh …' Sandra was looking so forlorn that Kim couldn't help but laugh.

‘Don't worry,' she smiled, ‘I won't arrest you for swearing. How's that?'

‘You can do that?' Sandra said, wide-eyed. ‘Arrest someone for swearing?'

‘It depends. Are you going to swear some more?' Kim asked, and winked.

Sandra shook her head vigorously.

‘I think we'll be fine then,' Kim said, and continued with the task in hand. ‘Hey, Sandra, someone told us that you may have recorded the fight. On your mobile phone, maybe?'

From where I was sitting, I could see a change in Sandra. She tensed up, and one of her hands dropped down by her side, faux-casually. She had her hand resting over the pocket where her phone was.

‘Is that bad?' she said. ‘Is that illegal?'

‘No, you can film whatever you want, whenever you want. Forget about that for now. Can I just talk to you about what happened?' Kim asked, whilst digging out her notebook.

Sandra nodded, and the two of them spent the next few minutes walking through what had happened: who said what and to whom, in what order, and why. Thankfully, Sandra proved to be a lot better at telling a coherent story than San had been.

Once Kim had outlined the whole story, and confirmed that Sandra had definitely filmed the incident, the time came to break the bad news.

‘Well, I think that just about wraps it up, but now we have a bit of a problem – I'm going to have to borrow your phone for a while.'

‘Why?'

‘Well, you were witness to an assault, so we needed to take a statement from you, but what you have on your phone is evidence. I'm going to have to take your phone away to our lab, so our guys can take the video off your phone.'

‘You can't do that!' Sandra said, loudly.

‘Well, actually, I
can
.' Kim said. ‘So, please, could I have your phone?'

‘No. I use it all the time,' Sandra said. Kim glanced over at me and I shrugged. We had to take the phone.

‘
DAAAAAAD
!' Sandra wailed.

A man sitting on one of the first-floor balconies peered over the railing at us.

‘Uh. Hello, officers,' he stuttered, clearly confused to see two constables next to his daughter.

‘What have you done now, Sandra?' he said, in the typical dad-joke fashion (delivered in the same tone as the hundreds of lines dads love to use whenever a police officer gets anywhere near them: ‘He did it!' ‘Oh no! They're coming to take me away', ‘See, they're here because you didn't finish your sprouts last night.'

‘They want to take my phone,' she shouted up.

‘I'll be right down,' he called, and vanished towards the lifts. A fistful of seconds later, as the lift doors slid open, a tall man wearing a pair of glasses and a cigarette, along with well-worn flip-flops and a grim expression on his face, appeared.

‘You can't take my daughter's phone,' he started immediately. ‘She hasn't done anything wrong, has she?'

‘Oh no, I didn't mean to give you that impression,' I hastily said. ‘Your daughter is not under arrest, and she's not suspected of anything. The only thing is, she recorded an altercation on her mobile phone and we need to seize it as evidence.'

‘That's bullshit,' he said.

‘Dad! Language!' Sandra said hurriedly.

‘Er, Yes. Sorry. But this isn't right. It's her phone, and you can't take it away from her,' the dad said. ‘If you want the pictures, I'm sure Sandra would be happy to email them or put them on one of those USB-things for you. Wouldn't you, hon?'

Sandra nodded, her face brightening immediately; it looked as if she could keep her phone after all.

‘Unfortunately, that's not going to be possible,' Kim said. ‘In order for something to be useable as evidence, we need to take it off the device ourselves. In fact, it'll be our lab guys doing it. They'll do a statement about how they got the data off the phone and whether they believe it was tampered with or not. I'm not saying your daughter would do anything to the files, like accidentally erase them, edit them or anything like that, but it's simply the way we have to do things for something to stand up in court.'

My radio blipped into life.

‘Two-zero receiving Mike Delta.'

I took a couple of steps away, without taking my eyes of the trio, and responded: ‘Go ahead.'

‘Are you guys nearly done over there? The late turn is coming on and they were just wondering when the car would be back.'

‘Give us twenty minutes to wrap up. We'll be with you in half an hour,' I replied.

When I rejoined the conversation, there was a heated discussion going on.

‘Give me the phone, Sandra,' the father said. Sandra produced the phone, and handed it over to her dad, who shoved it in the pocket of his cut-off jeans. ‘You're not getting this phone. We bought it only a few months ago. Do you have any idea how expensive these damn things are?'

‘Sir, I'm frightfully sorry, but don't worry,' Kim said. ‘Your daughter will get her phone back, but we do need to seize it as evidence for now.'

‘You can't just go around and take people's phones,' he said, shooting a long, lingering, angry stare at Kim.

‘I completely understand that you are upset,' I interjected. ‘But the truth is, we can most certainly take somebody's phone if we suspect that it contains evidence. Sandra said herself that the phone contains a video of a girl beating up another girl, and we will probably want to prosecute the assailant. To do that, we'll need the video evidence.'

My argument didn't seem to be working, so I decided to try another angle: ‘How would you feel if Sandra had been assaulted, and you knew there was a video of the assault that could help get justice, but the person who filmed it didn't want to hand over their phone?'

‘Yeah, well, you don't have the right,' the father said, feebly.

I could tell from the way he was looking at us that he did understand why we needed the video; he just didn't want to hand over the phone.

‘I'm afraid I do. Under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, section 19,' I said. ‘There's another thing you have to keep in mind as well. If Sandra was to try and copy over the video files, but it turned out that they were corrupted for some reason, or they got deleted by accident, she would be under suspicion of tampering with evidence. That would be rather serious, wouldn't you think? Now, if our guys do something to delete the footage by accident, they'll have to write a statement about that and Sandra wouldn't be liable.'

‘I understand all of that,' he said. ‘So when could she get the phone back?'

‘It shouldn't take too long,' I said, realising that I didn't actually know how long it was going to take. ‘I don't know exactly how long, but I shouldn't think it would be more than a couple of weeks or so, at the most. After all, the phone itself wouldn't be evidence, just the video stored on there.'

‘Can I call someone who knows the law, and find out?' he said.

‘You can, but we're in a bit of a rush; we've been here for nearly an hour now, and the shift after us needs our car, so I'd like to be back in my car within five minutes,' I said.

Kim took a step forward: ‘Sir, I really don't want to mention this, but if you don't hand the phone over voluntarily, we have the right to take it by force. I can see you're a reasonable guy, but I've explained everything to you and we really need to get going now.'

‘Please,' she added, employing the mum-stare that few people can resist, ‘the phone.'

Never in a million years did I think that little speech would work. Effectively threatening someone with violence rarely works, in my experience, but there's something very disarming about Kim. She was right, of course, we do have the legal right to take the phone by force, but actually explaining this to someone we were trying to convince was a bit of a gamble.

‘Er,' the dad said, ‘okay.'

He stuck his hand in his pocket and handed the phone over to Kim, who immediately turned to Sandra.

‘Do you have a password on your Blackberry, in case the battery runs out?' she asked.

Sandra shook her head.

‘Right,' Kim said, and pointed at an entry in her notebook. ‘Now if you just sign here. This confirms that we've taken your phone and that you understand why.'

Sandra scribbled her signature at the bottom of the short entry in Kim's notebook.

‘Thank you, Sandra,' she said. ‘It's really important that people don't get away with bullying others like this, and your video is going to help make sure we can stop this from happening in the future. You've done a really good thing here today.'

We finished up with Sandra and her dad and left them on good terms. For sure, neither of them was happy that we'd taken the phone away, but both of them seemed to understand that we had to and that we had the right to do so.

When we'd climbed back into the car to go check the phone into evidence, I suddenly remembered an embarrassing episode from a few months ago, when I had seized a phone belonging to a drug dealer. ‘Kim, did you remember to take the battery out of the phone?'

She shook her head, and immediately set about taking the phone apart to take the battery out. Blackberries are clever little devices – they can be wiped remotely, even if they are turned ‘off' at the power key. There was probably little risk of Sandra doing that, to be fair, but you never knew.

When the time comes to copy the evidence off the phone, the forensic guys will hook it to a fresh battery, in a room that's completely shielded from radio signals, so that if anybody did try to wipe its memory, the signal wouldn't make it to the phone.

‘Ha!' Kim said. ‘Can you imagine if the phone got wiped after all that? We'd never hear the end of it …'

‘Yeah, you ain't wrong,' I said. ‘I'm just glad we didn't have to tussle with the dad. That could have gotten messy.'

She shot me a look: ‘You need to get better at reading people. He was perfectly ready to hand over the phone; he just needed an excuse to do so, and I gave him one.'

I shrugged, and turned the BMW out of the estate, steeling myself for the hours of paperwork I still had to do after the day's shift, but still pleased I'd be off the streets before the evening fun started.

‘Right,' the skipper said, as his eyes slid around the small assembly of plain-clothes officers in front of him. ‘Jesus, you're a messy bunch.'

‘If you were the fashion police,' he said to me and Simon, the only two in full uniform in the stuffy room, ‘you'd have to arrest us all!'

We were on Operation Slate, an undercover job. Two female officers were to be placed, plain-clothed, in a busy bar that had become a hotspot for theft. The hope was that their tablet computer – an iPad – would be stolen, so we would be able to arrest the thieves right away.

Twenty minutes after the briefing, we had installed ourselves in and outside the bar we were covering.

Though we were all in close vicinity, we would communicate by radio alone. I went on the
Event 2
channel that was reserved for our sting operation. Simon stayed on the normal despatch channel on the radio, to keep half an ear on things going on around the rest of the borough.

‘Radio check from uniformed units on Operation Slate,' I radioed in.

‘CCTV receiving,' one of the team members in the bar's CCTV room radioed back.

‘Safety receiving,' the team guarding Lisa and Miranda – our officers with the iPad – added.

‘Spotter Alpha receiving,' said another officer who was charged with just milling around the nightclub looking for known suspects and keeping an eye on things.

Then my radio beeped twice. One of the undercover officers had a radio in their purse, with a pair of buttons on the inside of the bag. One of the buttons sends a beep; the other sends an urgent assistance signal. Two beeps meant ‘okay', so I guess they were receiving us.

We are involved in operations like this every few weeks, targeting whatever crime hotspots we have around the borough. We usually target different types of theft, including bicycle theft, pick-pocketing, shoplifting, among others, usually guided by the areas where the SMT
⁶³
in the borough feels our statistics are weakest.

The jobs tend to be either incredibly busy or completely dead. So far, this was the latter. Simon and I were strolling up and down the street outside the nightclub, with my radio silent apart from the occasional radio check.

The streets around the club quarter were relatively well patrolled; six officers were doing big loops around the bar district, and every 20 minutes or so, I'd have a chance for a quick chat to catch up on some of the gossip. It's a perk of these operations; you're working with people that aren't on the same team as you, so you get a chance to catch up and have a natter with officers you don't know as well, or haven't seen in a while.

At one in the morning, about three hours into the operation, my radio woke up from its slumber.