Confessions of a Police Constable (33 page)

‘I can't hear anything. Can you?' Jay said.

I rolled my window down ever so slightly to have a listen.

‘Nope, I can't hear any—'

I was interrupted by the smashing of the window next to my head. Pain shot through my neck, and out of the corner of my eye I saw someone grab for the door next to me. They pulled the handle hard; the whole car rocked. It was locked. It always is. I lock my door out of habit, whether I'm on duty or not.

I turned towards my window and saw four people outside. One of the dark shadows had reached his hand inside the window they had just smashed with a brick, and was attempting to reach for the door lock. He was so close that I could smell his arm: a musky tang of earth, cigarettes and cheap laundry detergent. For a second, I thought about how odd it was that I was sitting there, smelling the arm of someone who had just broken the window that shielded me from the elements.

I snapped out of my shock and looked down at my hand. I had picked up the spare battery for my radio. I didn't waste any more time and brought it down on his hand. Hard. The young man yelped in pain and pulled away from the door, before running towards the back of the car; his friends did the same.

I sensed something happening beside me, and turned to Jay.

Or rather, I turned to the space where Jay should have been.

The men – boys, really – had opened the door on his side of the car, and were trying to drag him out of the driver-side door. He was still wearing his seatbelt, and the nylon straps digging into his lap, neck and shoulder were the only things keeping him in the car.

Our in-car MDTs have huge ‘emergency' buttons on them in case we need help. I reached for the space in the centre console where the button was—where the button
would have been
, if this car had had an MDT installed. I lost precious seconds registering there was no help to be had from the dashboard, other than the button to switch on the car's flashing lights. I pressed it, activating the blue lights that are hidden in the grille at the front of the car and as blue LEDs in the reversing lights at the back. Jay, in his struggles, was pressing on the steering wheel, and managed to turn on the car's sirens as well. Every time he bumped into the horn buttons built into the wheel, the tone of the sirens changed from one melody to another.

The small, darkened area was suddenly lit up with stroboscopic blues. The deafening cacophony of the sirens echoed off the walls.

Somewhere in all of this, I found my senses and pressed the red button on my radio.

‘Urgent assistance required,' I shouted.

I grabbed the door-release handle and bounced out of the car, reaching for my baton with one hand.

As I stood up, a lap-full of glass rained down off me. Glass was everywhere. I could feel it sticking into my shoulders where it had dug its way under my Metvest. It was gnawing into my sides. My eye felt … odd … but I had but one thing on my mind: helping Jay, and then getting the hell out of there.

I started moving to the back of the car, continuing my frenetic, shouted monologue into my radio: ‘We're under attack!' I shouted. ‘Six males, maybe more.'

A few of the group who'd been attacking us had been scared off by the sirens. By the time I had staggered around to Jay's side of the car, there were just three left.

Jay was half-hanging out of the vehicle, and one of the men was making to kick him. In excruciating slow motion, I saw the attacker bring his leg forward hard.

‘Get away from him,' I shouted, and raised my baton to strike. There was one man between Jay and myself. He saw my stick and began to move out of the way, but I was not in the mood to find out whether he was planning to run off; anything or anybody between me and Jay was going to get a whack with the length of freshly-racked extendible steel I had clutched between my fingers.

I swung at the man with my baton. I couldn't hear it, but I felt a crunching as the brushed steel impacted with the lower arm he had thrown up to defend himself.

I could see Jay's head bouncing up, and helplessly falling back down again, as yet another boot connected. One of the men was holding him by his arm, still trying to drag him out of the car, as the other kicked him.

‘Get back,' I shouted, on autopilot – ‘get back' is the universal fighting call that gets drilled into you in officer safety training.

I brought the baton down on the first man again. This time, he lifted his other arm. My baton connected with something metal. It was a pole. He was holding a short length of scaffolding or piping. I couldn't tell whether he had used it on Jay, or whether he had plans to introduce it to some part of my anatomy. I was not about to let him, and brought my baton up again for another strike, but he cowered away, half-running, half-leaping into a small set of bushes near the edge of the playground.

With great relief, I noticed another set of blue lights had joined ours. But I realised I couldn't hear anything. I couldn't hear the sirens on our car and I hadn't heard the other police car arrive. I glanced back. It was a carrier. The BSU serial we had heard on the radio earlier had come to our assistance.

Glancing back at Jay, I saw that the man who'd been kicking him had started to run, and now had two of the fully riot-clad BSU officers in hot pursuit.

The last guy, who had been pulling Jay from the car, had dropped his grip and was making to run off too. I didn't want to let him get away. I leapt forward and crashed into him. The top of my head smashed into his face as I carried out the least delicate rugby tackle ever attempted. My force caused the man to topple over onto the open car door. For a brief moment it seemed as if the door was going to give in at the hinges, but then it changed its mind and we were catapulted the other way. I ended up on my back, with the man I had dived at covering me like a blanket.

On the ground, trapped by 12 stone of athletic IC3 male, I tried to think of a way to use my baton, which I was still clinging on to. Before I made it that far, two men picked the assailant off of me and deposited him with great force, face first, onto the asphalt. I tilted my head backwards, and from my upside-down perspective, I saw that they were using zip-tie handcuffs to restrain him.

Looking back ‘down', I saw Jay wrestle himself into an upright position, undo his seatbelt and climb out of the car. He must have been kicked in the head at least twice; a trickle of blood was running from his hair. He clutched his arm to his chest as he came over to me. He said something.

I still couldn't hear a thing.

He reached over to my radio, pressed the transmit button and said something, before cancelling the emergency mode.

Jay picked me up from the ground with his working arm. He opened the back door of the Mondeo, and dropped me in the back seat, leaving my legs still pointing out of the car. I sat up and felt instantly dizzy.

Gradually, as my adrenaline levels returned to normal, my hearing returned. Only then did I also realise that my colour vision had also been absent: I had been seeing the whole episode in a weird, super-slow-motion, sepia colour.

‘You all right?' I could finally hear Jay ask.

‘Yeah, I think so,' I said, leaning forward and placing my face in my hands. I found a piece of glass in my cheek, flicked it aside and returned my face to my hands. I had a dreadful headache.

‘You're covered in blood. Ambulance on its way,' Jay summarised.

I twisted and leaned back into the back rest of the front seats. I was looking through the back window of the car. The whole area was swarming with police; at least half a dozen marked cars, a few rent-a-wrecks and two carriers had responded to my call for urgent assistance.

I couldn't hazard a guess at how long I had been sitting there like that, but after a while, I realised someone was talking to me. I had been zoning out, looking at the sea of blinking blue lights at the end of the short road.

‘Say again?' I enquired.

Jay laughed.

He looked into my eyes, and I saw a flicker of … something I couldn't put my finger on.

‘Thanks, Matt,' he said, before stepping aside, revealing a set of paramedics eager to take care of us.

¹
IC stands for Identity Code. They are used to describe the apparent ethnic background of Victims, Informants, Witnesses and Suspects (collectively known as VIWS). IC1 means ‘white'.

²
Mobile Data Terminal

³
Computer Aided Dispatch

⁴
Hendon Police College, a huge training complex that serves as the main campus for the Metropolitan Police.

⁵
Police Community Support Officer

⁶
The training paperwork you get when you learn everything you need to know to be a police officer.

⁷
White or Hispanic person

⁸
Push To Talk button: The button that opens a radio channel and enables me to transmit with my radio.

⁹
Time Of Arrival

¹⁰
Police National Computer

¹¹
The Metropolitan Police-wide criminal intelligence database

¹²
‘Intel' refers to Intelligence. Checking for intel usually just means that we check any previous calls and all the various databases we have available to see if we know anything about a place, person, or vehicle.

¹³
‘The nick' is slang for your home police station – or the closest police station with custody cells.

¹⁴
The Metropolitan Police is so ‘customer-focused' these days that everyone we deal with is semi-sarcastically referred to as a ‘customer', even if they are caught red-handed, halfway into someone's bedroom window during a burglary.

¹⁵
Road Traffic Collision

¹⁶
Gravity Friction-Lock Baton

¹⁷
Push To Talk

¹⁸
‘Blues' are the flashing blue lights. ‘Twos' refer to the two-tone sirens used on police cars (the ones that kids normally ape when they run around the house shouting ‘neeh-naah-neeh-naah').

¹⁹
Diplomatic Protection Group

²⁰
Slang for sergeant

²¹
CPR is short for Cardiopulmonary resuscitation; it's also known as ‘heart massaging' or ‘chest compressions'.

²²
Emergency Life Support

²³
Automatic External Defibrillator. It's like those paddles they use in hospitals to ‘shock' patients back to life, except more suitable for carrying around with you in an ambulance.

²⁴
Members of the Public

²⁵
‘Bodies' is police slang for prisoners; not, as some people assume, people headed for the morgue.

²⁶
Officer Safety Training

²⁷
CS is technically o-chlorobenzylidene malononitrile – but the letters C and S refer to Corson and Stoughton, the two Americans who discovered the compound.

²⁸
Personal Protection Equipment

²⁹
Mobile Data Terminal

³⁰
Computer Aided Dispatch

³¹
Police National Computer

³²
Armed Response Vehicle

³³
Saying the Q-word to mean ‘the opposite of busy' is bad luck in this job; whenever someone exclaims, ‘My, is it quiet today', it invariably means that the rest of the shift descends into a shitstorm of historical proportions. The last time someone mentioned the Q-word over the radio, the riots broke out a few hours later. QT stands for Quiet Time.

³⁴
Traffic police

³⁵
‘Tug' – to pull a car over.

³⁶
Immediate Capture of Evidence for Front Line Officers – or, as most people would call it, a camera. I love that sometimes the acronyms they come up with (‘ICEFLO') are the same length as the words they replace (‘camera'). Only in the Metropolitan Police …

³⁷
A police officer who's been in the job for a long time; usually a term of endearment.

³⁸
Personal Radio

³⁹
Technically, an assault where the attacker is intending to cause Grievous Bodily Harm.

⁴⁰
Crown Prosecution Service

⁴¹
Crime Reporting Information System: the computer system where we log all criminal incidences. When you report a crime and you're given a Crime Reference number, it has been issued by our CRIS system.

⁴²
SOCO. Like CSI, but more British.

⁴³
Officer Safety Training

⁴⁴
Forensic Medical Examiner

⁴⁵
Borough Support Unit

⁴⁶
Crime Reporting Information System

⁴⁷
Automatic Time Recorder: an automatic stamping machine that is calibrated to only ever stamp the exact time it was used, along with a code for the police station that did the stamping.

⁴⁸
Case Progression Unit: officers who deal with cases currently in process.

⁴⁹
Crown Prosecution Service

⁵⁰
Senior Management Team

⁵¹
Officer Safety Training

⁵²
MG-11 is the name of the Witness Statement form used in the Met.

⁵³
Evidence and Action Book. A handy little 34-page booklet that has loads of aide-memoires in it, so overworked and slightly stressed police officers can do their jobs better.

⁵⁴
Case Progression Unit

⁵⁵
Police Community Support Officers

⁵⁶
Scene of Crime Officers