Prisoners, Property and Prostitutes (2 page)

At the age of 24, the standpoint from which I obtained my view was about to change forever.

When I was a small boy I had no real idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. I admired both my parents – my father was a businessman who always seemed calm, confident and compassionate, well turned out and efficient. My mother performed that unsung role of being the woman behind a successful man, or more accurately right beside him through all the problems that life throws at a couple. This included myself and my older brother, who I am sure unwittingly provided the usual round of ups and downs that offspring do, and which my parents managed to survive without too much permanent emotional and financial scarring.

In my later teens I had visions of combining my ability with languages with my love of money by learning Arabic, and thus making a fortune in the Middle East. Doing exactly what in the Middle East I was unsure, but it seemed a good idea. Unfortunately Arabic eventually proved to be beyond me, and I ended up scraping a degree in French and Italian at a level too low to do much else but teach, a career which (with all due respect to those who actually do teach) did not appeal in the slightest. A
career as a solicitor was briefly mooted, but at the time it was such a popular choice – everyone wanted to do it. I often wondered if their motivation was more out of financial greed than a wish to be a champion of justice and fair play, but maybe I’m cynical. In any event I never felt I had the necessary killer instinct to achieve in an area where there was such avaricious competition, hence the attempts at language study instead.

I liked the idea of something involving ‘man management’ in one form or another, and I knew for certain I wanted to do something where one day was not exactly like the next. I also wanted to be able to go home at the end of a day’s work feeling I’d actually done something useful, or made some tangible progress. This feeling was accentuated by watching my brother’s career which consisted of working in London and moving mythical money in and out of investment accounts, which to me didn’t really do anything visibly useful. Maybe there was also a hint of guilt after spending almost five years as a student, producing absolutely nothing.

Eventually however I joined the Police, for which I have to thank the woman who became my mother-in-law. With me being too poor to buy a newspaper, she would scour the Daily Telegraph jobs section on my behalf for anything starting with the words ‘graduates wanted’. She would cut out any promising advertisements and post them to me, and I would open the letters and read the latest offerings, usually at about 10.30am while lying in bed with her daughter and a hangover and wondering which lecture I was missing. It wasn’t quite the right spirit, but I felt it was one way of putting my career choice ahead of everything else.

One day a cutting arrived advertising ‘Graduate entry into the Police Service’. It had a certain appeal – a friend of my father’s had been a senior officer in a Scottish force, and on the odd occasion I met him he seemed a sensible man who was happy with his life. He also let me have a go with a revolver he used to carry at all times – a permitted consequence of a career spent locking up Glasgow’s finest.

As I thought about it I saw that this career fitted a lot of my criteria. Working with people, varied conditions and doing something useful. Something whereby at the end of a career I might be able to look back and think I had (possibly) made a slight difference.

Despite what you may read later, I am pleased to say that in this respect I was right. Another rather urgent aspect was that I was getting nearer and nearer to the end of my final year at University, and I had developed an amazing ability to talk myself into whatever job I felt I had even the remotest hope of getting.

So I applied for the Accelerated Promotion entry scheme for the Police. This was a scheme open to graduates, which as the name suggests allowed for rapid promotion through the ranks. I liked the sound of this – I didn’t have a mission to save humanity so much as a wish to be paid lots of money, and this looked like the way to do it. I filled in a long form on which I had to tell far fewer lies than on most applications, and was eventually called to interview at the headquarters of my chosen force.

Wearing my ‘interview’ suit and looking uncharacteristically well-groomed for a student, I sat before the Chief and Deputy Chief Constable and gave polite, reasoned answers to a number
of questions, and at the end of it was asked if I had any questions. Only one – ‘when will I know the outcome of the interview?’ My confidence was never high during interviews, and although I thought I had done reasonably well in this one, I had by now convinced myself I had probably not persuaded these very powerful men that they were looking at the future of modern policing. So after my 80 or more other job applications and a dozen or so unsuccessful interviews, my hopes were once again dwindling.

‘Wait outside and we’ll let you know in a few minutes,’ they said. Wow! At least that was a change from the two or three week delay before most employers sent their rejection letters, which usually thanked me for my interest in their company (pull the other one) and wished me luck in my chosen career (like hell they did).

Ten minutes later I had my news – no, not good enough for accelerated promotion, but was I interested in joining on the normal scheme? Yes, of course I was. Who ends an interview saying they didn’t basically want the job? I was still confident that by the time they recontacted me with a vacancy I would already be on the executive ladder elsewhere, but they seemed nice people and I didn’t want to be in the bad books of my local Police.

Three months later, still no job offers, and they wrote to me – come for a weekend assessment, very ‘outward bound’ and no smoking allowed, so low-scoring on two counts for me. But the prospect of any job was better than none, so off I went. To my enormous surprise I enjoyed it – I was put with nine other men, none of whom I had ever met before, and made to do things ranging from raft building to standing up and talking non stop
for a minute on spontaneously nominated subjects. It wasn’t difficult to see what they were looking for – ability to think fast, assess different situations, and most importantly get on well with a group of strangers when you are all tired and under pressure. So the lad who blew his nut and called everyone a ‘bunch of wankers’ may have been correct, but was out. The rest of them must have been pretty unpromising because only two of us got through, me and an ex-merchant Navy bloke. We hit it off from the start and worked as a pair for much of the weekend, both of us seeming to share the same sense of humour and a slightly cynical, laconic approach to life. At the end of the weekend I asked him how he thought he had done, and was slightly disappointed when he said he usually did well in selection procedures as he made a point of keeping close to someone far more hopeless than himself. Oddly enough we have remained in contact and on good terms since.

This was around the April of my final year at University, so I was relieved to have gainful employment in the bag before being cast out into the real world. I filled in the rest of the Summer and Autumn with a menial clerical job I had picked up on the University campus, and on a Monday in the November I reported to the Force Training Centre as a new, fresh-out-of-the-crate recruit, fully vetted and ready to go, but with a strong underlying feeling that my arrival in this area of employment was little more than a sophisticated accident.

The first week was busy, loads of paperwork to fill in, books handed out, talks from various people about basic things to watch out for, things you must do, mustn’t do, getting sworn in, sworn at, and generally run ragged by everyone we encountered.

Compared to today’s inductions it was a different world. Back then you were told,‘if you don’t like it then the bus stop’s outside and there are plenty of people who will be grateful to have your job, so if you’re going to start moaning about anything, don’t bother.’

Today they spend ages being given talks on equal opportunities, complaints procedures and what to do about bullying in the workplace. We were given the whole lot very succinctly in that one sentence.

Another brief but fundamental piece of advice came from a man from Complaints and Discipline who said,‘There are lots of things out there that will get you sacked, but the three most dangerous are prisoners, property and prostitutes.’ He went on to illustrate his point with a series of tales of policemen who had been led astray or betrayed by well intentioned dealings with all three. I made a mental note to take exceptional care with all property, and all the more so if it belonged to a prostitute. Especially one I had arrested.

The beard which I had sported throughout my student days was removed before my start date, leaving just a moustache – but even that was ‘not allowed’.

‘What about him over there? He’s got a moustache, and that bloke there’s got a beard.’

‘I’m not talking to them, I’m telling you – get rid of it. If you don’t like it, the bus stop’s outside and....’

‘Give me ten minutes, I’ll get rid of it.’

And that was that. Discipline through and through, much of it apparently ridiculous. But then a high standard of discipline meant we were better suited to serve society and do
the job we were trained for. Or at least that was probably the plan.

In line with this philosophy physical training was high on the agenda, so much so that by the end of the first week I ached from top to toe and was convinced I had flu, but it was just sheer fatigue. It seemed paradoxical that for a force so keen on fitness there were so many rotund figures knocking around the place. We were told that such people were ‘ten year tossers’, people who had joined a decade or more earlier when Police pay was truly abysmal, so to have joined then generally meant that:

a) no-one else would employ you and

b) the service wasn’t fussed who they took on.

In some instances they were right, there were a considerable number who deserved that label, but then again there were many more who had joined around that time who were very honourable, honest and decent officers.

It is just that very few seemed to end up on my shift.

The improvement in pay and conditions in the intervening years was often pointed out to me, as if I had somehow cheated the older in service by joining on a decent rate of pay without suffering the privations of the previous years.

After a week at the Force Training Centre I was slightly fitter, sworn in and equipped with uniform. The following Monday I reported to the District Training Centre for ten weeks’ basic training. This meant daily parades, more physical fitness, lots of parrot-fashion law, and ‘practicals’. Practicals involved instructors at the Centre playing the part of members of the
public, one or sometimes two recruits would be selected to play the part of ‘officer dealing’, and then briefly be kept out of sight while the rest of us were told what the practical would involve. The unfortunate Constable or Constables would then be called onto the scene and have to deal with whatever lay in wait.

The instructors’ main task seemed to be to ensure that whatever you tried to do to resolve a situation you didn’t win. They would then laugh heartily at your efforts, and tell you how you should have done it. I thought they were being unfair. I didn’t realise until after I left that they were actually making it more lifelike than even they perhaps realised.

Some of these exercises ended in farce; a ‘domestic’ scenario culminating in the instructor playing the part of the wife-beater being picked up by four officers and carried into a small tree, his body coming to rest with his private parts meeting the tree at speed. Sweet revenge indeed! Not a scripted finale, and definitely not Health and Safety approved. Nor was the scenario of the man trying to gas himself by sitting in a closed garage with the engine running on his car. The selected pupil for the lesson walked up and down the Training Centre’s row of garages several times, uncertain what drama was about to unfold, and oblivious to the grey fumes seeping from under the up-and-over door only yards away from him. Eventually a muffled voice from within shouted,‘How realistic are you going to make this, you blind jerk?’ The student in question rapidly rose to the rank of Inspector over the next few years, which was not very reassuring.

One of the quaintest practicals was that of the homeless man, who regaled the passing officer with tales of woe and
misfortune, begging for some form of assistance. The exercise ended when the officer uttered the words ‘It’s not my fault you’re a tramp. Now sod off and stop bothering me.’

It turned out the unfortunate gentleman should be directed to the nearest Salvation Army hostel, where no doubt a bowl of soup and a warm bed awaited him, as a brass band played ‘Abide with me’ in the background. Good old-fashioned traditional policing, unchanged for 100 years or more. I liked that one, and vowed to use it in the social crusade that I felt my career could become.

There was also plenty of swimming, presided over by an instructor who possessed amazing abilities in the pool, but outside it he was only really good at two things – playing the fruit machine and drinking. He had an abrasive charm, and by repute had been sent into training as he was too violent and dangerous to let out on the street. I didn’t believe this at the time, but should have done as it was perhaps a hint at some of the people I was to work with in the future. My abiding memory was of him watching a black girl recruit trying to get out of the deep end of the pool, simultaneously battling gravity and her leopard skin patterned swimsuit, which threatened to remain in the water as she emerged. To the modern recruit the incident would have brought about a screaming fit of challenging this and objecting to that, as the air rang with words like ‘jungle’, ‘darling’, ‘phwoaar’ and some very inappropriate references to coconuts, but in truth the biggest hurdle to her getting out was that she was laughing so much.

Beneath the instructor’s banter was an affection and compassion, and a mutual respect for his encouragement which
matched the enormous effort which she put into the swimming, an activity which was obviously not her forte. It wouldn’t happen today, but a recruit in a similar position today wouldn’t get the same results. They’d probably just get out by the steps.