Prisoners, Property and Prostitutes (21 page)

Resisting the urge to tell her not to bother as they were indirectly responsible for the scene she had just witnessed, Charlie turned back to the dog and gave him a public beating in an attempt to appear penitent, and as soon as the woman walked off he packed up as fast as possible and fled the area for home. Sam’s one trip off his patch was over.

Working the office had a big advantage in that I had no paperwork. I would walk in at the start of a shift, be given a rundown of what jobs were on the go, which ones were still to be given out, and what sort of time the departing shift had had over the previous eight hours. At the end of my shift I would perform the same sort of handover and leave. I didn’t have to give a single thought to jobs not done, paperwork or statements not completed, I could just switch off until I went back the next day to do it all again.

The downside was that every job that came in had to be dealt with in one way or another, either given to a patrol, passed to a specialist department, or very often marked off as ‘advice given’ or ‘Occurrence Book entry’. My Sergeant had spent some time in a Control Room as a Constable and gave me many good tips on the giving of advice to phone callers. His original office career had ended with two particular message pads – one reported a call from a chip shop, the content of which said ‘There is a man being battered in here’. That was enough for his Inspector to warn him to be less flippant. The next day a concerned gentleman rang in, asking if an officer could visit to advise him in respect of several matters concerning one of his
children, who he was concerned was becoming a little wayward. When the Inspector read on the pad that Mr. Smith had phoned in saying, ‘I want to see a Policeman over my daughter,’ that was the final straw.

The Inspector’s concern was that he would not be seen to be firm enough with his subordinates, as every night at midnight the message pads were clipped together and put in a tray for the Superintendent to scrutinise the following morning. After this they were filed.

‘Filed’ would be better described as ‘chucked in a cupboard under the front desk’, but at least we knew where they were.

The pads were serial numbered for reference, but rather than being printed before we got them, the numbers were applied at the same time as the pad was written by using a desk stamp which would put a number in each top corner. The stamp would automatically wind on one number at a time, but at midnight the numbers had to be reset to zero. This could be a messy task as many years of surplus ink lurked within the mechanism, but I soon became adept at poking it with a pencil to manipulate its innards rather than getting covered in ink every time. A great benefit of this low-tech system meant that if a phone call came in in the early hours reporting a serious matter which later turned out to be trivial, then the pad could be rewritten, the stamp reset, and a whole new pad created with the correct chronological number. This stopped the Super asking the day shift why a report of a robbery had been finalised with ‘advice given’, as all he ended up seeing was the revised pad which was written with hindsight and might simply say something on the lines of ‘report of lost property.’

As one of the ‘office men’ I soon came to realise that for every job given out over the radio, there were a great many more that were ‘batted off’ over the phone. The direct number for the Police Station rang on the desk in the Panda Control, so if things became very busy the two of us in there could be faced with two internal phones, one external line and a radio all competing for attention, at which point some irate member of the public would saunter into the foyer and start ringing the bell on the desk. Our usual Sergeant would always pitch in and help, but occasionally we would have a stand-in for a day or two, and some had very fixed ideas of what they should deal with and what was someone else’s responsibility. To have two phones on the go and a blaring radio with two or three patrols all trying to pass messages at the same time was bad. To see the Sergeant go to the front desk and hear him say,‘Take a seat, I’ll get someone to deal with you in a moment,’ was highly annoying. The Sergeant would then walk back into our office and announce, ‘There’s someone at the front desk when you’ve got a minute,’ before returning to the leisurely scrutiny of a few bits of nonurgent paperwork in his tray. Fortunately the 999 emergency calls all went direct to the Headquarters Control Room, from where they controlled any resources which were ‘County wide’ rather than purely local, such as Traffic and motorway patrols, as well as things like dogs and SOCOs.

Life as a patrol Constable, both on foot and in a car, had been a fair eye-opener for me. I was (and still am) amazed by the sheer variety and eccentricity of humanity ‘in the wild’. But in the office I had a further unexpected round of awakening to the many facets of human nature. Outdoors, in uniform, you are a
bit of a sitting duck for the public to approach and unload their problems onto. In the station you are truly ‘back to the wall’. A telephone means that all the great unwashed had to do was pick up a phone and call, and 24 hours a day someone would answer. If they felt like a little exercise then a gentle stroll would bring them to the front desk, and a press of the buzzer would produce a ready-made agony aunt from whom they could demand a solution to their problems.

Again this didn’t apply to all phone and personal callers – many were quite normal people, reporting crimes, reporting property lost, or seeking sensible advice over matters we were rightly expected to be able to help with, but in a single day you could see a fair spectrum.

A popular past time of many has always been that of falling out with their neighbours. If they felt they were not getting their local community officer on their side, they would come up to the nick ‘
en famille’
, usually on a weekend afternoon when the football had finished on television and there was nothing for the children to do. This is the same mentality that staff at Accident and Emergency Units see, when a sore finger from a week ago turns into a family day out. After filling the foyer with two or sometimes three generations of the same clan, the alpha male would address you with his speech. A supporting chorus of his wife, her sister, and perhaps the oldest child would all join in with additional details to bolster the tirade. After several minutes of chapter and verse about how their lives had been made hell by all manner of aggression from whoever was unfortunate enough to share the same street as them, it would move to phase two. This was a list of all the officers who had attended over the months or
sometimes years and been tasked with sorting out an endless soap opera of discontent. Names would flow off the tongue, many of whom I knew well. The catalogue of relative success or failure was interesting – sometimes they would praise the efforts of an officer who I knew would have done almost nothing to help. Others who would have made efforts to plug the hole in the Titanic rather than abandon ship were branded ‘lazy’ and not interested. The truth behind the rant was that whoever told them the truth or tried to broker some compromise was doomed to criticism, and whoever gave a few platitudes and showed sympathy to their ‘cause’ was deemed to understand the situation.

Phase three covered the names of several supervisory officers, ranging from Sergeant to Chief Superintendent, the wrong rank usually being attached to the wrong surname, but to the casual observer it sounded good.

The summary ended with the question, ‘So what are you going to do about it?’

It would usually be sorted out with a bit of sympathy and a promise to get the local Bobby to revisit, and when challenged with the words, ‘so you’re not actually going to come out and deal with it now,’ I was able to reply with that as a mere office man I was unable to fly to their rescue like some sort of superhero and resolve their predicament because there was a Police Station to be run. I also made a mental note never to become a ‘Unit Beat’ officer, as to do so was to put your name forward actually to help these aromatic ingrates sort out a mess for which they had only themselves to blame.

Over the years these sort of people try the patience of every Police officer, and the best silencing of a family like this that I
ever saw was when on patrol I had gone with a colleague to a long, long-standing dispute. We had been given the three-phase summary of misfortune, followed by the usual question, ‘So what are you going to do about it?’

Expecting to give the usual platitudes I drew breath to speak, when Chris Roberts, the other lad with me, suddenly spoke.

‘I think I’ve got exactly what you need in the car. We can resolve this once and for all today. Just wait there.’

This surprised me probably more than the family because I hadn’t a clue what he was on about. We all waited with mild apprehension as Chris went to our patrol car outside. In full view of everyone he opened the boot, and meticulously went through all the kit we carried. In a short space of time he had cones, wellies (size 8 probably), first aid kit, signs and lights strewn in the road behind the car. By the time the spare wheel was lifted out I was thoroughly baffled. I walked out to speak to him, followed by the now fascinated herd from the house. They were obviously sure that whatever he was looking for was important, and what’s more, it was for their benefit, so deserved a closer look.

Chris had a genuinely despondent air about him by now, and was loading everything back into the boot. He finished this task, turned to the family and said:

‘I thought I could help you, but I’ve had a look and I’m fresh out of Pixie dust. You’ll have to fix it yourselves. Goodbye.’

Another phenomenon which became evident both at the front desk and on the phone was the failure by the public to realise
that while the Police are a 24 hour a day service, the actual individuals within it are not. Small children often have the misapprehension that the teachers at their school have no home lives, and live permanently at school, being lost and without direction unless in front of a class. By the age of eight they have usually realised that this is not the case, but this mentality must reappear in later life when they need the Police.

The phone would ring around 11 o’clock in the morning, and a voice would ask,‘Can I speak to Constable Grey please?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I would reply, ‘he’s not available at the moment. Can I help you or take a message?’ ‘Well it is quite important. Are you sure he’s not on duty? He came to my house when we got burgled.’

‘What time was that?’

‘About half past four this morning.’

Resisting the temptation to say,‘Of course madam, we are all chronic insomniacs who live at the Police Station anyway and await your next instruction,’ I would make some mild apology for the inconvenience caused by the officer actually being so selfish as to go home for a while, and broker an alternative arrangement.

Other callers would ring in panic at a given situation, and one that sticks in my mind was a woman who was rightly irate at a group of youths causing the usual nuisance close to her house, and who announced down the phone that, ‘they’re hitting golf balls round the place – one of them nearly missed me.’

How disappointing, madam. I’ll tell them to aim better next time.

One of the secrets of successful Policing was to be able to give good advice, and if not solve people’s problems, at least make sure they didn’t come back for more, or if they did, try to make sure it was when there was a different shift on duty.

The range of questions demanding reply was amazing, and very often nothing to do with the Police. Even things like, ‘how high can my neighbour let his conifers grow?’, ‘what do I do about the drains in the road smelling?’, but that was all stuff to refer to another agency – someone else’s problem. We were only consulted because of our ease of availability and contact. The majority of enquiries were actually more or less in our remit, and if I stepped back those few short years to the time before I crossed the invisible line and joined the force, I could understand the motive for approaching the Police for many of the answers sought. What I hadn’t appreciated at that time was the overriding urge to tell people to grow up and clear off, and how much effort has to be put into saying it in a much longer and more pleasant way that leaves the punter with nothing, but happy all the same. After all, the other side of the coin is that the man you short change at the desk could be the passer-by you ask for help the next day at the scene of some mayhem or other. A variation on the theme of making as many friends on the way up as you can, in case you need them on the way down, I suppose.

One sunny Saturday afternoon two youths came to the front desk, clutching a magazine. The older of the two was about twenty one years old, and introduced himself as the younger one’s father, which left me quietly puzzled. He repeatedly referred to the younger one saying ‘my lad this’, and ‘my son
that’, but given that his ‘son’ turned out to be just short of 14 years old, a quick mental estimate would have needed him to be fathering children at the age of about seven. I knew they were a promiscuous lot in Newport, but surely this was taking it to extremes. Further conversation revealed that ‘dad’ was actually the stepfather, and the domestic setup was the frequent but slightly bizarre one where a woman in her late thirties falls for someone young enough to be her son, as one of Cupid’s more amateurish shots hits home. Many such relationships blossomed at a local night club which would have events aimed at the more ‘mature’ customer, known locally as ‘Grab a Granny’ nights. Given the appalling divorce rate in the town, these events were well attended and had a lot in common with a cattle market, but with more alcohol and a different (if no less pungent) smell.

The unlikely ‘father-son’ pair seemed on good terms anyway, and put their question to me.

‘My lad wants one of these for his birthday’ said ‘Dad’, and put the magazine on the desk. His lightly tattooed hand indicated an advertisement. Most fourteen year olds would perhaps have wanted a bicycle, or maybe an exotic pet. Not this boy. The advertisement was for a .762 calibre self-loading sniper’s rifle, complete with telescopic sights and silencer. ‘As used by US Navy Seals’ it declared proudly, ‘this beauty can kill at two miles’. The seller was a gun dealer in Arizona, who probably did most of his trade in person with beer-bellied inbreds in check shirts driving pickup trucks rather than fat ginger children with mildly perverted step fathers in suburban England. Uncertain quite how to advise them I paused and the ‘father’ went on.