Forty years ago I spent a couple of months shadowing the police who were working in “J Division” – a wedge of East London running out from Walthamstow to Ilford. I wrote a book about them which was not all crap. This morning I found one of the notebooks I kept from that time, and here are some transcriptions.
The superintendent’s face was ruddy and his fingers sunburned. He looked like an honest Labour politician of the ‘45 vintage, marked by good living well appreciated – say Jim Callaghan, but with George Brown’s eyebrows. I had been following the work at his station for a month or two and he had decided I could be trusted, a little bit. So he invited me to drink whisky with him in his office one afternoon. There was a desk, of course, chairs for visitors, a filing cabinet and display a cabinet full of gardening trophies; on top of that were two carved wooden hands, one with one finger upraised; the other with two fingers raised, not in a sign of peace.
He wanted to teach me how policing worked.
“The vast majority of detected crimes comes from arresting someone. Quite often you arrest someone and you’re not quite sure what they’ve done … 75% of detected crimes come from an in arrest in this division. The real big league criminals, that’s a bit different, but this kind of policing is that policing’s about.”
He was absolutely clear that the police lied under oath in court, just as the criminals did. In some lost age, perhaps the Fifties or before everyone in the game had known the rules, but then came Rights, and the police did not like Rights. “Never demand as a right what you can ask as a favour” said a sign on one door in the nick.
“There’s more work now than before”, the Superintendent said: “when I nicked someone the CID took over. I’ve had blokes going sick rather than go to court. There’s a lot more stress now: the best used toilet in the Metropolitan Police is up at Redbridge Crown Court.”
The stress of course came from knowing that they would perjure themselves to get the result they believed in.
“Well, it’s the Law and Justice”, he explained: “The law is an elaborate game, Justice is when someone gets his just comeuppance, even if it was for something he didn’t do.
“There’s much less than when it started. Now only about 2-3% got to be” – he fell silent while his hands made shaping and moulding gestures. But it used to be about 70% was actual fact. Now 97-99% of what they say is true – the law has changed to make it much easier to go to court.”
This is what my note says. I am not quite sure what had changed to make lying less common or less necessary. The general picture I have is one of reforms that had demanded an unrealistic standard of police behaviour, followed by a further change of rules. But exactly what changed when is no longer clear to me.
This was the passage I remembered from that notebook because it’s glamorous, it’s about catching criminals, and shows one half of real police work, which is not about detecting criminals from their crimes, but finding criminals first and detecting their crimes – then getting your knowledge through the courts.
What I had forgotten is the other large portion of the work, which is discovering crimes, or criminals, and knowing there is nothing you can do about them. There is, for instance, this scene that met me in I think Ilford nick when I turned up for work at at 8:15 one morning.
In the charge room are two immensely fat boys 10 and 6 and a friend, thin, perhaps 8. The fat boys' mother is almost symmetrical: very short & fat rather than dumpy.
The boys had been found sniffing glue on the railway line. The mother assures us that the 10 year old had given up glue sniffing: 'we had a male nurse down,' she says. She has a speech impediment: a lisp which she counters by making a bubbling at the back of her palate. The desk officer starts clicking in sympathy when she speaks.
The Charging Sergeant advises 'remedial treatment' at home. The fat woman tells the children they’ll never sit down again.
In all this the ten-year-old is like a golem, He whines and looks sly but it is all an act. The boy he blames has a blank oval face but occasionally there is life in his eyes, and at those moments you can see he is a child. The six-year-old looks up to his golem brother: thinks he’s smart.
Then there is a note from a domestic we were called to:
Sobbing black woman in a torn nightdress with a surprisingly calm little girl, paler. Her uncle is Schizo outpatient from Hackney. Granny with spectacles and a goitre on her neck. No one would make a formal complaint, but in the middle of the conversation I saw the WPC clench her jaw until her face was for a moment quite rectangular with grief. After we’d left the flat she said “That’s that. She’s sleeping with him to stop him going back to the mental home.”
No wonder they treasured the moments of comedy. I think I put this note from a night shift into the book;
“A man dressed only in white ?satin underpants and 2 gold medallions round his neck comes in to complain about the theft of his gold Ford Grenada, currently being pursued by a hamburger van.”
Five or six years after all this I hailed a taxi outside the Independent’s offices in City Road. The driver greeted me by name: it was the battered Superintendent, safely retired. He drove a taxi now, he explained, because he couldn’t do without talking to
people. He liked them, you see.