Putting on a police uniform for the first time is a peculiar experience. It feels like fancy dress, like a joke taken too far. Boots, trousers, shirt, necktie, kit belt, stab vest, hat – and a face hidden somewhere in the middle of it all, lost among the black, white and blue. The police uniform transforms a stranger into a familiar figure, a person into a personification. As a police officer, you become someone less specific. But what you lose in individuality, you gain in access to other individuals. In uniform you can talk to anyone and anyone can talk to you.
“Nice to see you, officer. How you doing? All right? … Quiet, yeah. Too quiet if you ask me.”
Uniform flattens, makes the wearer two-dimensional. If someone dislikes the police, you can be friendly, but the outfit speaks first and louder.
“Don’t you have anything better to do than coming round here wasting our time?”
Putting on the uniform for the first time, dressing in front of the mirror, you watch yourself disappear. Then, out on patrol, you look for yourself in car windows, shop windows, the mirrors in people’s hallways, your head on a police officer’s body.
When I became a special constable – a volunteer with full police powers – I was attracted not so much by the role as by what police see and experience, their proximity to vulnerable groups at their most vulnerable moments. I am a former careworker and primary schoolteacher, and this was the lens through which I looked at policing. I was interested in how, and how well, our society was set up to tackle entrenched social issues. Social workers felt overloaded. Local services had been cut in a huge government austerity drive, from mental health provision to youth clubs to libraries. In such circumstances, I wondered whose job it was to grapple with our most complex social challenges – homelessness, loneliness, gang violence, poverty, mental illness, domestic violence – and I suspected the police were the people who confronted these issues at their most raw. I was intrigued to see how they responded to them. I knew the police tackled crime and kept order. I was not sure what they did with the rest of their time.
What was it about this job that was simultaneously so compelling and so unappealing?
For the volunteer, becoming a special is an opportunity to learn something new. For the Met, it is a way to boost numbers on busy weekend evenings. There were 400 of us at the ceremony after our training, about to be dispatched to London’s 32 boroughs. I asked to be placed in Lambeth, where I lived and where I had, until recently, worked as a teacher. Among the other Lambeth specials were a banker, a bus driver, a printer, a civil servant, a supermarket manager, a pastor, an HR director, a stay-at-home parent, a hospital receptionist, a stagehand, a custody officer, an executive PA and a criminology student. In terms of age, ethnicity and gender, it was probably the most diverse group I had ever been part of.
At the start of every shift there was a briefing to give us the latest intelligence on our area. No two were the same, but most were fairly similar. Top five robbers, top five burglars, anyone wanted or missing, vehicles to look out for. Some details would stick in the memory more easily than others. “Suspect last seen doing press-ups topless on the roof of his car”; “Suspect has attached a machete to the wall by his front door”; “Suspect evoked section 61 of the Magna Carta and attempted to headbutt police”.
Every Friday night, we would be put on patrol in Brixton town centre, Clapham High Street or Vauxhall. For the first shifts, though, we simply circled Lambeth in a van – three new specials in the back, two regular officers in the front – getting a flavour of what the borough had to offer. One of the regulars turned around in his seat. “Right, guys, you tell us what you want to stop. We’re looking for slaggy cars, rundown cars, pimped-up cars … Or normal cars driven in a slaggy way or by slaggy-looking people.” Slag is police slang for criminal; slaggy means rough, dodgy, dubious.
Someone pointed at an old red Ford Focus as it turned sharply down a sidestreet, as though trying to avoid us. We followed the car, pulled it over and got out to talk to the driver. We took down his details, ran a name check on the radio and learned he lived in north London and had previous convictions for drugs. Could he account for his presence in this part of town? He could not. We searched the car, shining torches into the footwells, picking through the wrappers and Rizlas around the gear stick, then searched the man himself. Emptying the pockets of his padded jacket, we found dozens of small paper bundles: drugs, wrapped and ready to sell.
“How do you explain these?” we asked.
“They’re psalms!” the man said. “They’re prayers!”
We dug our thumbnails into the fine grey paper and unrolled a couple. There was nothing inside them and the crumpled paper was covered in fine black print. They were prayers, as he said. Tiny scrunched psalms, rolled up to hand out. We said goodnight and sent the man on his way.
When officers stop a person or vehicle, they radio to check whether they are known to police and whether there is anything we ought to be aware of. The operator consults the Police National Computer and gives responses in code. Alpha – ailments. Delta – drugs. Echo – escaper. Foxtrot – firearms. India Papa – male/female impersonator. Mike – mental health. Sierra – suicidal. Victor – violent. Whiskey – weapons. Whiskey Mike – wanted/missing. Codes are also used to describe a person’s ethnicity. IC1 – white, north European. IC2 – white, south European. IC3 – black. IC4 – south Asian. IC5 – Chinese, Japanese or other south-east Asian. IC6 – north African or Arab. IC7 – unknown ethnic origin.
One evening we stopped an IC1 male on Norwood Road, radioed in his details and found out he was wanted. The man overheard the call. “Whiskey Mike? I’ll have a brandy Coke,” he said, before we arrested him.
We did a sweep along Clapham High Street, looking for an unlicensed hotdog vendor who was notorious in the area, an IC2 male in his 60s who always worked Friday and Saturday nights, frying sausages and onions on a crudely welded sheet-metal cart.
“There he is, the fucker!” our driver shouted. We scanned the pavement and spotted him: a short man with craggy features, tending a steaming silver hotplate. He was wearing black jeans, a black anorak and a black beanie pulled down low so it covered his eyebrows. As we were parking, the hotdog vendor spotted us, dropped his tongs and ducked down a sidestreet, his cart bouncing along in front of him. We followed, brought the van alongside and rolled down a window, driving at his pace. After 20 metres he stopped. “I’m working. Leave me alone!”
“Go home,” we said, “or we’ll confiscate your cart.”
After that, we looped back to the high street and drove slowly up and down it, “talent spotting”.
“That one?”
“Fuck off, mate.”
“How about that one?”
“Not bad. That is not half bad.”
White heels, tight leather skirt. “She’d get fucked.”
Sequined top, high-waisted jeans. “I’d do her.”
There were debates about the quality of this arse or that arse, whether a face lived up to an arse, an arse to a face. “If you see a woman from behind, can you tell how fit her face will be, just by looking at her arse?” someone asked.
We paused at a traffic light next to Clapham Common tube and a curly-haired IC1 female tapped at the front passenger window. One of the regulars opened it and asked what she wanted.
“Someone took my purse. It has my residency card. I was on a bus and a black man grabbed it and ran away.”
“He’s long gone now,” the officer said. “The best thing you can do is report it at a police station in the morning.”
He wished her goodnight and wound up the window. “She’d get fucked,” he said as it slid shut.
My face felt hot and I felt my shoulders tense. I looked around the van, trying to gauge my colleagues’ reaction. If they were shocked, they did not show it. The moment passed without comment. What did it mean that words like these were permitted in a police van?
It was getting late and we were circling the backstreets when we spotted an IC3 teen peering through the rear window of a white estate car.
“It’s hard,” a special said. “You see a black guy alone at this time of night and you can’t help thinking certain things.”
“What kind of things?” replied one of the regulars. “Because that sounds a bit racist.”
During the shift I had been discreetly making notes on my lap in the dark. As my colleagues talked and laughed, I continued to write – then felt a flush of fear. What if someone noticed? How would they react if they saw their banter recorded verbatim on an index card? I tucked the cards under my thigh, like a child hiding a note from a teacher.
The next morning, having breakfast in my local cafe, I looked at the sexist banter recorded on the index card and felt confused. The same officer who had challenged a special’s racist language had taken us “talent spotting”. Why had he upheld one set of standards and not another?
Reading the comments, I was shocked but not surprised. I recognised them from the corridors and changing rooms of adolescence. The tone was identical, as was the giddy mutual encouragement, one lewd remark giving permission for the next. I had said nothing. I told myself this was because I wanted to see what police did, without intervening. But it was also because I was new, and anxious, and caught off-guard.
We were patrolling Clapham in the van. It was perishingly cold, snowing heavily, and there were few people or cars on the streets. There was a gusty wind and the snowflakes were small and sharp on the face. It was going to be a slow night. There were domestic violence calls coming out, but it was too cold for street crime.
On Clapham Park Road, we spotted a white car driving without headlights, difficult to see amid the snowfall. We pulled it over and two IC1 males got out, brothers in their mid-20s, on their way to collect their sister from Heathrow. “Oh God, I’m so sorry. I didn’t even realise,” one said. We began to fill out a £30 fixed penalty notice for driving without headlights. “Come on, it’s quiet on the roads, it was a mistake.” We worked our way through the long form, writing a whole statement at the roadside, while the white car buried itself. The brothers were not wearing coats and they shivered, stamped and sighed, the snow turning to slush at their feet.
We looped around the residential streets behind the high street, finding them deserted. The whiteness made the streets look simpler and less overloaded. Details disappeared, outlines softened. The only signs of life were the footprints on the pavements and the temporary graffiti on some of the cars: “TWAT”, “CUNT”, giant cartoon penises.
“What are your favourite swearwords?” our driver asked us.
“You know what? I really don’t like all the swearing in the police,” a female special replied. “I can’t stand it when people use the word cunt.”
“But swearing’s an important part of the job. Actually, my current favourite is shit-cunt.”
We stopped a black car on the street behind a club called Infernos. An IC3 male in his mid-20s jumped out, short, with a puffy gilet and a patchy beard. He smiled as we approached. “Wow, you guys are tall! I want some of what you’ve been eating!” We told him he was driving without lights. “Man! I’m an idiot. I had no idea. I’m such an idiot.” We ran name and car checks, and learned he had previous convictions for GBH and possessing an offensive weapon. “I’m a family man,” he said. “Totally reformed!” We pointed out the dangers of driving without lights. “You’re right. You’re so right. It’s totally up to you, officers. If you want to give me a ticket, I’ll understand.” We warned him and said goodnight. He got back in his car, flicked on the lights and drove away.
I had the realisation when I began policing that, although we have less status and influence than those further along in the legal process, we determine who enters in the first place. By arresting one person and not another, giving a verbal warning for one offence and a ticket for another, we decide what becomes a criminal matter and what does not. Faced with two identical situations, we can turn one into a matter of permanent record and make the other disappear. Sometimes we cannot bring ourselves to give a person a ticket because they are young or old or charming or vulnerable. On other occasions, when we are feeling fastidious, or being watched, or we do not like the attitude of the person in front of us, we stick to the letter of the law, regardless of how minor the offence. We “have, in effect”, wrote the pioneering sociologist of policing Egon Bittner, “a greater degree of discretionary freedom in proceeding against offenders than any other public official”. As such, constables exercise “a power that is certainly not officially assigned to them”.
The next morning, my road was dusted with snow. I decided to walk down the hill to the cafe instead of taking the bus, then regretted it as my gripless Converse skidded across the pavement. I thought about the previous night’s shift, drifting around Lambeth in a blizzard. I thought about the swearing in the van. It had been funny. Everyone had laughed. But the female special had stated a boundary and our driver had immediately crossed it. There was an aggression to his response that I had overlooked the night before.
Moments like these gnawed at me throughout my time as a special – it seemed that to join the Met was to consent to a certain kind of sexualised, macho culture. It was in the air and there was no escaping it: the “talent spotting”, the chat about one another’s sex lives, the sexual jokes and banter. Watching a new special trying to object, I saw that this culture was particularly keenly enforced for female officers, whose participation was clearly necessary and exciting for some male officers. And, just as some female officers made a show of their ability to handle physical confrontations, some also made a show of being as willing and able to be as laddish as the lads. The alternative, which I had just witnessed, was to shut down. Either way, female officers were expected to fit themselves to a culture in which casual misogyny was the currency of workplace connection.
Filtering, holding, dealing with all of that, on top of an emotionally and physically draining role – it sounded exhausting, just as being a black or Asian officer at any time in the last 60 years sounded exhausting: going to work every day and deciding whether to prioritise pragmatism, protest or self-protection.
I could not believe that this culture – hidden from no one inside the Met – had not been stamped out. Relative to how precisely officers watched their words when it came to race, there was something wild and unstable about the use of sexual and sexist language. It was so blatant, as though officers felt irreproachable. Shit-cunt. She’d get fucked. Even used playfully, there was a violence to this language.
Challenging racist language and attitudes within the Met was not sufficient to stamp out institutional racism, but it did make a difference. It sent a message. It curtailed the flow of toxins. Somehow this logic did not carry over to misogyny. There was clearly no belief that behind-the-scenes banter existed on a spectrum with real-world violence and abuse.
The special who objected to the swearing had said nothing in reply to the driver. Nor did I. Nobody backed her up, and the conversation moved on.
After six months as a special constable, I had to top up my officer safety and first-aid training. I booked on to a course and reported for a day of fighting and bandaging colleagues in a windowless sports hall. I pressed the buzzer and went inside. The gym’s breeze-block walls were lined with rubber mannequins – frowning, muscular, topless males. We lined up and prepared to attack them.
An instructor blew a whistle and we did circuits of the gym, battering one dummy after another: hitting one in the thigh with the butts of our batons, pounding the arms of the next with our batons extended, chopping another in the neck with the side of our hand. We lined up opposite a partner to work on restraints: thumb locks, wrist locks, elbow locks, shoulder locks.
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We were called into a classroom for a session on how to deal with a stabbing. There were limbless rubber mannequins propped around the walls and we positioned ourselves on the floor next to them. “The average number of wounds inflicted on a person during a stabbing is seven,” the instructor said, “and sometimes the person who’s been stabbed won’t know about all of them. It’s your job to check.” We rolled on gloves and patted down our mannequins, then we bandaged their heads, chests and abdomens.
While we worked, the instructor regaled us with anecdotes from his years on the beat. “I was on patrol with a female officer – and before you ask, yes, I have seen her naked. We were playing strip poker and she had some very bad luck … Another time, we were chasing a violent male. This was back when female officers wore skirts, and when my partner apprehended the male she toppled backwards and we saw everything.”
I was treating a sucking chest wound on my mannequin’s torso. I held the dressing in place and looked around the room. I was not sure how the instructor’s banter was going down. We were a diverse mix of gender, age, ethnicity. I spotted a few smiles. Other faces were inscrutable. I wondered what gave him the confidence to share these anecdotes with a group of officers he had never met. Had they just popped into his mind, or was this the patter he always used while teaching first aid? His upbeat delivery implied that we could not possibly object.
I was posted to the Lambeth Gangs Taskforce for the night. I had wanted to go out with them since I began, but their shifts were popular and hard to get on to. We went hunting, touring popular corners, alleys and play areas, trying to flush the gangs from their hiding places. A boy on a BMX cycled up to our car and our driver rolled down the window.
“All right, Shakir?”
“Why are you lot flooding the area tonight?”
“You hear about the shooting last night? The managers are shitting themselves about it.”
Shakir nodded.
“Do you know what it was about?” our driver asked. “A girl? No, wait, people use knives when it’s a girl.”
Shakir shook his head and cycled away.
We drove into the Tulse Hill estate, parked up and got out to wait for a unit that had arrested a teen with a blade earlier on. They had finished at custody and radioed to ask where we were.
“We’re in the car park at the entrance to the estate.”
“Mate, your radio sounds muffled.”
“Sorry, mate, your mum’s tits are muffling it. How’s that? Any better?”
It was gone midnight and the estate seemed calm. A couple of officers smoked while we waited for something to happen. Someone handed around a packet of Percy Pigs. “We look like a gang, hanging around like this,” one officer said.
“The biggest gang in London!” another replied.
“What would it take to sort out all the gang stuff?” I asked.
“A bomb,” someone replied. “One here, one down in Angell Town and one around Coldharbour Lane. That would sort it.”
A call came out and two of the officers, one male, one female, got back into their unmarked car. The driver turned on the engine, but instead of reversing out of the space he pumped the accelerator with the handbrake on. The car bounced on its suspension, as though they were having sex inside, and everyone laughed.
Another robbery call came out, an IC1 female on her way home in Clapham, and we drove to her address. She was in shock, and each time it seemed she had calmed down she would burst into sobs again. “It’s terrible,” our driver said. “You should be able to walk home without this happening.” In the car afterwards his tone was the same. “It’s not right,” he said, shaking his head.
We wove around the adjacent streets in case we spotted the robber. A domestic violence call came out of the radio and nobody answered.
“I need somebody to take this,” the operator said. More silence, then a response unit called in to claim it.
There were female victims of violence we wanted to help, and others we preferred to ignore. The inconsistency was bewildering and somehow the sex joke in the car park felt related to this picking and choosing: another instance of male officers defining the terms on which they would interact with women. A lone female officer, out with 10 men, was expected to laugh at a gag at her expense. It looked harmless, like friends messing about, but I struggled to imagine an equivalent moment in any other social profession. For teachers, social workers, care workers and health professionals, swapping sexual banter while working would seem grossly inappropriate. What was it about policing that made this feel so everyday? We were doing related work, so why should our approach, our intentions, our standards be different?
A call came out: the theft of a handbag in a cocktail bar in Brixton market. The suspect was an IC2 female, mid-50s, in white jeans and a red vest. We raced to the scene and spotted a woman who matched the description outside Fish, Wings & Tings, but not the white leather handbag she had been seen stealing on the bar’s CCTV. We arrested and cuffed her at the Coldharbour Lane entrance to the market. “My daughter! Oh my God, that’s my daughter,” the woman said, ducking behind us. “Please don’t let her see me.”
The woman’s name was Martina. The custody van arrived and we helped her into the cage at the back. In the middle of the van, where the arresting officers sit, a sword was rolling around on the floor, a polished steel sabre with a gold hilt. When we got to Brixton custody it did not seem too busy and we went straight into the holding cell nearest to the desk. “Won’t be long,” we said to Martina. But we were. There were clearly some complex cases ahead of us, because we were waiting in the holding cell from half past nine until 11 o’clock. Martina was calm and upbeat to begin with, telling us about her early life in South America, but after three-quarters of an hour her mood dipped. She started to need the toilet. She started to find the cuffs uncomfortable. She wanted to call her family.
“We understand you’re frustrated,” we said, “but these things take as long as they take.”
When our turn came, we walked Martina to the desk, presented her to the custody sergeant and checked in her property. Keys, purse, phone, a toy car, a jobseeker’s card. I glanced around while the custody sergeant filled in the necessary paperwork. “PCs: if you need to wash blood off your handcuffs,” read a sign behind the desk, “please don’t do it in the kitchen sink.” On the other side of the counter we could see the hotdog vendor, a blank expression on his face, in for ignoring his fines and failing to appear at court.
Aside from the female constables and custody officers, Martina was the only woman in the custody suite. That was not unusual. Only about 15% of people arrested are female. “If men behaved like women,” wrote the criminologist Barbara Wootton, “the courts would be idle and the prisons empty.” Martina said again she was eager to let her family know she was OK, but we told her as we had not found the stolen handbag, and she would not tell us where it was, she would not be allowed to phone home until we had searched her flat.
We drove south from Brixton, up the hill, past Olive Morris House and the prison, and on to a quiet residential street. It was 1am and there was no other traffic around. There were speed bumps every few metres and the sergeant accelerated towards them. He hit each bump as fast and hard as he could, and we flew over them, all four wheels leaving the road, the van’s undercarriage shuddering. We spun round a corner and parked outside Martina’s flat.
“Look, what are you all doing charging in here in the middle of the night?”
“Are you Martina’s daughters? She’s been arrested.”
“For fuck’s sake. This is just like her!”
Even in a small flat, there are a lot of places to hide a handbag. We split up and searched the five rooms, in two of which small children were sleeping. We searched the kitchen and living room, then dug through the overflowing wardrobes and toy boxes in the five-year-old’s bedroom. The sergeant popped his head in. “Found anything? No? Well, get the fuck out then,” he whispered. “We don’t want him to wake up and find his room full of coppers.” The officer searching Martina’s 20-year-old daughter’s bedroom leaned into the corridor and rattled a pair of heart-shaped handcuffs at us. “Boys, do you need these?” He disappeared for a moment, then peered out again. “Do you need this?” he said, waving a silver vibrator. “She was pretty fit, wasn’t she?” he said, back in the van. “I bet as soon as we left she was straight back in her room, strumming herself.” We did not find the stolen handbag. The outrage on her daughters’ faces also suggested it had not been dropped off there. We could only assume that Martina had been working with somebody else or had panicked and dumped it in the market.
The Friday before Christmas: thousands of office parties, the most drunken night of the year. Vauxhall was overrun. On Goding Street, making the most of it, we found the hotdog vendor. “What’s your problem?” he said. “You got nothing better to do?” But he scraped the sausages into a box and wheeled the cart away.
This was going to be one of my final shifts. My wife and I were moving to South America with her work. After a year in the Met I had resigned, and in a few weeks’ time I would return my uniform and warrant card.
It was going to be a lively evening. Already, at half past eight, the atmosphere was raucous. An IC1 male was urinating in a hedge a few feet from us.
“Mate, are you aware that there’s a public urinal less than 100 metres away?”
“Say no more, officers,” the man replied with a wink, and ran in the direction we were pointing.
An IC3 male, early 20s, ran up to us shouting, “Listen, listen, three black guys down there took my money. I was trying to buy drugs, I gave them £20 and they just walked off.” We were taking down his details when his friends ran up to pull him away.
“Mate, what are you doing telling them you were buying drugs? Mate, come on!”
“No, no, I want my money back,” he persisted.
Looking around, crowds everywhere, people shouting and running, I felt overwhelmed. It was chaos. I was patrolling with an experienced regular and when she looked at Vauxhall – the clubs, the Pleasure Gardens, the thousands of people streaming in and out of the bus and train stations – she saw patterns invisible to my eyes: troubling behaviour, simmering tensions, people in places you would not expect them.
I observed the way she approached people, pausing for short, friendly interactions with anyone sitting or standing around, from the homeless IC1 males in the park to the laughing crowds of IC3 females gathering before entering the clubs. Interaction by interaction, my colleague gauged the way the evening was shaping up, what was happening where, which issues to anticipate.
Great policing is a mysterious blend of knowledge, skill, manner, judgment, outlook and values that can be difficult to pick apart. I asked the regular about her approach. “I genuinely believe in prevention rather than cure,” she replied. “If you talk to someone early on in the evening, they’re much more likely to get on with you if you pull them out of a club later on. I joined the job 14 years ago and in all that time I’ve never been assaulted. Policing is all about getting on with people, and not enough officers think like that.”
She kept pausing to chat to people, conducting short stops but without them feeling like stops. Over the early part of the evening she must have greeted several hundred people, imprinting our presence on to their minds, affecting their outlook and behaviour in small but significant ways. “Cheers, we’ll be around all evening,” she said at the end of each interaction. She was assertive while still sounding warm and sincere.
Policing can be a route to status and power, to care and service, to action and thrills – or a blend of the three. The role attracts a curious mix of characters, but it demands the same of all of them: police officers need deep, enduring empathy for vulnerability, pain and loss; and, at the same time, they need to embrace their role as guardians of order and a vehicle for coercive force. Police officers need genuine humanity, and to be willing to pin someone to the floor. Add to this the challenge of responding effectively to domestic violence, mental ill health, homelessness and teenage gangs, and cynicism and disillusionment are ever-present risks.
It takes resilience to turn up every day at Brixton police station, optimistic, empathic, with a belief in your ability to make a difference. “Are you thinking of joining the job?” regulars would often ask special constables on patrol with them. The specials usually said yes. “Don’t,” the regulars usually replied.
I asked my partner how she saw her colleagues. “Fifty per cent of officers are good,” she said, “25% are truly excellent and 25% are in this job for all the wrong reasons, and they’re the ones the public remember.”
Names and identifying details have been changed.