Matt Delito - Confessions of a Police Constable

Slowing down, as it turned out, might very well have been a good idea; it may have saved my life, in fact. The next thing I knew, I was thrown from my bicycle. It transpired that the movement I’d noticed was a teenager ducking behind a tree, after he and a friend had spanned a length of steel wire across the cycle path, at roughly neck level.

This is an old trick: get the cyclist off the bike and then nick their bike and possessions whilst they are dazed and confused. Or, in some particularly unfortunate cases, dead.

As I lay flat on my back, the two youths came out of the darkness. One of them grabbed my bike, jumped on, and pedalled like a youth possessed into the night. The other quickly dug through my pockets, before running after his friend with my gym bag in his hand.

‘Hello? Is there anybody there? Can I help you? What is your emergency?’

I looked down at my hand.

My old, crappy Nokia was gripped between my fingers – clearly the thieves had not wanted it. The screen was lit up. It read 999. I realised that I must have dialled the emergency number, despite my barely sentient state.

‘Hello, this is Matt Delito, I’m a police constable, Mike Delta five-nine-two.’ I gave the operator my shoulder number completely automatically; I’m not actually sure whether they cared in the slightest.

‘I’ve just been attacked with a garrotte wire in the park by two youths. Both are IC1 1, around sixteen years of age, slim builds, just over five foot tall, both wearing black tracksuits. One had white trainers; the other was wearing a baseball cap. A red one, I think. Also, I need LAS. I think I may have broken my wrist.’ LAS are my brothers in arms: the London Ambulance Service.

Within moments of giving my details to the 999 operator, I heard the sirens of a passing police car flick on, and before long saw the silhouettes of my trusty colleagues Pete and Kim running towards me. A second car showed up minutes later with two more of my colleagues, and more importantly one of my assailants – the one with the red baseball cap.

I was still on the ground, heart pounding, with a god-awful pain in my wrist. I looked up at the young man being paraded towards me.

‘You’ve made a few pretty big mistakes today, young man,’ I said, as he half-heartedly struggled against his handcuffs.

‘You’re lucky I am tall,’ I continued. ‘If I’d been six inches shorter, that cable could have taken my windpipe off, and you would have found yourself staring at a prison wall for the foreseeable future.’

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that his other mistake was not stealing my little Nokia. It’s hardly the fanciest piece of equipment, but being able to dial 999 immediately was probably the only reason the boy was caught. If I had waited for even a couple of minutes, I have no doubt they would have got away with it.

The boy was bundled into a caged van a few minutes later. I sighed: I had already done a 14-hour shift, but I knew I’d be spending the next ten hours having my wrist set at the hospital, being lectured about concussions, giving witness statements back at the police station, and shaking my head at the idiocy of it all.

The arm hurt, and my chest ached from where the wire had cut into it. I’ll be honest with you, though: most of all, I was pissed off that I wouldn’t get a good night’s sleep.

God knows I needed one.

‘I want him out of here,’ the woman screeched, as she reached over my shoulder, the fingers of her hand curled into a claw, and her impressively long nails slashing, musketeer-style, through the air in the direction of her partner.

‘Shut it, you fucking whore,’ he barked back, and made a break for her, his hands balled into fleshy, white-knuckled fists.

I deduced from the trickle of blood coming from the man’s face that she’d managed to land at least a few scratches before we’d made it into the flat. Her face told a tale as well: her eye was practically swelling up as we stood there.

Seven minutes earlier, we’d received a call over the radio: ‘Domestic in progress, graded I, India.’

Our calls are graded in three levels of urgency: E-grade (or Echo) is, basically, whenever you can find the time to rock up. Court warnings, routine appointments and simple follow-ups tend to be graded E. The next step up is an S-grade (or Sierra), where we are meant to make it to the caller within the hour. Dealing with shoplifters, looking for suspicious persons, anything not super-urgent gets a Sierra grade.

Finally we have the most urgent calls, graded I, India. I-graded calls have to be responded to within 12 minutes, so that’s when my advanced driving gets put to the test. The flashing lights go on, the sirens are dusted off and put to good use, and my engine and brakes get a good workout.

This time, the address that showed up on the MDT 2as relayed by the CAD 3operator made my heart sink. I knew the house well. It belonged to one of those couples that ‘love each other’ so much that they seem to celebrate their passion largely through beating seven bells out of each other after consuming a drink or 18 between them.

We would attend this address at least a couple of times per month. The training school at Hendon 4loves to remind us that ‘domestic violence intervention is murder prevention’, but I’ve got to admit to having thought more than once that perhaps we should just leave this particular couple to it. For as long as I have been a copper in this borough, they seem to have been completely hell-bent on putting new dents into each other, and it’s a pitiful mess every time.

‘Take him away! I don’t want him here,’ she squealed, as I walked in through the front door.

I was the second car on scene, which is just as well, because I’m single-crewed. The car that beat me there was triple-crewed – unusual, given that, in these times of relentless belt-tightening, we’re usually one-up in a car, not three. I was glad to see that my colleague Tim was there; he knows the couple well. In addition to Tim, there was Charlie, a relatively new probationer, fresh out of Hendon, and Syd, a special constable.

Specials are volunteers. Many people seem to confuse them with PCSO 5staff, but there are crucial differences between them, the main one being that special constables don’t get paid. Also, not many people realise this, but special constables have the same powers as myself: they have been sworn in, are warranted by the Queen to do arrests, talk sternly to inebriated teenagers, wag their fingers at people failing to wear seat belts, heroically rescue kittens out of trees, and so on and so forth.

I sneak a look at this particularly solidly built special’s Metvest. I think I’ve seen him before, but I can’t remember his name; his nametag reads Smith, which is profoundly unhelpful.

He was doing his best to keep the man from getting to his lady-love. Meanwhile, Tim was trying to reason with the woman, in the hope she would come down from being a squeaky, hyperventilating ball of fury.

‘Oi!’ I called out. ‘Can we all just shut up for ten seconds? I can’t hear myself think in this racket.’

Weirdly (and unusually), they listened to me. The flat fell quiet for a couple of seconds, except for the man’s heavy breathing, leaving all six of us staring back and forth at each other for a few seconds.

‘Right,’ I said, taking control of the situation in the brief moment of silence. ‘You—,’ I pointed at the man, ‘let’s go to the living room and have a chat.’

Tim started leading the woman out of the kitchen and into the bedroom. Good thinking. Kitchens are the most dangerous rooms in a house when there’s a chance a fight will break out. Heavy pans, plenty of knives, boiling water – it rarely ends well.