Matt Delito - Confessions of a Police Constable

Bingo. There was a gun in there. A Glock, perhaps? I didn’t know for certain – I’m not great with firearms.

I pushed the flap shut with the tip of my pen, moved the floor carpet back into place and closed the boot, locking the car up carefully. I walked over to the father, and gave a nod to Belinda.

‘It’s a gun,’ I said. She arrested him for possession, and I got on the radio.

‘Mike Delta receiving five-nine-two,’ I transmitted.

‘Five-nine-two, go ahead.’

‘I’m going to need Trojan assistance. We found a gun in the boot of a car,’ I said.

‘Oh, and could you send a van on the hurry-up, please, I don’t know if anyone is watching us. We’ve also got a kid we’re going to have to take into custody.’

Every damn time I complain – even if it’s just in my head – that a shift is too quiet, something ridiculous happens.

I suppose this is why we generally use the acronym QT – in order to avoid saying ‘Quiet Time’.

In this instance, we were on the scene for another ten hours.

My colleagues returned to the nick 13, taking with them the father and son duo, along with a further five officers who had to come out to do a section 18 search of the dad’s house. We found another two handguns, a rifle, a small amount of class-A drugs and a sizeable stash of ammunition for the weapons in the house. We also found another handgun carefully taped under the passenger seat, in another hollow cut into the upholstery of the MX-5. It turned out that the dad wasn’t an active gang member, but that the local gangs used him as a handler, to make sure their guns weren’t found during raids on the houses of known gang members.

I guess if there’s anything to learn from this, it is: don’t take your kid’s Blackberry away from him if you’ve got a gun in the back of your car. And if you do, don’t call the police on him yourself.

Or, you know, don’t hold weapons for gang members. That might be even easier.

‘GET BACK!’ I screamed at the top of my lungs, as I slowly shuffled away from the man standing opposite me on the seventh-floor landing of a council estate.

The staircase I had just ascended was behind me. To the right of me, there was a low black railing and a 70-foot drop. In front of me was a Customer 14.

The man seemed dazed, not entirely with it in general, and absolutely, feather-spittingly furious.

Something had happened to him. He had completely lost the Ordinance Survey maps and headed out into the deepest, worst-lit corners of incoherence. He was sobbing, shouting, mumbling, drooling, spitting. The words ‘Elise’ and ‘I’m going to fucking kill him’ kept being repeated.

My adrenaline boost was giving me tunnel vision and aural exclusion. I was aware of it, but I wasn’t able to use it: I couldn’t hear or see anything apart from the man I was facing. He wasn’t a very tall man – about five foot seven, perhaps. He was around 40 years old, IC1, with a build that suggested a long, hard life of substance abuse. He was hunched forward, holding onto the railing with his left hand.

I reached for my radio and pressed the button – the orange one, right between the volume dial and the stubby antenna on my Motorola personal radio. Officially, it’s known as the Emergency Assistance Button. Frequently, it’s known as the ‘whoops’ or the ‘shit has hit the fan button’ too. In this case, it was the ‘I need some bloody backup, bloody quickly’ button.

As I pressed down, the other transmission that was in progress (something about an RTC 15) was cancelled, and I could speak for ten seconds without having to clutch my radio’s transmit button.

‘Urgent assistance required,’ I said, as calmly as I could, without breaking eye contact with the man, who was edging closer to me very slowly. I told the radio where I was, and followed up with the words that I knew would catch everyone’s attention: ‘IC1 male with a knife.’

I took a firmer grip of the GFLB 16I had in my right hand, and crept back until I felt my foot touch something behind me. I realised with a jolt that the only direction I really wanted to go – further away from the addict in front of me – was blocked by a wall.

The man didn’t have an actual knife. ‘Knife’ is what you say over the radio to convey ‘sharp weapon’. Samurai sword? Knife . Bayonet? Knife . Stanley blade? Knife . Surgeon’s scalpel? Knife . Similarly, all bat-like weapons are ‘sticks’, and any projectile weapon is a ‘gun’. If that sounds a little bit backwards, well, I’d urge you not to worry about it too much. When you are dosed to the eyelids with adrenaline in an extreme situation, it’s a lot easier to say ‘knife’ than trying to decide whether you’re facing a madman with a foil , a sabre or an épée . From our point of view, if it cuts, slashes or stabs, it’s a knife.

This particular madman, however, was holding a whole different class of ‘knife’. In his hand he had an injection needle of some sort. It was tiny. The only reason I knew he was clutching it was the occasional flash of surgical steel in the overhead lighting.

I’ve faced suspects with a baffling array of weapons. Guns, of course. Bats, knives, tyre irons, rolling pins, cast-iron pans, and even a chainsaw once. Nothing scares me as much as a hypodermic needle. When you’re against somebody with a bat, it’s a fair fight: they have a stick, you have a stick, you both have a bit of a tussle, they get arrested, job done. You may walk away with some bruises, perhaps even a broken bone, but ultimately it’s a situation you’ve been trained to handle. Guns are slightly worse, of course, but there’s a solution for that too, and over my years in the Metropolitan Police, I’ve perfected the art of running-away-very-fast-and-waiting-for-the-cavalry-to-arrive.

When faced with a needle, you have a huge problem: if they come close enough to be wrestled to the ground and arrested, they’re close enough to give you a tiny scratch. It seems strange to be completely out of your head on adrenaline because of a weapon you can barely see, and yet a million statistics back you up. For example, in England, injecting drugs causes 90 per cent of all cases of hepatitis C and 6 per cent of all HIV cases. I’ve had my hepatitis jabs, of course, but a cure for HIV is still far enough away that I’d rather not have to deal with it.

The man took a step closer just as my radio jumped back into life. ‘Mike Delta five-nine-two. Status update?’ I briefly touched my PTT 17.

‘Could do with some help here, guys. He’s armed with a hypodermic needle.’

‘Received. ETA one minute,’ the operator fired back.

I tried talking to the man again, interrupting his incoherent tirade: ‘Mate, let’s get you some help. We’ll find out what’s happening, and I’ll help you. I promise.’

He took a step closer still, but some of the wildness seemed to have been extinguished from his eyes; a sign that I was getting through to him, I hoped.

‘Mate, I know you’re hurting. I can help you. I don’t want anyone to get hurt,’ I said, and involuntarily moved my baton side to side a little. My knuckles were white from gripping my 21 inches of extendable stainless steel. The movement caught his eye. He straightened up slightly and, in the process, slumped lightly against the railing.

Behind him, I spotted two of my colleagues. They must have gone up the wrong stairway into the estate and ended up behind the man. Or perhaps they knew the layout better, and went around on purpose?

Whatever the reason, they held an advantage by being behind him and it suddenly became my job to keep that advantage. I started talking, careful not to stop. I knew that I had to keep his attention on me.