Matt Delito - Confessions of a Police Constable

‘What’s your name? Can I call you Simon?’ This is an old trick of psychology: call someone by the wrong name, and they will be rattled enough to give up their real name.

‘Matthew,’ he barked back.

‘Matthew? That’s great. My name is Matthew too. We’re like brothers, you and I. You’re not that much older than me. Perhaps you could have been my bigger brother, and we could have been Matthew and Matthew. That would have been confusing, wouldn’t it?’ I forced a laugh. Matthew looked confused; he started to laugh, but then remembered whatever it was that was bothering him in the first place, and a look of determination came over his face.

My colleagues advanced behind him. Our tactics worked. Matthew was oblivious to the impending attack. Craig grabbed his arm and Tim put him in a headlock.

‘Drop the needle,’ Tim shouted.

Immediately Matthew did as he was told. For a brief moment I thought he might try to throw himself off the balcony, but the three of us held him back, and minutes later he was led downstairs in handcuffs.

When we finally had Matthew under arrest, we ran him through the PNC. His PNC record had warnings for drugs, violence and for being a known carrier of hepatitis A and C.

The three of us looked at each other, and a shiver ran down my spine.

‘I’ll take a knife fight over this any day of the week,’ I half joked. Instead of laughing, my colleagues nodded silently in agreement.

We had all walked a little bit closer to the edge than we were comfortable with.

My Ticket had expired.

The ticket I’m referring to is my police driving licence. As well as a standard DVLA driving licence, in order to be allowed to drive any police vehicle, you need to have a special driving licence. To receive this licence, officers do a course, followed by theoretical and practical exams.

Police driving licences come in different levels, starting at ‘level 4’. This is the ‘boring’ ticket that allows you to drive from one place to another, but not on blues and twos 18. You can do a ‘compliant stop’ – which means that you can drive behind somebody and turn your blue lights on to pull them over – but if they drive off, you have to call off the pursuit. This happened to me once when I had only the basic ticket, and I felt pretty daft having to let the guy drive away. Thankfully, in London there’s never a helicopter far off. The helicopter followed him to a petrol station, where I was able to go and arrest them. It transpired that he had a sizeable amount of drugs in the car. ‘Sorry, I didn’t see you, officer,’ the driver had said. Nice touch.

There are dozens of different driving courses you can take. I have a solo ticket (that’s for riding police motorbikes) and the advanced driving qualification. The advanced course is rather interesting, and includes all sorts of high-speed pursuit stuff. It’s a shame that my end of the borough has 40mph limits (or less) everywhere, so I never get to open the cars up properly.

Much like normal driving licences, police licences expire. Unlike normal driving licences, they expire rather quickly. When I’d realised mine was almost up, I’d gone to the driving school at Hendon to have it renewed, but the instructor I was meant to go out with had had to break his appointment when he was called off to something or other. You’d be surprised how often that sort of thing happens; I have a feeling he moonlights for the DPG 19, which would explain a lot.

An expired ticket isn’t a disaster. It normally means you end up ‘operating’ on a Panda – a term still in use despite police patrol cars having not been black and white for several decades – or one of the area cars, with someone else driving. However, on one occasion, I also managed to make it to work late. As a punishment the skipper 20decided to send me out on foot patrols through some of the shopping centres and markets that had recently been plagued with drugs and shoplifting.

Whilst assigning the job, the skipper explained it would ‘help build character’. I had pretended to be insulted and grumpy as I left. ‘Pretended’ because, honestly, I don’t really mind foot patrols all that much. It does mean you’re not on response duties, but it’s actually quite nice to have an opportunity to stroll around the borough for a day. You talk to people, you get some exercise, and it’s a completely different experience to spending all day flying, tyres a-screeching, from call to call.

The morning’s foot patrol, however, had turned out to be less than pleasant. Heavy clouds were sagging with the weight of grey depression, ready to ejaculate their heavy, sleety load all over my freshly washed overcoat. January will always be a dreadful time to be on foot patrol.

Thankfully, I’d managed to spend a fair bit of time getting to know the café owners around my sector of the borough. A chat and a coffee here, a quick vandalism report and a cup of tea there – it all makes the world spin merrily on.

Lunchtime came along eventually and, since it was a Friday, I decided to treat myself to a greasy delicacy from Burger King.

Just as I finished the last bite of my double whopper, my radio interrupted my daydreaming.

‘Five-nine-two receiving Mike Delta?’ it squawked.

‘Retheifsglowblead,’ I replied, with my mouth full of burger and my last two fries.

The couple sitting on the next table glanced over momentarily, before hunching over their trays, laughing so hard I briefly thought they might do themselves an injury.

‘You broke up there, say again?’

‘Receiving, go ahead!’ I repeated, smiling at the couple, with a shrug. I ended my transmission.

‘Hey, they don’t like waiting, what can I say?’ I said to the giggling couple, and winked.

‘We have a Code Zulu up on Eastern Terrace. Are you free to deal?’ the CAD operator asked.

It has been a long time since you were able to buy an off-the-shelf ‘police scanner’ to listen in on police conversations, like they do in the movies, but there remains a rather obvious security flaw: as I sit there, finishing my lunch, the couple at the table next to mine will be able to overhear everything my colleagues talk about. Mostly, it will be boring stuff: a shoplifter, a colleague needing an Op Reclaim recovery of an uninsured car, or CCTV reporting some youths drinking in the park. However, occasionally, much more serious matters will be transmitted over radio.

As a precaution, our Airwave radios are encrypted. Not as heavily as elsewhere, though. On American cop shows, you often hear them say things like ‘10-4’ (we’d say, ‘Received’), ‘10-23’ (we say, ‘Stand by, please’) or ‘417A’ (we say, ‘Suspect with a knife’). You don’t really want to have to look up all sorts of inane codes for every thinkable situation (apparently ‘10-41’ means ‘Will you be requiring an ambulance?’ What’s wrong with saying, ‘ Will you be requiring an ambulance? ’). However, in the UK we do have a few codes that we use, even over the military-grade-encrypted radios. We’d use a code like ‘Code X-ray’ for a sexual assault, for example; ‘Code Yankee’ could be a bomb threat.

The situation the operator was asking me to attend was a Code Zulu – a Sudden Death.

Sudden Deaths are the bread-and-butter of policing; whenever a ‘sudden death’ happens, police are called as a matter of course. I’m actually a little bit fuzzy on what defines a ‘sudden death’, but I believe it is any death that doesn’t happen as the cause of an obvious accident, and to someone who has not seen a doctor in a couple of weeks.

‘A few weeks? Oh my, I haven’t been to my GP in over a year,’ you might say. That was certainly my reaction when I first found out what a sudden death was. However, the two-week rule means that anybody who has had recent medical issues – heart attacks, late-stage cancer and so on – isn’t automatically classed as ‘sudden’, because, well, they’re not technically sudden.