general entrance was usually a pile of dirty needles or a bag of used glue. I felt a sense of pity for the people in the flats who didn’t match the image portrayed by the area. They were not the most salubrious of surroundings and the occasional burnt-out car in the car parks added to the uninviting vista. My first memories of Little London came as I was driving around trying to take it all in, when a brick thudded against the car door. I saw three children of about ten years old running away and gesticulating with their hands as they did so. I never dithered in Little London again.
The second area I noticed on my travels was Hyde Park. It was made up of row after row of old terraced houses. It did, however, display some similar characteristics to Little London. Every second street or so would have a burnt-out car and youths gathered in small groups. They’d cover their faces with bandanas and turn away from me as I drove past. This was their way of trying to get me to stop the car and challenge them. I may have been the new bobby on the patch, but I wasn’t going to fall into that trap.
The calls kept coming in and I felt a little guilty as my colleagues raced from job to job. I listened as they were sent to a violent shoplifter at one of the city centre stores. I was familiar with its location and decided that I’d try to impress my new colleagues by getting there to help them. I knew they’d all be monitoring me in the early stages, and this would go some way to giving them the right impression of me as a hard worker.
I drove at speed through the city centre traffic. The sirens were near deafening as they reverberated from the buildings. I had never driven to a rush job in such heavy traffic. I had to concentrate like never before as pedestrians occasionally stepped out in front of the car, despite the volume of the sirens. Nevertheless, I arrived at the call and informed the control room. Another police car was already present and I ran into the store to back them up, as there had been no update over the radio.
Two sales assistants ran up to me. They looked shocked and just pointed to the other end of the store. ‘Your friends are over there,’ one of them said. ‘Hurry up, he’s a madman,’ urged the other.
I made my way over as quickly as I could and saw my colleagues, a male and a female officer, rolling about on the floor desperately trying to restrain a man. He was thrashing around wildly and I saw two pairs of handcuffs strewn on the floor. He was trying to bite both officers, which prevented them from properly restraining him. I dashed over to help. It was almost impossible to do anything useful initially. Each time I tried to grab one of his hands, he’d pull away forcefully and quickly, knocking over display stands in the aisles as he did so. He began spitting and his attempts to bite were becoming more accurate as he took hold of my jumper sleeve. The other male officer rolled over on top of the man and I did the same almost straight away. With my extra body-weight on top of him, the struggle came to a hasty and peaceful conclusion. He was handcuffed and brought to his feet.
The male officer looked at me. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘It’s Mick isn’t it?’ he asked, shaking my hand.
‘That’s right.’
‘I’m Matt,’ he said.
The female officer approached me. ‘I’m Sophie.’
‘Nice to meet you, Sophie,’ I said.
‘We’ll see you at the nick later. Thanks again,’ Matt said.
They left with the prisoner, and I left with the contentment of knowing that the first impression I’d had made on my colleagues at Millgarth was a favourable one.
I spent the rest of the shift trying to repeat what I’d just done as the jobs came in, but all I actually managed to do was get lost several more times. I didn’t mind too much, though, because when we paraded off duty that evening, Matt and Sophie invited me upstairs to the bar to have a drink with the shift. I met a few more members of the team and all seemed very friendly. Word had got round about me helping with the arrest of the shoplifter. I was the subject of several jokes, too; I’d been spotted a few times in the car at the side of the road with my head buried in my map and the hazard lights flashing. Apparently, police cars had whizzed past me with the blues and twos activated on a number of occasions. However, my honourable intentions had been noted and the founding of some wonderful friendships had begun. I went home feeling very pleased with my new job.
I had a lot to learn when I started at Millgarth. The day shifts were spent, in the main, collecting shoplifters who had been detained by security guards. Sometimes, there would be so many waiting to be collected that every officer in the division would be in the city centre, or in the Bridewell (the police custody suite). I remember one day I collected seven shoplifters from seven different locations in about twenty minutes. I had to call up on the radio to get extra pairs of handcuffs brought to me. After a while, such work loses its appeal, but it was a necessary part of the duties, and for this reason a special squad of officers was established to deal with the prisoners, once they’d arrived at the Bridewell. Interviewing, charging and photographing a prisoner can take hours, especially if house searches are involved, or there is a long wait for the solicitor. It was, therefore, impractical for patrol officers to get tied up with shoplifters. The ‘shop squad’, as it was called, was the busiest team of officers in the force. The more recent name for the team is the Retail Crime Unit.
The nature of the job changed again for the night shift in Leeds city centre, as partygoers from all over the North of England came to the pubs, bars and clubs. Inevitably, with illicit drugs and alcohol playing a large part in some people’s nights, the shifts were riddled with incidents. Weekends were the worst. You could leave the police station at 10 p.m. and not get back in until 7 a.m. Whilst the nights passed quickly, because of the volume of calls, it meant you usually went home feeling exhausted and very hungry.
It was common to attend fight after fight. We would spend a large part of the shift in the Casualty Department of the hospital chasing witnesses and complainants to assaults. I remember one job in particular. We had been called to a public order incident at one of the more notorious venues in the city, Big Lil’s on East Parade. Due to our heavy workload that night, by the time we arrived it was quiet and the club staff informed us that an ambulance had attended and taken several of the people involved to hospital. Naturally, we were obliged to follow up this lead and we duly made our way to the Casualty Department.
Whilst we were en route, we received a call from the hospital stating there was a fight in progress in the reception area and that one of the ambulance staff had been assaulted. We established that the people from the nightclub had turned on one of the ambulance crew, simply because there was a waiting time for treatment of about an hour. We arrested three of the trouble causers at the hospital, but it could have been more as the waiting area was filled with drunken thugs wanting to get involved. Several shouted and swore at us, whilst others spat blood at us from the wounds they’d sustained in their last fight. This was the kind of incident we had to deal with on a regular basis and we’d usually be criticised by various sections of society for our action (or lack of ).
I would say that ten people should have been arrested from the incident at the hospital, but, because of personnel restrictions, we weren’t able to deal with it properly. One of the men I arrested was given a fine for causing an injury to someone’s face. It had required nineteen stitches. In my years working as a policeman, I found that the only people who were affected by the punishments given by the courts were people who ostensibly had more to lose, like a motorist getting banned for speeding on his or her way to work, for example. To habitual offenders, court sentences were practically meaningless and had little effect on them. I’ve seen a man leave court with a bigger fine for speeding than another man’s fine for a house burglary. I wish I could explain the wonders of the English judiciary to you, but like most police officers I’m usually left scratching my head.
Perhaps the most professionally challenging period of my police career was when I spent three
