Читать книгу Cops and Robbers - Ant Anstead - Страница 6

There have been a number of stand-out moments during my time as a police officer. I joined in what I can only describe as a period of ‘pre-red tape’. Lots of crazy stuff happened. While the police service brought me great enjoyment and I experienced some incredible events, I also saw great hurt and sadness. People can be damaging to each other, and I have witnessed at first hand the very worst of human behaviour. Researching this book and revisiting this period of my life has brought back many positive and negative memories, but I will share with you just a handful of those lighter memories, which whilst writing have made me laugh out loud and cry at the same time. The truth is, in the years I spent in the police, most of those stories are unrepeatable in a book celebrating police cars, and some events I have simply emotionally moved on from, blocking them from my mind. I was young, and revisiting this period in my life has made me reflect on the small impact that I made on public safety and that quite often the day-to-day role of the police officer needs to be secret. In truth, the public cannot know, and I think deep down they don’t want to know, what it is that the police really do.

When I joined, a senior officer described being in the police as 95 per cent mundane boredom and 5 per cent total utter fear. And in some ways he was right. As an officer of Hertfordshire Constabulary I spent the early part of my career in the affluent, rural area of Bishop’s Stortford. Staffing levels were so low I spent the majority of my two years there policing solo. The public perception was that there was a whole army of police officers patrolling the streets. Truth is, there were often only three of us. Three! Covering an area from the Essex border to the east, Cambridgeshire border to the north and as far south as Ware, the town in which I lived. This huge amount of space was known as part of ‘A Division’.

A Division was so vast that to police it effectively we needed to drive – quickly! Hertfordshire Police allowed you to drive cars based on passing various levels of driving qualifications. The entry level driving qualification was known in-house as a ‘G Ticket’. Pass this basic test and you can drive a marked police vehicle – but that’s all: no blue lights, no rapid response and certainly no car chases. It was simply a marked police taxi to get from A to B. I spent many months policing Bishop’s Stortford on a G ticket, and I remember the car of choice fondly, my first ever police car. It was a P-registered Vauxhall Astra – the rubbish one with rounded rear end and awful plastic bumpers. It had grey velour seats with that familiar generic car pattern, and the heater didn’t work. It was the most basic of cars, with a single cone blue light on the roof. This car was slow – so slow – but it got me around my patch brilliantly, never missed a beat. Boy, that car could tell some stories …

There’s something remarkable about driving a police car. It stops everyone. People stare, people behave differently, people certainly drive differently when near a marked police car. I became all too familiar with the varying degrees of public reaction and relied on that response when policing. The car, and of course the uniform, became my asset every day. The car itself became a tool for me in so many different ways; it carried a vast amount of items, it blocked roads when needed, and it became an ambulance when called upon, a refuge for victims, a safe place for informants, an escape when in danger and even a weapon when all else failed. It felt like an armoured vehicle because of everything it stood for, yet all it had was a badge on the door and a blue light on the roof – a blue light I couldn’t even use! For me it was what the car represented that made it invincible. I drove that car across every inch of A Division. I got to know my patch so well, and got to know its residents, too. In the UK we are very lucky; we police with consent, with the majority of the public behaving like law-abiding citizens and crime being committed by a small minority. It meant I saw the same offenders over and over. I got to know them, and they got to know me, too.

Once I had established myself as a local police officer I pestered my sergeant on a daily basis to let me qualify to drive with blue lights. I cannot emphasise enough how frustrating it was for me to listen to the car radio for crime and public calls for assistance, knowing I had to drive there like another car in the daily traffic, to be literally sitting at the lights while a burglary was in progress was not what I joined the cops for! The ‘Yankee’ car was qualified to attend on ‘blues and twos’ and it would often pass my Astra, waving at me while weaving through traffic. I wasn’t in the police long before I knew that I needed to drive a police car properly. I needed to get myself a Yankee ticket. And quick.

The Yankee qualification was a great course. I remember my instructor Vince really well. He was a very dry man who spoke in a monotone, and who, truth be told, really just wanted to ride police motorbikes and tell bad jokes. It took me two weeks to pass the course, which I did whilst driving up and down the country in an unmarked car with two other officers also itching to be allowed to be let loose in some county metal. After the initial days we all became quite familiar with each other, as you would when spending all day together trapped in a car. We covered various aspects of driving and I learned a lot from Vince, including how dark one man’s sense of humour can be. Once Vince felt confident that we were competent, we would BLAT (blues and twos) in a police car to different locations across the UK. Vince would start each day declaring our intention, ‘Today we are going to Southend to buy chips’. And that’s what we did. I still look back and think I had the coolest job. The Yankee course was all about passing; the humiliation of not passing would have been career-ending, and my group would never have let me live it down. Plus they all knew I was a car guy! I had to pass. At the end of the course I was handed a certificate, a piece of paper that said: ‘Anthony Anstead. Response Driver’. I still have it, in fact. And that was it, my ticket to get me to the front line of policing. My police career was about to change forever.

Once I was a response driver, A Division policing instantly became different. I could now attend all incidents as a first response. I could stop cars and chase vehicles. So far I had by default been somewhat protected from the public, but now the safety catch was off and I saw the real side of front-line policing. The really bad bits.

My first fatal car crash was horrific. It was on the A120 between Little Hadham and Bishop’s Stortford. It was a night shift, around 3am, and three young lads had stolen a lorry, set fire to it and left it in the layby, making off in a second stolen vehicle. In their haste the driver lost control of the car within 100 yards of the dumped lorry and turned it upside down. Both front passengers left by the windscreen. The driver was killed instantly and was lying in the road when we arrived, while the other was alive but had serious head injuries. He was holding his face together like it was a latex mask split down the middle. The rear passenger somehow managed to crawl free and he ran off, nice chap.

As I got closer to the scene, I used my car to block the road at the Bishop’s Stortford end and radioed for a roadblock the other side, but I knew assistance was a fair distance away. I could see the lorry on fire at the top of hill and assumed it was involved in the crash. I ran to see if there was anyone inside but the flames were so bad I couldn’t get close. I passed the lorry and used cones from my car to block the road. I asked for fire brigade and ambulance while sitting in the road with the injured man, near his dead friend. I was bandaging his head with blood pouring everywhere. He was silent, and it must have been the shock that prevented him from feeling the pain from his injuries. And the sight of his friend’s body. It was a strange moment. It felt like hours until assistance arrived, and once I was cleared from the scene I had a few moments to clean myself back at the station before I was then sent at 6am to a report of a broken window at the local Tesco. My Yankee ticket took me to the coal face of incidents and that night became the start of familiar relationship with RTAs, which I attended on an almost daily basis, as Hertfordshire has some fast open roads. I’m often asked if, as a car guy, I like motorbikes, and there’s no doubt that, because of this period of my life, and attending numerous bike crashes, my answer is a resounding no.

I conducted numerous traffic stops, mostly mundane for small incidents of speeding or poor driving, and often I just had to have a peek at a car that didn’t quite look or feel right. One stop that stands out was in South Street on a sunny afternoon. I was at the traffic lights and an estate car passed me going the other way. The boot was wide open, hinged upwards, and a young man was sitting on the tail of the car with his legs dangling over the edge towards the road and holding the front of a 15-foot rowing boat on his lap which had some wheelbarrow wheels on the rear. No tow bar, no trailer, just this kid holding a boat that was being pulled along by a car. It was one of those ‘what did I just see?’ moments. I quickly spun my car round and pulled the car over as it got to over 40mph. Just a bump in the road, a clip of the kerb would have dragged that kid out of the car. And they couldn’t really see what the issue was – what was wrong with dragging a boat by hand out of the back of the car? There’s no real obvious ticket for such an offence, but, needless to say, I didn’t allow them to drive a moment longer.

One evening around midnight I was patrolling the edge of the A Division near the M11 junction when a blue BMW roared past me. I instantly gave chase with blue lights, giving the details of my pursuit on the radio. Past the industrial estate I was doing my best to keep contact and get sight of the number plate. I was struggling to keep up and knew the car would be long gone once it was on open roads, and the M11 was nearby. I called for assistance from our faster Traffic cars and requested further help from our neighbours in Essex. I was losing the car but still revving the nuts off my little Astra, trying my very best to keep up. The BMW entered the slip road for the M11, and I was several hundred yards behind. Then the car suddenly braked, screeching to a halt as I sped closer. The driver got out, waving his arms as I closed in on my target, I jumped out to be met by this furious man who shoved an ID in my face and screamed ‘I’m fucking Special Branch you fucking prick, check the fucking number plate.’ Then he ran back into his BMW and drove off. Yes, I got my ass handed to me by my sergeant for that. But hey, the thought was there. Whoops …

I had an appetite for policing, and soon I wanted to leave the rural scene, so I transferred to the very busy K Division, covering Cheshunt and Waltham Cross. There were no green fields and farms; it was a totally different style of policing. And it was busy!

I’ve had numerous memorable police chases, but one sticks out purely because I’m a car man. It was a normal afternoon on a normal weekday and I was patrolling alone in a slightly newer W-reg Astra. I passed a silver Porsche 911 convertible with the roof down, and instantly recognised the driver – a well-known local toerag. And I knew that there was no way he could afford a 911! I followed for a few hundred yards, requesting a PNC check on the plate and the status of the known villain’s driving situation. The car came back normal, owned and registered locally to an address in Little Berkhamsted. Weird how I remember that little detail? Still, it didn’t add up, and whatever the information, I was stopping that car. The moment I put my blue lights on he was off. It was now a Porsche 911 versus a 1.4 Astra – mmmm … Had he stuck to the A roads he would have left me for dust, but he didn’t. He entered a housing estate, weaving in and out of the roads and losing his back end on almost every corner. His lack of car control meant I kept up easily, and we raced around the estate until we reached a dead end, where he jumped out of the car and ran off into a park. I gave chase, and as I was a pretty quick runner back then. He was arrested within a few minutes and we walked back to the car. Of course, he had a perfectly reasonable story: the car was his friend’s, etc, etc. But I know cars pretty well, and having a simple look around it I found the poorly modified chassis number concealing that it was, in fact, a stolen car and he had just copied the number plate from another local 911 he saw to avoid suspicion. However, he couldn’t resist the temptation of some roof-down cruising. Sure enough, I had caught red-handed one of our most notorious local offenders in a stolen Porsche 911, which was then reunited with its owner, and I’d had a pretty cool police chase, too. That was a good day.

Driving police cars is dangerous and I have had numerous scrapes along the way. I once parked my police car on the A10 to direct the flow of traffic down the very tight Theobalds Lane and to block a crash scene. While waving a lorry on, the back of his rig caught the front bumper of my car, dragging it for about 20 yards while I was frantically waving my arms to get him to stop. Then ‘PING’, he pulled my front bumper clean off. It was a light and funny moment, looking back. However, that same road was also the scene of my first serious POLAC (police accident). I was a passenger in a marked police car with a member of my team driving. We were on ‘blues and twos’, pulling onto the A10 when – BANG – we were smashed into by a silver BMW. We spun off and hit a fence and he went into the oncoming traffic. It was a heavy hit. My partner Sue was stunned. I turned the sirens off and ran to the car that had hit us, trying to get the man out of the car. He wouldn’t leave the vehicle, even as I was pulling at him harder and harder to get him out. It was only when a member of the public came over and said ‘he has his seatbelt on’ that I realised what an idiot I was. Whoops. The next moment I was in an ambulance on the way to hospital. Shock is a weird thing.

K Division was crazy, a busy place to police, with varying crime and a melting pot of cultures. It was on the fringes of north London, making it a Metropolitan police area until Herts took over the patch. I was on the transition team for that takeover, sharing the patrols with the Met until they slowly thinned out to being all Herts officers. A memorable period for policing at this time was that of the petrol strikes, which crippled the nation. It was chaos! Only priority motorists were allowed access to fuel (which meant that, as a member of the emergency services, I was okay). Seeing the public descend into chaos and the queues and distress at the pumps made it clear how important the motor car is to the daily lives of so many people.

My time in K Division was great; I saw and did some crazy things in that period; there was a lot of crime and violence, but I knew that I wanted to lean towards more action, so I applied for probably the most specialist role in the police: the TFU, the Tactical Firearms Unit. That decision changed my life forever.

It’s important to remain focused on the fact that this is a book about police cars, and although I have numerous stories from my time in the police, as I’ve already said, many are not fit for this publication. There was, however, for me, a changing relationship with the police car at the moment when I was handed a gun. I learned very quickly that the police car was now both an effective weapon and a place of safety. Before being armed, I had never really considered the ballistic properties of a car, such as, when the shots start coming which areas are effectively bulletproof? It’s not like the movies; the door of a Volvo T5 won’t stop a bullet! The engine bay, however, would, and that Volvo bonnet became a regular vantage point to lean over while armed with either an MP5 or a G36 weapon. It was the Volvo that became my favourite police car. It was amazing! We used Volvos and Mercedes as ARV (Armed Response Vehicles); both were estate versions, providing more space to carry the extra equipment. The only real performance upgrades were ceramic brake discs and fancy callipers, otherwise it was pretty much a standard car. Between the front seats there was a gun safe that carried larger weapons. First the MP5, a small, compact assault weapon that was really accurate, then some months later we changed to a G36, which was more of a rifle. The safe was locked and the weapons unloaded. We would have to ‘self-arm’ when en route to incidents, and of course for immediate issues we would use our side arm (in my case a Sig Sauer 9mm self-loading pistol) that we carried each day in a holster. Open the boot of the car and there was a huge locked pull-out tray that contained loads more goodies: baton guns, flash bangs (Stun grenades), shotguns with varying types of cartridges, CS rounds and a bunch of other cool non-firearm stuff. Under this tray we carried additional equipment like first-aid kits, a defibrillator, a stinger (a bed of nails for puncturing car tyres) and so on. This ARV was basically a mobile armoury, and therefore it was heavy! The Volvo seemed the perfect choice, and I could not believe that car’s performance ability; it was rapid, but ever so reliable. I can’t remember a single moment when that car let us down – and we put her through her paces, we did not hold back! As we patrolled with two ARVs at a time there was always a race to grab the Volvo ahead of the Mercedes, as all the TFU team knew the Volvo had the edge. Strangely, of the standard road-going cars the Mercedes would be superior, but I guess the Volvo just carried the extra weight better. It was a reliable Swede. The TFU had a host of other unmarked cars, and I spent many hours concealed in the back of a green unmarked Mercedes Sprinter van, in particular. It’s amazing how dark the humour is when there are half a dozen armed coppers trapped in the back of a van. Now if that van could talk …!

The TFU also had an armoured Land Rover 90. I was told it was an ex RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) vehicle from Northern Ireland, and it certainly looked the part. Constructed with fully riveted flat steel panels and thick bulletproof glass, it weighed tons. It was also the slowest car I think I have ever driven, taking minutes to get up to 40mph, and it barely went round a corner. I drove it several times but only ever used it operationally once. It was in December one year when we received a report of a man at the Christmas-tree-sales place brandishing a gun. We entered the farm in the Land Rover using the loud-hailer to give the chap instructions. Turned out the gun was a toy.

In 2005 I left the police to follow my true passion of building and restoring cars. My television career kicked off with the Channel 4 car show For the Love of Cars, which ironically was hosted by a TV police legend Philip Glenister, who is well known for playing Detective Inspector Gene Hunt in Ashes to Ashes and Life on Mars. In For the Love of Cars I restored an ex-Scottish Police Rover SD1 known as ‘The Beast’, which went on to sell at auction for a new auction world record for a SD1. Working on that car brought back many police memories, and in the show we retraced the infamous ‘Liver Run’ in the car as a tribute to the original SD1’s dash through London with an organ that was urgently required for a patient mid-surgery.

This book was written in order to share not only my passion for the Great British police car but as a nod back to those proud and amazing years I spent serving the British public.

This is a Hertfordshire Vauxhall Astra Mk3 just like the one I started my policing career driving, only mine didn’t have a bonnet box. It wasn’t fast, but it was a faithful servant and I loved it at the time.