Читать книгу A Fair Cop - Michael Bunting - Страница 11

I made the transfer to Millgarth Division in December 1995, just weeks after the job at the Co-op. My first memory is one of bewilderment. I remember spending almost an hour in nose-to-tail traffic, as I made my first journey to the station, a complete contrast to Cleckheaton in the Dewsbury Division, where the journey took fifteen minutes at most. I wanted the change, though, and this was just a small price to pay. I yearned for the challenges of the hectic routine of city policing, something that up to this point I hadn’t experienced.

When I arrived, I struggled into the station clasping onto a mountain of police uniform, which meant that I had to walk sideways so that I could see where I was going. I asked the office clerk to press the buzzer on the door to let me in. She seemed amused as I tripped over my long overcoat, which was hanging out of the pile of clothes I was carrying, and as I sprawled onto the floor, I looked up at her. She politely tried to hide her merriment.

It’s okay, you can laugh,’ I said as I scrambled to my feet. ‘I would.’

‘Are you PC Bunting?’ she asked, rather red-faced.

‘I am.’ I brushed the front of my trousers down with my hands as I stood up. I walked over to the desk and held out my hand. ‘Mick,’ I said.

‘Hello, Mick,’ she replied, letting out a little giggle. ‘I’m Christine. You need to take the lift to the third floor. Your sergeant is expecting you.’

Lift? This was a big place! Cleckheaton was a world away from here, its police station an old converted terraced house. My nerves and excitement amalgamated and I hurried to the third floor, where I found my unsuspecting sergeant tucking into a hearty English breakfast. I thought this might be my second mistake of the day, arriving just as he was on his meal break. He gave me instructions as to where to get my locker key and told me to get settled and he’d see me in ten minutes or so. He looked a little displeased by my arrival at this critical time in his day. I got on with the laborious task of making several visits from the car to my locker with heaps of police clothing. Christine looked amused each time I precariously walked past her. I think she anticipated another blunder. So did I.

Eventually, the job was done. I tidied myself up and went to my first Millgarth briefing. I felt a little nervous, but nothing out of the ordinary for someone starting a new job. I was introduced to the shift and began to find my way around the station. I was left off operational duties for the first hour so that I could get to know the building. I spent my time wisely and introduced myself to the various departments in the station. Everybody seemed welcoming and I felt at ease relatively quickly.

I was told that I’d have to spend the rest of the day driving around the division with my map of Leeds so that I could familiarise myself with the vastness of my new workplace. I already knew the city centre quite well, but I was amazed at just how hard it was to make progress through the busy traffic. I ventured to the outskirts, where I was faced with a different problem. The streets intertwined seemingly at random. I would spend long periods trying to get from one street to another, only to be beaten by the complexity of the layout. Just as I thought I’d cracked it, I’d be greeted by a set of bollards in the middle of the road. It seemed ironic that the bollards, put in place to prevent joy riders, were blocking my route in a marked police car.

I tried to respond to calls to which other units were being sent as a means of testing myself. Every so often, I’d need to pull into the side of the road, as I looked up the street which I would have had to attend. Usually the other units had arrived, sorted the job out and departed before I’d even got there.

I continued driving around and discovered two areas of Leeds which looked particularly problematic in terms of law and order. The first, Little London, was a small suburb comprised mainly of high-rise flats. They were a depressing sight; just looking at them produced a feeling of inertia. They were listless. Even though they were spilling with inhabitants, to me they projected a sense of indolence, as people with seemingly little purpose tried to make the best of their lives. The greeting for visitors at the 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 months on the shop squad. The workload on this assignment was very high and officers would soon burn out from the constant pressure of having to deal with the endless flow of shoplifters. For this reason, each patrol officer has to take his or her turn on the unit. I never had aspirations to be a detective and so I found this three months harrowing. The paperwork involved for each shoplifter could take up to four hours; I can leave you to guess how I felt when I saw six or seven prisoners on the board for my attention. I could quite easily be dealing with shoplifters until one or two in the morning. In the main, the average offender was aged between sixteen and twenty-five and often they stole to feed their drug addiction.

Of course, there were exceptions. The strangest job I encountered whilst I was on the squad was when I arrested a woman in her mid-fifties at House of Fraser in the city. She was quiet and very well-spoken and looked immaculate. She had a ring on her finger with a gem the size of my thumbnail. It must have been worth thousands. Her perfume was recognisably one of the highest quality. When I searched through the property she was carrying with her, I found she had several gold credit cards and an equal number of debit cards and cheque-books, all of which were legitimate. There was no doubt she had considerable spending power, yet here I was arresting her for the theft of a £20 cutlery set. I lodged her in a cell before going to her house to perform a search in accordance with PACE (Police and Criminal Evidence Act).

I was amazed by what I found. It was not the usual journey to Hyde Park or Little London, but to one of the more affluent areas of Leeds—Alwoodley, not an area where you would usually suspect its inhabitants of being shoplifters. Upon my arrival, I informed the lady’s husband what had happened. He just looked at me with a sorry expression and said, ‘Oh no, not again.’ I suspected that she had an ongoing problem.

Searching the house was no easy task. In the basement, there was a large gymnasium and a swimming pool, beautifully lit with underwater lights which made the water glow green. I found nothing of any note until I got to one of the spare rooms upstairs. I opened the door and it was like a department store warehouse, full of brand new goods, still in their original wrappers. There were about twenty sets of cutlery and the woman obviously had a fetish for soap, as I found about three hundred bars, ranging from store own-brands to the best quality bars costing over £20 each. There were no receipts to be found anywhere. The husband looked mortified. I believed him when he told me that he didn’t know those things were there, as the house was so large and the room felt cold, as if it wasn’t used for living in. I called for a van and then began the massive task of seizing and logging all of the suspected stolen items. It took me three hours just to list them on a property record sheet.

I returned to the Bridewell, to a rather angry-looking custody sergeant who wanted to know where I had been. I informed him of the situation and so he called the lady’s solicitor, despite the fact that she had stated that she didn’t wish him to be present.

I conducted the interview with her. It took over two hours, as I had to question her about every item. In her quiet manner, she admitted to stealing them all. What I found most surprising was the fact she remembered the date and location of the theft of everything. She was remorseless, but I don’t think she knew what she’d been doing, I think it was more an addiction. It was decided that the best way of dealing with the woman was by means of a help group and her condition of bail was to attend weekly meetings to rid her of her habitual stealing. She agreed to this and the decision was eventually taken not to prosecute her. As far as I know, she never offended again. It took me over two months to return all the stolen property to the appropriate stores, some of which weren’t aware they’d even had goods stolen from them.

Whilst on the same squad, I once did a house search in Beeston, a suburb of South Leeds, following the arrest of a habitual shoplifter. The house was a two bedroom terraced dwelling and the first thing I noticed was flies buzzing around the bare light bulb, which precariously hung from the ceiling. There were piles of soiled clothing on the floor and the only remaining carpet spaces were covered with cat excrement. There were remains of food on a plate on the sofa, but this had formed a layer of mould and looked virtually unrecognisable. There were several used needles in the bedroom and I found a spoon with a burn mark on it in the bed.

The most repulsive sight was the bathroom. The water in the toilet filled the pan to the top and it was stained black. There were carrier bags tied up on the floor, containing human excrement. There were faeces floating in the bath, too. More distressing was the presence of a cot on the landing right outside the bathroom. The stench was too much and I did the best search possible under the circumstances, before going back to interview the eighteen-year-old mother of two. She was charged with the offence of theft from shops: she’d stolen toiletries and nappies.

Dealing with people like this saddened me. This woman had no chance of breaking her cycle of crime and I felt no satisfaction from charging her, as I knew that her crime was not driven by malice, but by an instinct to survive. I pitied her greatly and found myself making her several cups of tea during her time in custody. Just three days before her court appearance, she was found dead in her house. She had drawn a headstone on her bedroom wall and written the letters RIP on it. She had then lain next to it and taken an overdose of heroin. Her life had become too much. Her children had been with the body for two days before it was discovered. The eldest had eaten bits of flesh from her arms just to stay alive. This was another part of the job that I found difficult to deal with.

As you’d expect, I was glad when those three months were completed. I was pleased to be back with my shift patrolling the streets of Leeds city centre. Almost as soon as I’d finished my time in the shop squad, I made an arrest that attracted national media attention.

One night in January 1997, I was on another night duty. It was Saturday and, as always, we were anticipating a busy night. I didn’t expect, however, to arrest this particular person. It was around midnight and I was driving the police van past the Majestyk nightclub in the centre of the city. I was with my colleague, PC Dave Braddock. There was a long queue of people outside the club, shivering in the freezing temperatures. My attention was then drawn to the other side of the road, to a group of men. They were lively, excitable and loud, but seemingly nothing other than in good spirits on a night out.

Then, without reason, one of the men shouted across towards us. His words were scathing of the police in general and his language was expletive. I was surprised by the blatant nature of the comments. He was a tall, thin man, well dressed and daubed in chunky gold jewellery. He kept on walking towards us and stood directly in front of the car. He looked in at us and shouted once again, ‘You fucking pigs.’ It was at this point that I recognised him.