LITMIR.BIZ

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Hendon⁴ loves to remind us that ‘domestic violence intervention is murder prevention’, but I’ve got to admit to having thought more than once that perhaps we should just leave this particular couple to it. For as long as I have been a copper in this borough, they seem to have been completely hell-bent on putting new dents into each other, and it’s a pitiful mess every time.

      ‘Take him away! I don’t want him here,’ she squealed, as I walked in through the front door.

      I was the second car on scene, which is just as well, because I’m single-crewed. The car that beat me there was triple-crewed – unusual, given that, in these times of relentless belt-tightening, we’re usually one-up in a car, not three. I was glad to see that my colleague Tim was there; he knows the couple well. In addition to Tim, there was Charlie, a relatively new probationer, fresh out of Hendon, and Syd, a special constable.

      Specials are volunteers. Many people seem to confuse them with PCSO⁵ staff, but there are crucial differences between them, the main one being that special constables don’t get paid. Also, not many people realise this, but special constables have the same powers as myself: they have been sworn in, are warranted by the Queen to do arrests, talk sternly to inebriated teenagers, wag their fingers at people failing to wear seat belts, heroically rescue kittens out of trees, and so on and so forth.

      I sneak a look at this particularly solidly built special’s Metvest. I think I’ve seen him before, but I can’t remember his name; his nametag reads Smith, which is profoundly unhelpful.

      He was doing his best to keep the man from getting to his lady-love. Meanwhile, Tim was trying to reason with the woman, in the hope she would come down from being a squeaky, hyperventilating ball of fury.

      ‘Oi!’ I called out. ‘Can we all just shut up for ten seconds? I can’t hear myself think in this racket.’

      Weirdly (and unusually), they listened to me. The flat fell quiet for a couple of seconds, except for the man’s heavy breathing, leaving all six of us staring back and forth at each other for a few seconds.

      ‘Right,’ I said, taking control of the situation in the brief moment of silence. ‘You—,’ I pointed at the man, ‘let’s go to the living room and have a chat.’

      Tim started leading the woman out of the kitchen and into the bedroom. Good thinking. Kitchens are the most dangerous rooms in a house when there’s a chance a fight will break out. Heavy pans, plenty of knives, boiling water – it rarely ends well.

      I waved the special over to me, and after we’d had a brief chat with the king of this particularly squalid castle, we explained to him that he needed to be arrested so we would be able to interview him properly. I decided to let the special get the body (which is police slang for ‘making the arrest’), mostly for my own amusement, but he promptly ruined my entertainment by knowing what to do, and the arrest went smoothly.

      Or at least, it looked to be going smoothly … until the man suddenly changed his mind. Immediately after the special applied one handcuff to him, he decided he didn’t want to get arrested after all. At first, he started struggling half-heartedly, but then he found some strength and with it a burst of uninhibited inspiration for mayhem. He booted the special in the shins, and managed to swipe my legs from under me. I hit the floor with a rib-crunching crash, hitting the back of my head against the side of a table. Pain shot through me briefly, before fading away again.

      ‘For Christ’s sake,’ I shouted. In response, the probationer – PC McOwen – came running to help us out. And so developed an all-out fight between the three of us and the man. The TV was kicked – I have no idea by whom – and crashed into the wall. Chairs were knocked over, a series of pictures that were balanced on a shelf went flying across the living room, covering the floor in shards of glass, and the table I had already landed on once ended up in several pieces on the floor.

      Amid the chaos I heard McOwen scream, ‘SPRAY, SPRAY.’

      He had taken his CS spray out of its holder, and was applying a generous dose of noxious liquid (which is not entirely dissimilar to pepper spray) to the man’s face.

      The man calmed down rapidly, which is great news, obviously, but in the process, I caught some of the CS splash-back, and my eyes filled with tears and a burning sensation I haven’t felt since The Stag Do That Must Not Be Mentioned.

      I react terribly to CS. Generally, I’d prefer we didn’t use the stuff in any circumstances. In the probationer’s defence, I suppose it was rather effective in this case; chances are we would have continued our living-room-trashing wrestling session for at least a couple of minutes more.

      We finally managed to get the man in both cuffs, lying on the floor with the special constable sitting on his legs, the man reeling off a vituperation of obscenities about our mothers, and the probationer holding the handcuffs.

      Having reached this position of relative control, we allowed ourselves to relax. It was all over, right?

      Right?

      Rarely do we have such luck; charging out of the bedroom came the man’s girlfriend, holding a rather large box set of the TV series Friends.

      Yes, really.

      ‘Leave him alone, he hasn’t done anything to you,’ she shouted, before lifting the box set above her head, and bringing it down on the special.

      Tim came running into the living room after her – I am still not sure how she managed to give him the slip – and tried to grab her. She struggled violently, elbowing him in the face and sending him to the floor. Yowling like a doom-wraith she hit the special with the box set again, this time with enough force that it disintegrated. A flurry of CDs, booklets and bits of torn box flew everywhere.

      Between the four of us, we restrained her as well, and started taking the man out of the flat, where a caged police van had just arrived with further reinforcements and a way of transporting the fine specimen of gentlemanhood to a night in the cells.

      As we hauled the man off, the woman was roaring from within Tim and McOwen’s grasp.

      ‘LOVE YOU,’ she called to her partner, before directing her anger at us. ‘You are hurting him, I love him, leave him alone!’ she half-sobbed, half-shouted, conveniently forgetting her insistence that we take him away not ten minutes earlier.

      We arranged another van to take her away as well, and they both spent the rest of the night in separate cells, shouting across the hallway between the cells, declaring their mutual undying love approximately 68 times, much to the chagrin of the sleep-deprived custody sergeant.

      The next day, lover-boy woke up to yet another ABH (Actual Bodily Harm) charge for beating up his girlfriend for the hundredth time. Meanwhile she was awarded with an assault charge for her valiant rescue attempt.

      Before long they were back in the flat, continuing on their previous path of loving each other to death.

       The A-hole who dropped the N-bomb

      ‘Hey, Delito,’ the sarge said to me that morning, in the daily briefing. ‘Thompson is off ill today, can you take care of the Sierra Delta gang?’

      Sierra Delta – or SD – is Street Duties. It is a programme where new police officers are put through their paces, dealing with cases from beginning to end. They might do an arrest for a shoplifting, for example, and go through the whole process, from alpha to omega. Arrest, booking into custody, interview on tape, investigation, and so on and so forth: the whole process right through to court. It means that each case you deal with takes a lot of time, but you also get a full understanding of how the processes work. It’s incredibly interesting, and I recall my street-duty sessions fondly – the PC who was my mentor/instructor is still one of my best friends to this day.

      ‘Delito. You listening?’ Daydreaming already? Oh dear, today really was going to be a long day.

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