‘This,’ I thought to myself, ‘has been a particularly rotten day.’
But I’m getting ahead of myself – introductions first.
I’m Matt.
I’m a police officer, but I haven’t always been. I’ve had quite a few different jobs in my time, including working in a petrol station (I would tell you that it was a barrel of laughs if it wasn’t such an easy-to-detect lie). I also worked as a runner for the BBC one particularly memorable summer. That was exciting; I got to meet all sorts of interesting people. Jeremy Clarkson, for example. He told me to fuck off once, which was probably the highlight of my pre-police career. I suppose that goes some way towards explaining why I prefer to talk about my career on the force than about life before I zipped up my Kevlar Metvest for the first time.
I’d like to invite you, for a minute, to think about what your average day consists of. No, go on, I’ll just sit back and have a few sips of my coffee whilst you ponder. Unless you’re my OP/IRV (this is the operator – aka the person who isn’t the driver – on an Incident Response Vehicle), your days will probably be slightly different from mine.
But what do I do all day? When I got tired of explaining this to my enquiring friends (and listening to their complaints about police officers: ‘I don’t like you lot – you gave my sister a ticket for speaking on her mobile when she was driving’), I decided it was time I started writing some of it down. That was well over a year ago now, and the result is the stack of dead trees, or the weightless, electron-powered virtual version thereof you are holding in your hands.
But I digress.
Where was I? Oh, yes, slumped against a tree.
I had just come off duty after a particularly long and dreary shift. It was late on a hot but rapidly cooling July evening and I was cycling home. Yes, ‘cycling’. I would not normally cycle so late but my motorbike had been involved in an unfortunate run-in with a bin lorry whilst it was parked outside the police station. I can’t really be sure that it was an accident rather than a particularly potent anti-police lash-out, but either way, the result was that my poor motorbike was stuck at the Yamaha dealership, and I was downgraded from triple-digit horsepower to zero-point-not-a-lot of horsepower, sweating and swearing in equal measure as I wrestled my pushbike along the godforsaken bicycle paths.
I was cycling through the park, through the dark, through the night, when out of the corner of my eye, I spotted some movement. At nearly 3 a.m., in a less-than-glamorous slice of town, movement generally signifies bad news, so I slowed down to take a closer look.
Slowing down, as it turned out, might very well have been a good idea; it may have saved my life, in fact. The next thing I knew, I was thrown from my bicycle. It transpired that the movement I’d noticed was a teenager ducking behind a tree, after he and a friend had spanned a length of steel wire across the cycle path, at roughly neck level.
This is an old trick: get the cyclist off the bike and then nick their bike and possessions whilst they are dazed and confused. Or, in some particularly unfortunate cases, dead.
As I lay flat on my back, the two youths came out of the darkness. One of them grabbed my bike, jumped on, and pedalled like a youth possessed into the night. The other quickly dug through my pockets, before running after his friend with my gym bag in his hand.
‘Hello? Is there anybody there? Can I help you? What is your emergency?’
I looked down at my hand.
My old, crappy Nokia was gripped between my fingers – clearly the thieves had not wanted it. The screen was lit up. It read 999. I realised that I must have dialled the emergency number, despite my barely sentient state.
‘Hello, this is Matt Delito, I’m a police constable, Mike Delta five-nine-two.’ I gave the operator my shoulder number completely automatically; I’m not actually sure whether they cared in the slightest.
‘I’ve just been attacked with a garrotte wire in the park by two youths. Both are IC11, around sixteen years of age, slim builds, just over five foot tall, both wearing black tracksuits. One had white trainers; the other was wearing a baseball cap. A red one, I think. Also, I need LAS. I think I may have broken my wrist.’ LAS are my brothers in arms: the London Ambulance Service.
Within moments of giving my details to the 999 operator, I heard the sirens of a passing police car flick on, and before long saw the silhouettes of my trusty colleagues Pete and Kim running towards me. A second car showed up minutes later with two more of my colleagues, and more importantly one of my assailants – the one with the red baseball cap.
I was still on the ground, heart pounding, with a god-awful pain in my wrist. I looked up at the young man being paraded towards me.
‘You’ve made a few pretty big mistakes today, young man,’ I said, as he half-heartedly struggled against his handcuffs.
‘You’re lucky I am tall,’ I continued. ‘If I’d been six inches shorter, that cable could have taken my windpipe off, and you would have found yourself staring at a prison wall for the foreseeable future.’
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that his other mistake was not stealing my little Nokia. It’s hardly the fanciest piece of equipment, but being able to dial 999 immediately was probably the only reason the boy was caught. If I had waited for even a couple of minutes, I have no doubt they would have got away with it.
The boy was bundled into a caged van a few minutes later. I sighed: I had already done a 14-hour shift, but I knew I’d be spending the next ten hours having my wrist set at the hospital, being lectured about concussions, giving witness statements back at the police station, and shaking my head at the idiocy of it all.
The arm hurt, and my chest ached from where the wire had cut into it. I’ll be honest with you, though: most of all, I was pissed off that I wouldn’t get a good night’s sleep.
God knows I needed one.
‘I want him out of here,’ the woman screeched, as she reached over my shoulder, the fingers of her hand curled into a claw, and her impressively long nails slashing, musketeer-style, through the air in the direction of her partner.
‘Shut it, you fucking whore,’ he barked back, and made a break for her, his hands balled into fleshy, white-knuckled fists.
I deduced from the trickle of blood coming from the man’s face that she’d managed to land at least a few scratches before we’d made it into the flat. Her face told a tale as well: her eye was practically swelling up as we stood there.
Seven minutes earlier, we’d received a call over the radio: ‘Domestic in progress, graded I, India.’
Our calls are graded in three levels of urgency: E-grade (or Echo) is, basically, whenever you can find the time to rock up. Court warnings, routine appointments and simple follow-ups tend to be graded E. The next step up is an S-grade (or Sierra), where we are meant to make it to the caller within the hour. Dealing with shoplifters, looking for suspicious persons, anything not super-urgent gets a Sierra grade.
Finally we have the most urgent calls, graded I, India. I-graded calls have to be responded to within 12 minutes, so that’s when my advanced driving gets put to the test. The flashing lights go on, the sirens are dusted off and put to good use, and my engine and brakes get a good workout.
This time, the address that showed up on the MDT2 as relayed by the CAD3 operator made my heart sink. I knew the house well. It belonged to one of those couples that ‘love each other’ so much that they seem to celebrate their passion largely through beating seven bells out of each other after consuming a drink or 18 between them.