Cops and Robbers: The Story of the British Police Car. Ant Anstead
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