A Fair Cop. Michael Bunting
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