Cops and Robbers. Ant Anstead
three of us. Three! Covering an area from the Essex border to the east, Cambridgeshire border to the north and as far south as Ware, the town in which I lived. This huge amount of space was known as part of ‘A Division’.
A Division was so vast that to police it effectively we needed to drive – quickly! Hertfordshire Police allowed you to drive cars based on passing various levels of driving qualifications. The entry level driving qualification was known in-house as a ‘G Ticket’. Pass this basic test and you can drive a marked police vehicle – but that’s all: no blue lights, no rapid response and certainly no car chases. It was simply a marked police taxi to get from A to B. I spent many months policing Bishop’s Stortford on a G ticket, and I remember the car of choice fondly, my first ever police car. It was a P-registered Vauxhall Astra – the rubbish one with rounded rear end and awful plastic bumpers. It had grey velour seats with that familiar generic car pattern, and the heater didn’t work. It was the most basic of cars, with a single cone blue light on the roof. This car was slow – so slow – but it got me around my patch brilliantly, never missed a beat. Boy, that car could tell some stories …
There’s something remarkable about driving a police car. It stops everyone. People stare, people behave differently, people certainly drive differently when near a marked police car. I became all too familiar with the varying degrees of public reaction and relied on that response when policing. The car, and of course the uniform, became my asset every day. The car itself became a tool for me in so many different ways; it carried a vast amount of items, it blocked roads when needed, and it became an ambulance when called upon, a refuge for victims, a safe place for informants, an escape when in danger and even a weapon when all else failed. It felt like an armoured vehicle because of everything it stood for, yet all it had was a badge on the door and a blue light on the roof – a blue light I couldn’t even use! For me it was what the car represented that made it invincible. I drove that car across every inch of A Division. I got to know my patch so well, and got to know its residents, too. In the UK we are very lucky; we police with consent, with the majority of the public behaving like law-abiding citizens and crime being committed by a small minority. It meant I saw the same offenders over and over. I got to know them, and they got to know me, too.
Once I had established myself as a local police officer I pestered my sergeant on a daily basis to let me qualify to drive with blue lights. I cannot emphasise enough how frustrating it was for me to listen to the car radio for crime and public calls for assistance, knowing I had to drive there like another car in the daily traffic, to be literally sitting at the lights while a burglary was in progress was not what I joined the cops for! The ‘Yankee’ car was qualified to attend on ‘blues and twos’ and it would often pass my Astra, waving at me while weaving through traffic. I wasn’t in the police long before I knew that I needed to drive a police car properly. I needed 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 …
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