Police Story

Photo by Naughty James
 

There are around 128,000 trained police officers in the UK. Subtract from this figure specially skilled officers like the Armed Response Unit and the Mounted Police, all the Senior Constables and Superintendents, and all those who predominantly work in offices, police stations and call centres. Then divide that figure by three to account for the rotated eight-hour shifts (2 AM–10 AM, 10 AM–6 PM and 6 PM–2 PM) that every copper works, and you’re left with 20,000 officers to patrol the streets at any one time. Then factor in that even when they’re on a shift, they work about as hard as everyone else who does the same job every day. Still, be that as it may, the good old “bobby on the beat” is still the backbone of UK policing, having to deal with the public at a ratio of 1:3022 at any given time. We’re not sure whether that fact scares or comforts us.

Extremely early one morning last month, we arranged to meet with one of those 20,000 officers at 2 AM to patrol the Smithfields Market area in Farringdon.

This is what happened, as they say on Top Gear.

2:00: Smithfields is a fucking bloodbath. Every morning for the past 600 years, flesh, fat, guts, organs, bones and sinew have been exchanged for money in this very spot. Today it’s one of the last functioning bastions of “olde” London, but it’s dying a slow death. Smithfields is inconveniently located and space here is limited. Many traders have lost their lucrative supermarket contracts, a situation made worse by Ken Livingstone’s “bastard congestion charge,” as one guy bitterly put it to us. The upshot for those without second jobs is that the market now only trades in the early hours, keeping some of the most venerable restaurants in the Southwest in a constant supply of juicy steaks, chops and cutlets.

2:01: I’m late. My cab driver barely speaks his own language and doesn’t know how to get there. I’m frantically going through his A-Z and spelling out the name of the place I need to be, but quickly see the futility in this, since spelling out the name of some place I’d never heard of wouldn’t help me find it any faster either.

2:37: I don’t feel good about showing up this late. “I was here at two!” says our man, but in an unmistakably avuncular voice that lets me know that even though I’d fucked up he wasn’t going to make a big deal out of it. Lucky me.

2:41: We settle in at the kind of all night café where people go before they either kill themselves or their ex-wives. I plump for a 50p cuppa and a foetid bacon sarnie smothered in some kind of Turkish mayo. Oh yeah, questions.

2:44: PC Bob Blakemore tells me that he wasn’t the most academic kid, so not once all night do I mention the fact that I have a PhD. He says he “got into trouble a lot” when he was younger. Not with the law, he assures me, but more in a “boisterous way, really”. Maybe this just means he never got caught, what with the 1:3022 ratio and all. But because I was late I decide not to be a dick and instead politely ask him more about his background. Turns out Bob decided to join the army as a way of “focussing his ambitions”. I’m not sure that makes sense but then he explains that “back in the 70s, a lad like me wasn’t likely to experience much of the world,” and I think I see what he means.

3:09: We leave the suicide café and Bob continues to fill me in. He was lucky enough to get posted to Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and doubly blessed when the very same job took him to revolutionary Iran for a while. There’s nothing like being violently hated to bring people together, and he tells me about the “great sense of camaraderie” that developed amongst his colleagues. I refrain from making a gay joke because they’re childish.

3:16: Walking by a minicab office somehow brings the conversation to the subject of terrorism. Given his background working in war zones, it’s no wonder that patrolling the City of London at a time where Al Qaeda is threatening to blow up anyone who laughs at Danish cartoons doesn’t faze him. He doesn’t find the Mohammedans nearly as intimidating as the IRA bombers, who were more ruthless in their choice of timing and target.

3:27: Huge articulated fridges come and go, convoys of death travelling to meat-Mecca from slaughterhouses around the country. Parking up in specially designed bays, they’re unloaded with clockwork precision to the song of “alright geezer, fackin Henry, ya reckon he’s off?”

“Nar, French cant! Ain’t got tha va va voom.”

“HAHAHAHA.”

The joys of the market. Photo by Naughty James

3:28: 3:29: 3:42: 6:00: 6:23: 6:42: 6:43: 6:44: See “Riding in Cars With Boys” to read how our New York office had a lot more of an eventful time with the police than we did here.