Confessions of a Police Constable Read Free

daily briefing. ‘Thompson is off ill today, can you take care of the Sierra Delta gang?’
    Sierra Delta – or SD – is Street Duties. It is a programme where new police officers are put through their paces, dealing with cases from beginning to end. They might do an arrest for a shoplifting, for example, and go through the whole process, from alpha to omega. Arrest, booking into custody, interview on tape, investigation, and so on and so forth: the whole process right through to court. It means that each case you deal with takes a lot of time, but you also get a full understanding of how the processes work. It’s incredibly interesting, and I recall my street-duty sessions fondly – the PC who was my mentor/instructor is still one of my best friends to this day.
    â€˜Delito. You listening?’ Daydreaming already? Oh dear, today really was going to be a long day.
    â€˜Sure thing, sarge, I’ll do my best,’ I replied.
    At the end of the briefing, I headed over to the classroom to meet Sasha and Pete, the street duties probationers. They were coming up to the end of their street duties, and they generally had their ducks in a row.
    Pete is one of those people who seem to be fuelled purely by air and love for The Job. He also has a look that – when combined with the uniform – makes women swoon when they see him. In some officers – the ones able to pretend they don’t notice, or don’t know – that can be a fantastic trait, because it makes certain quick quests for information all that much quicker. Pete knows what he’s doing, and he’s a solid police officer. If the women think ‘He can fuck me’, the men think ‘He can fuck me up’. In short, Pete spends every minute he doesn’t spend in uniform in a gym. I’ve run into him at the gym a couple of times, and he doesn’t mess around; he may very well be the fittest officer on the entire borough. He’s not particularly tall – about five foot seven – but he’s built like a row of brick-and-mortar outhouses, and inspires confidence through and through.
    Sasha is not entirely unlike Pete in many ways: she’s witty, knows her laws and white notes 6 inside out, and she’s no slouch either – she regularly runs half marathons and is apparently trying for her taekwondo black belt. She’s about as tall as Pete. Her slender build, short hair and fragile-looking glasses make her positively androgynous-looking – especially when she’s fully kitted out in her Metvest. She famously disposed of the rumours of her being a lesbian by sleeping with Pete just for long enough that everybody knew about it, before dumping him and returning to single life. The ‘everybody knew about it’ part was secured when she, early one Tuesday morning, transmitted over the radio, on the open channel, ‘Mike Delta two-two-three, do you have any johnnies?’
    She got into some trouble with the brass about that one, but she gained major points with the rest of the team, and she’s now well known as someone who doesn’t mince her words – quite refreshing, really.
    Once we’ve all said our hellos, we sit down briefly and talk about some questions they have, before breaking out the boot polish, giving our shoes a quick shine, and hitting the streets. Street duties involve a lot of foot patrolling, so you get a proper workout in the process, but seeing as I spend most of my time either driving around in a car or doing quick sprints after naughty little toe-rags, I usually find a walking session to be no bad thing.
    It was a pretty slow morning. The radio was so dead that people occasionally ran a radio check, just to make sure their radios hadn’t stopped working. So, without anything better to do, we decided to head out on ‘reassurance patrol’.
    Reassurance patrolling is usually done in areas where something bad has happened