Somebody call the Police!

Given the serious nature of the topic I’m about discuss, it might seem rather disingenuous to name this piece after a line from the cult British police movie Hot Fuzz and yet, it still seems somehow apt as it summarises both the seriousness of the job and the need to keep a sense of humour to cope with it.

This past week I had the good fortune to go out on a 9 hour shift with the local police as part of something called a ‘lay observation’; essentially a ride along. It’s a scheme in the UK which allows any member of the public to go out on patrol to see, first hand, what the police do.

I’ve been brought up to respect the emergency services. I was taught not to prank call the services and that you dialled 999 only in a legitimate emergency. I held those values so strongly that even when I was randomly assaulted in June (kicked in the head by a street drinker for sunbathing, no less), as I stood there shaking with shock, begging my body not to throw up and tears pouring down my face, I apologised to the operator for calling them because it “wasn’t really an emergency as my life wasn’t in danger but I didn’t know who else to call“. Yes, I really did apologise for calling them; I’m painfully British at times. And though I have done my civic duty and called for an ambulance through 999 many times over the years for others or reported people walking on motorways etc. on 101, I have never needed the police personally and certainly never had need to enter a police station; you hope you never do.

That changed in May of this year for me when I found myself sat in the waiting room of my local station, shaking and unsuccessfully holding back tears as I prepared, after months of sitting in denial, to report my boss for rape. Fast forward to last week and I was back in that same quiet waiting room, unintentionally sat in the same seat, shaking as I waited to meet my assigned officer for the shift, forcing myself to stay when everything in my body wanted me to run out of the building.

After spending months being consistently humiliated and dismissed by men in authority in the legal sector, who downplayed my pain and the illegality of my boss’ proven predatory behaviour, the thought of spending 9 hours in a single-crew response vehicle with a man in authority unnerved me, as much as my smiles and enthusiastic attitude suggested otherwise. I am acutely sensitive currently to having the world explained to me by men but I pushed through because I am fortunate enough to know that it really isn’t ‘all men’ and that this was an opportunity I didn’t want to miss. So I stayed and had an education I didn’t know I either wanted or needed.

And though I came to the shift with no pre-conceived ideas of what it means to be police or expectations of what a shift would look like, I’ll admit that my first surprise came as soon as I walked into the briefing room and saw how few officers there were sat around the table, though in a nice turn of events, the PC who had dealt with my random assault from June was also on shift that day; another reminder that the police absolutely do their best to help us in our time of need and bring the perpetrators to justice for us even if, for a variety of reasons, they sometimes can’t. There were just 10 officers, including the Sergeant, for our late shift (2-11pm). 10 officers as single-crew units for the whole of the Exeter population which sits at a little under 130,000 residents currently. That’s one officer for every 13,000 people. Let that sink in and remember that when you criticise services for slow response times. They are not slow (slow being a relevant and subjective term) to respond out of choice; their lack of resources simply don’t allow them to respond quicker and that’s even before you consider that, as single-crew units, they often have to double-up at scenes to back each other up meaning you’re down to 8 officers now covering 16,250 residents or even less officers if they have to stay at the station to interview people or complete paperwork.

When you’re walking through the city centre (and that’s any city or town centre around the country) on a Friday or Saturday night and see the emergency services out in abundance keeping the public safe, realise that that is not the norm for any constabulary.

The first couple of hours were slow which gave Will* and I an opportunity to get to know each other. I told him a bit about myself, the work and campaigning I do for men’s and workplace mental health and some of the circumstances which had brought me to the shift and he said that the force needed someone like me because there isn’t enough, if any, help for them when they’re struggling with their mental health. Given that police witness and deal with some of the most traumatic and upsetting scenes we can experience as humans, it was a painful truth to hear especially as mental illness is an increasing part of their jobs in the calls they receive. Indeed, our last job of the night was to find a high-priority missing person who was threatening suicide and left the property with medication missing from the household. She was found safe and well but I couldn’t help but think, as NPAS (police helicopter) hovered above to help us search, that NPAS themselves had logged 3 mental illness-related calls in the last 24 hours alone and as much as it is a police job to locate missing people, it isn’t necessarily their job to talk people back down from roofs or from the edge of bridges but they do it because they care. Yes, we’ve all heard of horrific stories of how some mentally ill people can be aggressively sectioned with restraints and no compassion (every person, situation and police force/officer is different) but the majority just want to help another human who is suffering. Ultimately, every officer, at some level, joins the police to do simply that; help and serve others but there has to be a parity of esteem and an encouraged ability for the police and ambulance service to work together such as the triage scheme in West Midlands which sees police joined by both by psychiatric nurses and paramedics yet it’s sadly a luxury most constabularies can’t fund.

As Will and Sean* (an officer that joined us on one call) pointed out, we are lucky in the sense that not only does our society in general in the UK not yet necessitate that every officer, apart from specialist units, need a gun (as they are rare in civilian society) but, particularly where we live in Devon and Cornwall, there isn’t an overwhelming hatred for the police. They can leave their vehicles unattended (though locked) without fearing slashed tyres or arson attacks because most don’t view them as a threat. The majority of their arrests are compliant and without incident.  When Will came back from an arrest later that shift with blood on his arm, he reiterated that non-compliant arrests thankfully weren’t the norm. 

We have a stabbing epidemic in this country currently but thankfully guns, for the most part, are still reserved for gangs, city and rich criminals meaning we don’t yet have to match their levels of weaponry by arming every officer. That’s not to say that we don’t have specialised units who can be called but when terrorists targeted people in London for example, many of the first responding police officers had nothing but their CS spray, taser and a baton. Let that sink in. Police attending to a terrorism incident or any incident in which they have to attempt to save your life and subdue a violent person do so with nothing but some liquid spray, electricity (not to downplay the intensity of the voltage or spray), a stick and their words and most of those are close proximity protection methods. Unlike our American friends, our police have no choice at times but to get ‘up, close and personal’ to save the life of someone they’ve never met before for a salary easily trumped by many.

In the UK our police have no choice at times but to get up, close & personal to save the life of someone they've never met before for a salary easily trumped by many. Click To Tweet

Throughout the night it became obvious that there are two very opposing ways in which society views and utilises the police; those who don’t call unless it is a genuine emergency and those who view them as some form of societal customer service. We’ve all read those articles about people calling 999 for a spider in their bedroom or because a garden gnome went missing and whilst we didn’t experience anything to that degree on shift, there were a couple of calls where I couldn’t help but think ‘999, where’s the emergency?’. A call from a Mum to report her regularly missing son despite knowing exactly where he was. A call from a carer to report her foster child missing again because she missed her curfew and she ‘legally has to report it’ despite the continued pattern of behaviour. Calls which you understand why they were made but didn’t quite feel as though our attendance was an appropriate level of response.

Sometimes our presence felt like nothing more than a tick box exercise to satisfy another Governmental policy created by bureaucrats with no life experience. However, what these ‘in the middle’ calls proved to me was something I had sadly long known since my volunteering days working with the local Youth Offending Team and Safe Bus; the police are often called because other agencies involved (and when it comes to vulnerable children, there are always many agencies involved) simply don’t have the resources either to enforce their own care plans.

To one of our calls, it was easy as we drove to her house to take details of her regularly missing boy, to drop the casual line of ‘it’s all down to parenting‘ but it very quickly became obvious that Mum, who in of herself had had a difficult life, was not only trying her best but felt consistently ignored by several over-stretched agencies involved in getting the help she was so desperately pleading for. And whilst Will updated his records, seemingly calmer after venting about her son’s behaviour and lack of help she was receiving for it, she sat there and showed me bead work she was creating and though it may sound condescending to praise an older woman for ‘child like’ bead work, her face lit up. She explained she was beading a particular piece for someone at church to reflect a child that woman had lost and that it helped her focus her mind away from alcohol as she beaded. I congratulated her on such a nice gesture and she proceeded to show me a photo of another piece of beadwork she’d completed and was proud of and it confirmed to me, once again, that in life, what we really crave as humans is acknowledgement, validation and appreciation. That we just want to be heard.

The saddest part of the evening came on a blue light run to a serious road-traffic collision between a cyclist and vehicle. Air ambulance was in attendance and Will was asked to be part of traffic management. I knew no details of the crash (even as we left the scene) until I began listening to the radio in which I heard officers coordinate to find and speak to next of kin but it wasn’t until we ran blue lights to our next call that I heard his name. His age (a teenager). The difficulties in getting hold of his family. And as I sat in the car (whilst Will backed up another unit) watching university Fresher students enjoy a meal, laughing and joking, I couldn’t help but feel that tinge of bittersweetness. It’s something I often felt when I worked in the hospital and would find myself in the lift with the morgue porters. How, on any given day of the week it is the first, last, best and worst single day of someones’ life. It was a beautiful sadness to watch them enjoy their lives as a boy (and the family who loved him) faced losing his. Sadness at the realisation of the fragility of life. That his mum was about to get the worst phone call of her life. That when she woke up that morning, she expected to see her son at home, not in the hospital. And I began to think about police mental health again. How officers have to compartmentalise so much of their work lives. To rely on each other and their dark senses of humour to face the spectrum of humanity they can view in just one shift because they have neither the time or available resources to support good mental health or mental illness. The police is still a male-dominated workforce and, as such, suicide rates are still high. How are we supposed to ask strangers (the police) to guard our lives when we refuse to invest in them equally?

In the brief time I spoke to the Sergeant, I could hear his anger at the Governmental cuts that affected his officers and their ability to do their jobs and serve the public well and if there was a physical bandwagon in the room, I would have jumped on it and ridden it with him because he is right. You can’t keep taking time, money and resources away from emergency services and simultaneously complain about rising response times or unsolved crimes. It’s common sense, not rocket science. At the end of the shift, with a wry smile, he asked if I’d had any dinner and I confirmed that I hadn’t. “Welcome to our world: he replied. I had, however, managed to snack on a brownie I packed in my go-bag; common sense and a cousin for a police officer told me I wouldn’t be eating.

Given that, as a society, we are now becoming more aware than ever of what basic self-care needs to be for good mental health (not to be confused with mental illness which often requires other factors) i.e. balanced diet/exercise etc., it feels incredibly frustrating and painfully ironic that the people we place in charge of protecting our lives, do not have the luxury to feed or hydrate themselves on the most basic of levels which is probably just as well since they don’t have the time to have toilet breaks either. So when you next read a tweet or a Daily Mail article admonishing the police for eating and taking a break whilst in their uniforms, remember that they are most likely running on empty. I drink approximately 2 litres of water and eat little but often on a normal day (as is recommended for the majority of society) but I managed less than 500ml of water and a small brownie in 9 hours. By the time I walked in the door at home, it had been 10.5 hours since I last ate anything of substance; I felt weak, dizzy and sick and that was after just one shift.

At the end of the night when the officers asked what I thought and if my shift matched my expectations, I realised that my time with them was exactly how I envisioned it would be. Varied. Not glamorous (“it’s not all about gun fights and car chases” to quote Hot Fuzz.). Time and resource poor. But full of compassion. Every call we took or member of the public who brought me into conservation taught or reaffirmed to me a little more about what makes us tick as people. What our real basic, emotional, needs are (acknowledgement/validation/appreciation). How good a job our police do with their frightfully poor resources and funding.

As I left the station and walked home in the cold and quiet of the night, all I could do was feel pride and gratefulness for the officers I had shared my shift with and a frustration that, as a society, we do nothing but take their presence, hard work and personal sacrifices for granted. On a personal level, those 9 hours with Will helped me in a way I hadn’t anticipated as he (without me seeking him to do so) had compassionately validated what I had been through in the months after reporting my boss and losing my job for saying “Me Too”. He didn’t downplay what I’d been through or tell me it was my own fault like my law firm did. Instead, he was disgusted and angry for me and apologised for what I’d been through; told me how strong I was for speaking up and reporting it at work and to them and as I walked in the door, I realised he was only the second man in authority since my sexual assault at Christmas who had shown me that kindness. He was yet another powerful reminder of ‘not all men’. A reminder I was fearful I wouldn’t receive when I anxiously sat waiting to meet him at the beginning of my shift.

My time with Response wasn’t necessarily eye-opening but it was humbling, an honour, and I will accept their invitation to go back for more shifts because the best thing we can study in life is ourselves and each other and the most powerful lessons we can learn are always free.

Police are society’s parents; they attempt to do what’s best for us even if people can’t or don’t want to appreciate it but perhaps the next time you get caught for speeding, realise that your taxes don’t ‘pay their wages’, they pay for your protection.

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*Names have been changed and/or withheld.

Disclaimer: Nothing written in this piece is intended to be perceived as criticism of the police, its employees or the general public.  Opinions of officers I have shared are their personal opinions and not those necessarily reflective of their employers.  I was not asked to write this piece but have sought permission before publishing. 

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