Sarah
I was attending the morning briefing when I received the text message that was going to bring my world crashing down.
I heard the ping as it arrived on my phone, but I decided it would be impolite to check it straight away because DCI Dave Brennan was in full flight. He wanted us to know that there was a lot going on and that we should prepare ourselves for a busy week ahead.
‘As you all know there was a near-fatal stabbing last night in Peckham,’ he said. ‘And in the early hours of this morning a warehouse was turned over in Camberwell. A security guard was badly beaten and goods worth a hundred grand were stolen. All this on top of a caseload that already has us stretched to the limit.’
It wasn’t such an unusual start to a Monday morning, certainly not in this part of South London, which had been a crime hotspot long before I joined the CID team. That was four years ago, and in that time I’d come to realise that the job was never going to get any easier.
London’s population was growing at an alarming rate and so were the number of criminal gangs. Yet at the same time cutbacks in manpower and resources were continuing to put pressure on the force.