when pressed (occasionally by my armpit, much to comms’ annoyance) produces the horrendous blatting sound that I now heard.
It also opened the radio mic so that I could hear an officer shouting in the background and the sounds of heavy breathing and fighting. One of the better features of the system is that it sends a GPS signal back to comms so they know exactly where the officer needs help. As soon as the air cleared, an operator came on the line.
‘Charlie Lima 92 needs assistance, Vogue Gyratory. Units to acknowledge.’
I flicked the switch nestled between the front seats, just behind the handbrake. Blue lights flashed and sirens screamed out from the grille. The Gyratory was only a few hundred yards away and as I shot down the hill, weaving through the traffic like a madman, I managed to find the pressel with my left hand, joining in the chorus of officers booking on to assist.
‘Charlie Papa 281, I’ve got a short ETA. Any update?’
I let go of the button just before swearing loudly at a man in a Clio who didn’t seem to know how to react to me driving at him at 70 miles per hour in a 30 area. When he finally finished panicking and drove up a kerb, I shot past and gave my attention back to the radio.
‘… Stop check on a vehicle, black Ford Mondeo near the Gyratory, four up, markers on the vehicle for drugs and bilkings.’
The usual then. People who sell drugs seem to object to simple things, like paying for petrol, and you can almost guarantee that if a car is associated with drugs, it will also be known for bilking – driving off from a petrol station.
I made a sharp turn into a side road that I knew joined the Lewes Road about halfway along and tore down the hill, wincing as I wrecked the suspension on the speed bumps. I barely paused at the bottom, swinging right and accelerating towards the BP garage at the Gyratory. The line of stationary cars told me exactly where my colleagues were and I drove down the wrong side of the road until I was level with the aforementioned black Mondeo.
As I got out, I could see Sergeant Mike Barker from LST – CL92 – rolling around on the ground with a wiry chap in his early twenties. He was being assisted by Adam Werther, another LST officer, and it didn’t surprise me at all that it was my old team rolling around with drug dealers once again. A third officer, Nigel Coleshill, was keeping the other two occupants of the car contained by way of pointing his pepper spray at them through the open passenger window. All the officers were in plain clothes and a large crowd was gathering as they struggled with the man on the floor. He was bucking and writhing, forcing Adam to put his hand around the man’s throat to prevent him from swallowing whatever he was clenching his teeth to keep hidden.
I ran over, throwing myself on the guy’s back with both knees landing first in the hope that I would wind him and make him spit out his mouthful. He groaned but didn’t unclench his teeth, so I grabbed both of his legs to stop him from squirming and lay back on them so that he couldn’t gain the leverage to rise to his feet.
‘It’s always you, isn’t it, Barker-boy?’ I called over my wriggling charge. ‘What’s he got in his mouth?’
Barker’s face was a study of concentration as he fought to keep control of the arm he had. Believe it or not, it’s incredibly difficult to restrain someone safely when they want to fight, no matter how many of you there are.
Next time you see four coppers lying on someone, just remember they’re doing it so that they don’t hurt him. It would be so much easier if we could hit them a few times, and sometimes you have to, but generally it’s safer and less damaging to them if we use locks and pressure points. I wish criminals felt the same about us, then maybe we wouldn’t go home with as many lumps and bruises as we do.
‘He threw a bag of heroin wraps into the front of the car when we stopped it, and Adam saw him put something in his mouth. He thinks it was crack,’ he gasped, fighting for breath. It’s also extremely tiring fighting someone for more than about twenty seconds, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
‘Open your mouth, unclench your teeth!’ Adam shouted as I opened my mouth to speak again, much to the apparent amusement of our audience, some of whom now had mobile phones out to record our brutality.
A pair of booted feet appeared by my head and I jerked out of the way of a potential kick before I realized that they belonged to another officer, Steve Warnham. As per usual he had neglected to put on his stab vest and his white shirt was so bright in the sunlight that I had to squint to look at him.
‘Hi Steve, do you think you could move the crowds back a bit? I don’t fancy getting a boot in the face.’
He nodded and began ushering the crowd back as more sirens approached. I like Steve, he’s solid and dependable and has years of experience which gives him a calm manner that few argue with. Other officers began arriving, accompanied by the double blip of sirens shutting off as the numerous cars disgorged their uniformed loads. Another officer, a young chap whose name I could never remember, took over my leg hold, allowing me to sit up and move towards the head, dusting my back off as I went.
Werther still had his hand on the man’s throat and I could see the muscles working against it as he tried frantically to swallow. Werther couldn’t do a lot else, what with his other hand keeping an arm locked up, so I placed a hand on one side of the man’s head and stuck the knuckle of my index finger into the nerve point under the ear, the mandibular angle, right where the neck and the jaw meet. I held it there for a second before pressing, and leaned in so that only he could hear me.
‘I want you to listen to me very carefully,’ I whispered, just loud enough for him to hear. ‘I’m going to dig my knuckle into your nerve point unless you open your mouth, and it’s going to be the most painful thing you’ve ever felt. It’s going to feel like I’m sticking a hot needle into your neck.’
Now please don’t think I was being cruel. It’s been proven that if you set people up for pain before using a nerve point, the anticipation makes it hurt far more and you get the result you want with less chance of harm to the person. That was the safest and easiest way to get him to open his mouth and not swallow the package, which I could just make out as a white lump behind his teeth.
The man looked at me and then tried to turn his head away, which I took to mean that he wasn’t playing ball, so I dug the knuckle in hard, shouting, ‘Open your mouth, open your mouth NOW!’
I held it there for a few seconds, and his body went rigid as the pain shot through him. I’ve had it done to me in training and it really is horrible; it feels like your head is going to explode, so I felt more than a little sympathy for him as I did it, despite knowing that I was hurting him far less than I would have if I’d been hitting him.
His teeth remained firmly closed, so I released the pressure. There’s no point keeping it on if it doesn’t work, that’s torture, and I think the human rights people have an article or two that deal with that.
Steve Warnham, still dealing with the crowd but close enough to overhear what was happening, turned at that point and called out in a voice pitched to carry to everyone watching: ‘Please sir, open your mouth; we’re concerned that you may have heroin or crack cocaine in your mouth and if you swallow it you could put yourself in danger. We can’t allow that to happen for your own safety!’
Someone give that man a fucking medal, I thought, as I saw the crowd nodding and muttering to each other.
Adam was still shouting at the guy to open his mouth, foolishly trying to reach into it armed only with a pair of purple rubber gloves. Our prisoner unclenched his teeth just long enough to bite Werther hard on the finger, then clamped them together again and tried to laugh.
I drove my knuckle back into the pressure point, hoping to surprise him into opening his mouth again – but it didn’t work, as he went rigid once more against the pain but somehow held on. I released the pressure, getting frustrated but knowing that if I kept going, I would only be doing so in revenge for Werther’s finger.
His body relaxed as I let go, but Adam had pulled his hand away