Brian Paddick:

BRITIAN'S MOST CONTROVERSIAL POLICEMAN REVEALS WHAT'S WRONG WITH POLICING

One night soon after I'd joined the police service, I brought in a
squaddie for drink-driving.

He'd crashed into a lamp-post. When the sergeant asked for his name
and address, the squaddie told him where to go.

The sergeant leaned across the desk and gave the prisoner an almighty
backhander, breaking his nose and sending blood spraying across the
table. The soldier never complained.

That was in the Seventies - and the police force is undoubtedly very
different today.

Yet in some respects, it remains the straight, white, male-dominated,
macho organisation I first joined.

In many ways it has become more liberal but in others it is slipping
back into its conservative and controlling past.

Nowadays, a senior officer can comment on only his or her own sphere
of responsibility, and anything seen to question the Government is
swiftly corrected.

There is a good reason for this Stalinist approach.

Many modern Government-supported initiatives such as asbos, ethnic
quotas and Police Community Support Officers - are fundamentally flawed.

Last year I retired from the Metropolitan Police after 30 years'
service. I had risen to the rank of Deputy Assistant Commissioner and
was Britain's most senior gay police officer.

Throughout my career, I was passionate about making a difference and
determined to be open and honest at all times.

This did not go down well with top brass and would ultimately result
in my resignation.

But now I am finally able to reveal what it has really been like to
serve in the Met and offer an insight into police culture and
practice - from the era of Life On Mars to the era of the suicide bomber.

And this time I can't be summoned to the Commissioner's office to be
given another dressing-down for treading on politically correct
sensibilities ...

I was 18 when I joined the police in 1976. I had originally wanted to
be a doctor but failed A-level physics.

My parents were not keen on me joining the force - they expected me
to go to university.

But being a policeman was "a job for life" with a good pension at the
end of it.

Best of all, it required only 15 weeks' training as opposed to seven
years of study for medicine.

One of my earliest jobs was to attend a scene in Holloway, North
London, where a woman had found her boyfriend dead in his bed.

I went to meet her outside the basement flat. The door of a dustcart
parked outside opened and down she stepped - apparently her "other"
boyfriend was a dustman.

On the bed, covered by a duvet, was a body. I pulled back the
bedclothes - something did not look right; the dead man's hair had
been permed and ... was that make-up?

I pulled the duvet back a bit further. He was wearing a lacy bra,
knickers, stockings and suspenders.

I walked back out and found the woman. "Did you notice anything
unusual?" I asked. She nodded sheepishly. "He'd promised he was going
to give that up."

Such was my introduction to the behaviour of the public. However, it
took less than a week for me to observe my first example of dubious
practices among my colleagues.

It was Friday night and I had been sent out on patrol in a panda car
with another officer, Sean.

We were parked on Holloway Road when Sean suddenly shouted "Cheeky
bastard" and roared off in pursuit of a night bus.

The driver pulled over and Sean went to talk to him. "Did you see
that?" he asked when he returned to the car.

"No, what?", "Cheeky sod went through a red light. When we get back
to the station you can do a witness book."

It was usual practice to have another officer as a witness so that if
the case went to court, it would be two of us against one of them.

"But I didn't see it," I said. Sean looked at me as if I'd just
confessed to the Moors murders.

The message "Nine-nine at Holloway" then came over the radio. It
meant "tea's ready" (the code came from the Co-op's 99 brand of tea -
we never used codes on the radio in the Met except for this one about teatime).

A WPC was in charge of making tea every two hours.

I realised I was in trouble when I overheard a conversation between
Sean and some other PCs, a number of whom said "I'll go witness"
loudly for my benefit.

By not toeing the line, I'd instantly earned a reputation as someone
to be wary of, who could not be trusted to fall in with the others.

This, plus the fact that I was always immaculately turned-out, earned
me the nickname Peter Perfect.

Whenever I went out on night patrol with one particular pandacar
driver, the first stop was the "tube station" - the off-licence.

We would buy a couple of "tubes" of Foster's lager which we stowed
under the front passenger seat. We would wait for a lull, go to
Kentucky Fried Chicken and then sit in the car eating and drinking lager.

In those days the unofficial policy was to try to avoid arresting
people for drink-driving - because police were drink-driving themselves.

There was other questionable behaviour too. A suspected child
molester was brought in and two officers, including a detective
sergeant, took the man into a room - you could hear the slaps for
several minutes.

In November 1980, I was given a sergeant's position in Brixton, South
London, and sent on a year-long course at Bramshill, the Police Staff
College in Hampshire.

I came back to London at weekends and it was during one of these
visits in April 1981 that I saw plain-clothes officers on every
street corner in Brixton. This was Operation Swamp, a clampdown on
street robbery.

About 1,000 black men were stopped and searched. Relations between
the police and locals were already strained; add to this the police's
aggressive tactics in Operation Swamp and the fuse was lit. It was
just a matter of time.

When the Brixton riots exploded in November 1981, I was pressing my
police uniform in my parents' house.

I watched the news in shock - colleagues were coming under a barrage
of missiles.

I put my uniform on, jumped into my new UKP5,000 pageant blue MGB GT
and headed for Brixton - not a very bright thing to do, in retrospect.

Twenty minutes later I was stuck in traffic when a group of about 50
young men appeared. "If they see me I'm dead," I thought.

I wriggled my way out of my jacket while the youths smashed a shop
window. As I tried to hide behind the steering wheel, the traffic
began to move. I had escaped, but worse was to come.

At the police station, I was given ten officers and six plastic
shields and told to clear Mayall Road.

I split my men into two groups of five in a scrum formation, shields
to the front, and pressed forwards.

Concrete missiles pounded us but somehow we managed to get close
enough for the rioters to become nervous and start fleeing.

It was not until I saw the TV coverage later that I realised what a
dangerous situation we had been in.

There were almost 300 police injuries and 65 serious civilian
injuries. Fifty-six police vehicles were destroyed and 30 buildings
had to be demolished.

Brixton became the most valuable education of my police life: indeed,
my attempts to change things in the Met were fuelled by this experience.

My empathy with minority communities, my hostility to the
discriminatory use of stop-and-search, my commitment to policing with
the consent of the community - all had their origins in the riots.

It was during my time in Brixton that I began to understand the
area's relationship with cannabis.

Once we tried to search a young black man for possession of the drug
but he ran off and ducked into a house in Railton Road used as an
illegal gambling den. I knocked on the door and a fortysomething
black guy opened it.

"We're chasing a young suspect and he ran into this house," I said.

"Wha' ya wan'im for?" "Cannabis."

The door slammed in my face. A few weeks later, we were chasing a
youth suspected of having stolen a handbag and he ran into the same
gambling den. The door was opened by the same man.

"Wha' ya wan'im for?" he asked. "Stealing a handbag."

He disappeared inside and a few moments later pushed the young guy
out. These incidents did not seem too significant at the time. It was
only later that I realised their true importance in terms of tackling crime.

I was promoted to inspector at Fulham at the age of 24. On one night
duty, a well-known local criminal attempted a smash-and-grab at a
shop just as a police car was passing.

The driver grabbed the unlucky thief, punched him in the face and
handcuffed him.

The punch was witnessed by two ambulancemen who made a complaint. In
those days, all complaints against the police had to be dealt with by
an inspector.

I went to the custody suite but the thief told me: "I was caught bang
to rights. I deserved everything I got. I've no complaints."

I went back to the ambulance crew. "Look, the prisoner doesn't want to know."

"We don't care - we want to make a complaint," they said.

Until recently, the police were not legally obliged to record "'third
party" complaints unless the prisoner himself complained, so I did
not have to make an official report.

But this was still an awkward situation: I was torn between wanting
to see justice done and loyalty to the team.

I took the unprecedented step of taking the ambulance crew to meet
the criminal.

It was a high-risk strategy but the prisoner repeated his comments,
there were handshakes all round and the crew left happy.

I was pretty pleased with myself until a friendly sergeant came up to
me and asked: "Can I have a word, guv?"

He said one of the other sergeants had it in for me and was saying I
had brought the prisoner and the ambulancemen together so that they
could collude in building a cast-iron case against the arresting officers.

Unorthodox solutions sometimes pay off but there will always be
people who deliberately misinterpret your actions to damage your reputation.

I could also have learnt that those closest to you would sometimes
turn out to be your worst enemies. Looking back on what was to come,
I clearly did not learn those lessons.

On January 1, 2001, I was made a commander in charge of the borough
of Lambeth, South London, of which Brixton is a part.

It was the job I wanted, even though Her Majesty's Inspector of
Constabulary would later describe it as one of the most challenging
policing environments in the UK, possibly in Europe.

Drug-dealers were selling crack - cocaine and heroin on the streets
and shooting each other to protect their turf.

To make matters worse, the borough was 100 officers short of its
allocation of 923.

I organised a series of meetings with all of my teams in my first month.

One raised the case of a colleague who had been arrested by Internal
Investigations for finding cannabis and throwing it away rather than
bringing it back to the station.

Officers had, until then, routinely dealt with small amounts of
cannabis by throwing it down a drain and giving the owner a ticking-off.

Now they were adamant they would arrest everyone they found with even
the smallest amount of cannabis.

But the memory of my time as a sergeant in Brixton came to mind. It
would be like Operation Swamp all over again. So I decided I was
going to stop arresting people for cannabis.

As a commander, and even later as a deputy assistant commissioner,
the only way I could get ideas aired and discussed by the Met
commissioner and his top team was through my own assistant
commissioner, at that time the very ambitious and conservative Mike Todd.

And I was pretty certain any proposal as radical as this would end up
in the bin.

So I thought the only way to bring the idea to everyone's attention
was to get it on the front page of the London Evening Standard, which
would be possible only if we did not tell anyone at New Scotland Yard
beforehand.

The story was picked up by other newspapers and the initial reaction
was almost universally either neutral or positive.

The then commissioner, Sir John Stevens, agreed to a six-month
experiment in Lambeth, where officers were told not to arrest people
for carrying small amounts of cannabis for personal use.

The scheme was implemented in July 2001. We left it to officers'
discretion to decide what was "a small amount".

The cannabis pilot certainly seemed to contribute to the crime
turnaround in Lambeth.

More people were arrested for possession of crack cocaine (up 57 per
cent) and Class-A drug-dealing (up 20 per cent), while burglary fell
by 18 per cent and street robberies fell from 791 to 407 per month
for the period of the pilot, compared with the year before.

With this new policy on cannabis, it was estimated that we had saved
4,170 hours of police-officer time and 11,270 hours of support-officer time.

Officers could use all that time to go after serious criminals. For
example, arrests for cannabis dealing increased by 11 per cent.

In January 2002, my staff officer drew my attention to Urban 75, a
Brixton-based community website where people had posted messages
making false accusations of police brutality at a recent demonstration.

I decided to become a participant in the bulletin boards to put the
police's side of the argument. I logged on as Brian the Commander.

After establishing my credentials, a captivating debate developed
which soon spread to drug issues.

I gave my personal view that drug addicts are the victims of
drug-dealers - I posted: "Help the addicts, screw the dealers."

Unconventional language for a police commander, maybe, but you have
to talk to people in their own language.

The discussion also turned to anarchy. I said that the concept of
anarchism appealed to me, but there would always be bad and mad
people so you would always need laws and always need the police.

The debate continued into February. Then, while I was on holiday, a
journalist who had been posting on Urban 75 wrote a story about my
participation.

It made the newspapers which were full of comments about my
"discussions with anarchists".

The coverage did not go down at all well with the Commissioner, but
it was Sir John's deputy, Ian Blair, who called me.

He was calm and reassuring and I respected him for the way he handled
the matter.

I had encountered Blair on several occasions and we had a good
professional relationship. I had always found him helpful and
considered him a like-minded human being.

However, I recall one occasion when he was annoyed with me and I was
summoned to his office to see him and Assistant Commissioner Tim Godwin.

I cannot now remember why he was displeased, but Blair seemed more
nervous than I was and the rebuke he issued was so mild I almost missed it.

Relieved that the ordeal was over, he looked at me, smiled and said:
"There you are, Brian. You see it wasn't a trousers-down session after all."

I looked back at him in disbelief - this was hardly the most
appropriate thing to say to the most senior openly gay officer in the UK.

What Blair had meant to say (I think) was that it was not a
"book-down-the-trousers session", as in the old schoolboy trick of
protecting oneself from the cane.

Godwin was straining to control a snigger when Blair, realising his
gaffe, said: "Er. . . I mean it wasn't a pockets-in-trousers session."

This made even less sense. In an effort to pre-empt any further
Blairisms, I just said: "Yes, Commissioner," in a deadpan fashion and left.

Reflecting on my career in the Met, there are many incidents of which
I'm proud and many that still bring a smile to my face.

The police force certainly needed to evolve and in the past decade or
so it has undergone some of the most significant changes in its history.

But too often I've seen how these changes have been ill-conceived and
poorly executed.

For example, the Macpherson Report into the racist murder of Stephen
Lawrence made a significant impact on the handling of race-hate crime.

But in its wake, the Home Office decided to set targets for
recruiting ethnic minority police officers.

These targets were set in proportion to the number of black and
minority ethnic people in each police-force area. In London, that
figure was much higher than in any other part of country.

It is, of course, a good idea that a police force reflects the
make-up of the community it is serving but there were problems with
these targets.

They were set using the overall percentage of the minority population
in each force area when in fact a high proportion of this figure were
under the age of 18 - too young to join the police.

Another factor was that a proportion of the black and ethnic
population were recent immigrants - they couldn't join the police, either.

Despite this, the powers-that-be decided ethnic minority and female
candidates should be fast-tracked through the recruitment processes
while high-calibre male candidates had to wait three or more years
before they were able to join the police, simply because they were white.

At a Scotland Yard briefing on July 28, 2003, the head of personnel
told us there were 8,000 application forms waiting to be processed,
mostly from white males.

I do not agree with mandatory quotas delaying the entry of white
candidates in order to fast-track black recruits.

Instead, action must be taken to ensure racism is eradicated so that
more high-quality black and ethnic-minority candidates are attracted
to the police.

We also need to improve the way in which existing minority officers
are treated by the organisation to reduce the high rate of those
leaving prematurely.

The next project off the Government production line was the Respect Agenda.

The Government had launched a bewildering number of initiatives in an
effort to curb the rise in anti-social behaviour.

These included an "academy" to help teach local authorities how to
tackle the problem; specialist Crown Prosecution Service lawyers; and
new sentencing guidelines for magistrates.

This approach was supposed to show how enforcement and prevention
went hand-in-hand but this scatter-gun approach sowed only confusion.

The most notorious initiative remains the Anti-Social Behaviour Order
(Asbo). Its use in London has been variable, with some boroughs
throwing Asbos around like confetti while others refuse to use them at all.

I believe Asbos are a useful weapon to have in the police armoury but
they should be used only in appropriate cases.

Senior officers felt they needed to persuade the public the streets
were safe, so they invented Reassurance Policing - swiftly nicknamed
There There Policing - and its task force, the new Police Community
Support Officers.

Ian Blair had created the idea of PCSOs during his time as chief
constable of Surrey. PCSOs were employed to be "the eyes and ears of
the police" and "reassure the public".

They wore a uniform and patrolled the streets but they had few powers
and much less training and equipment than real police officers.

The Police Federation was understandably concerned that PCSOs
represented policing on the cheap. Although PCSOs were given the
power to detain someone for up to 30 minutes, thus allowing regular
police officers to arrive, they often found themselves powerless to
stop people running off.

Their limitations quickly became apparent. Some PCSOs had to be
rescued from Stratford shopping centre in East London when some local
youths deliberately targeted them because they had no powers.

In a recent and more serious case, two PCSOs looked on as two members
of the public tried to rescue a young girl and boy from a pond.

By the time a real police officer arrived and jumped into the pond,
it was too late to save the boy.

I now believe the whole concept of the PCSO to be flawed.

If we have to pay people to be the "eyes and ears of the police",
rather than relying on the public, then something has gone terribly
wrong with British policing.

We currently have fully trained, fully equipped police officers
spending up to half their time performing administrative tasks in
police stations while PCSOs patrol the streets.

Surely this is the wrong way round. If we could use the money
currently spent on PCSOs on keyboard operators doing the admin tasks
for regular officers, we could significantly increase the amount of
time each police officer spends on the street.

The police service in which I was a rookie cop was flawed. But in its
favour it allowed officers to spend time in their communities,
preventing and solving crime and comforting its victims.

Today I see them hidebound by paperwork, targets and political
correctness. It's no longer Life On Mars, but I do sometimes look at
the Home Office and the executive of New Scotland Yard and wonder
just what planet they're on.