'IT'S KNIVES, FIREARMS, CASH, DRUGS. EVERY NIGHT'

Wearing A Stab-Proof Vest, I'm Ready To Join A Policewoman Taking The
Fight Against Weapons And Gangs To The Streets

We are barrelling across Wandsworth in a big silver carrier with
sirens wailing, six smart policemen in light body armour and me in a
rather oversized Times stab-vest. Why the sirens? "Fight at a garage,"
says PC Andrea Pickup. She is a diminutive figure with beautiful brown
eyes and three children under ten: senior officers in the elite
Territorial Support Group call her "brilliant". She runs marathons,
undergoes the group's regular and taxing public-order training at
Gravesend, and frisks men twice her size for knives and guns. "You
should see her wag her finger at them...!" says Inspector Chris
Bethel, shaking his head wonderingly.

It is Andrea whose night I am following, although for dramatic reasons
I don't see her after ten and finish the shift with the men. We are on
Operation Blunt 2, the Met's initiative against knives and gangs. In
its first ten weeks it made 97 arrests, searched 3,500 citizens and
retrieved 1,900 knives, assorted knuckledusters, at least one meat
cleaver and a great many drugs.

In the briefing we got maps and photographs of the known leaders -
"Nominals" - and recent incidents: Blunt is "intelligence-led".
Wandsworth's gangs are the SUK and TZ, or "Stickemup Kids" and "Terror
Zone"; other boroughs offer such vaunting teenage sobriquets as
Clapham Soldiers or the DSN - "Don't say Nuttin'." The briefing
officers know them all, but are subject to cautionary mantras:
"Remember human rights. Avoid police humour that may offend. But make
no mistake, we must get into their faces and into their pockets, and
let these people know they cannot terrorise innocent citizens. The
community is behind us."

The local force has beaten us to the garage fight, so the big silver
carrier starts nosing like a shark through glum estates. Two lads with
sculpted hair outside a launderette... "Nah." But then a nondescript
group by a newsagent , black and white together, one with a football.
I wouldn't have glanced twice, but we jump out and searching begins.
Tiny Andrea takes on an enormous shaven-headed man, briskly patting
down his cargo pockets. "Knives can be anywhere - belt, small of the
back, leg. Some of them wear two pairs of trousers, knife on the
inside." The man with the football emotes like Disgusted of Tunbridge
Wells. "Why don't you go and catch a burglar or a rapist? You're
wasting my time - you got no right - " "Yes we have," says the officer
patiently (there is a Section 60 - stop and search - over the whole
borough for this week's Blunt operation). Names are passed to the
computer in the van; before she has finished Andrea knows her subject
is a regular "distraction burglar".

Behind him another man is handcuffed, enabling her colleagues to
remove Class A drugs from his pockets. No knife this time, but all
through the shift the officers laugh at my astonishment over how they
choose their subjects amid the thousands of lounging London teenagers.
"You read body language; 95 per cent of stops turn out to be already
known to us."

The football man, freed, starts bouncing his ball in the traffic, to
annoy.

"Stop that!"

"You wasting my time, man!"

Our drug dealer is being led to the van; his mate follows with a bag
of chips and feeds him one. "'Scuse me," says the felon politely,
"could you tell my friends which station?"

"Wandsworth."

We hand him over to a Case Progression Unit, which frees the team to
get back on the road. News comes in of arrests by other teams, and the
officers start to worry. With only three stations waiting, they risk
running out of cells. It is the main frustration of Blunt 2: prisoners
must be taken to a police station, but the days of a cop-shop in every
neighbourhood are gone. A lot of time is spent driving through traffic
with sullen passengers, in the hopes of a free cell in Catford.

More searching, outside a Londis. This time there is aggression:
Andrea and a colleague move in on a young man and suddenly she is on
the ground. Then he is. A full moon emerges from the clouds and a
smart woman noses by in an MGB. "It transpires," says Chris Bethel
while Andrea leads her assailant to the van in cuffs, "that he didn't
want to take his shoes off, because in one of them was a stolen Oyster
card." I raise my eyebrows.

"Believe me, it's stops like these that produce the knives, the
firearms, the cash, the drugs. Every night."

We offload Oyster man at Battersea - Wandsworth now being full - but
Andrea stays to have her leg checked. Our depleted band moves on to
another estate and a VW Golf attracts the team. Why? "Just the way he
glanced round; you get a feeling." A Polish lady stops to ask
directions and the driver patiently checks the map. "It's surreal
sometimes, you can be actually fighting a guy and someone will ask the
way to Tesco." From the VW car comes a cry: "Find!" They are
vindicated again, and show me a large plastic bag, full of individual
wraps and UKP 20 notes. This is a PWITS: possession with intent to
supply. He may not have a knife, but his trade fuels those who do.

The community is gathering now, children and girls and the man's
mother saying: "He needs his medication. Your doctor won't know what
he's got." "Yes we do," says the inspector. "Sickle cell." Again, the
man's previous record has flashed up. But we wait for the medication
before haring off towards the last free cells available: in Tooting.
As I climb in, a small boy on a flash bike asks wonderingly: "Is dis
de start of something?" The calm speed, the uniforms and radios and
all-knowing technology, the cool guy with the smart car being taken
away through the dark streets - the child's eyes are wide.

"They see that we mean it," says one of the veterans. "I think we
rather lost our way over stop and search. We're finding it now."

Radios crackle. Andrea's leg is not serious. At Tooting I say
goodnight, but two impressions remain. The first is that given a
chance and a strong team, the police know exactly who to stop, white
or black. Not one of our groups has failed to include at least one
lawbreaker. The second is a look on the faces of those searched but
not arrested: relief, mingled with a grudging respect.