Guns and Gangs by Graeme McLagan

Author:Graeme McLagan [Graeme McLagan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780749015886
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2013-04-21T04:00:00+00:00

Four years on, the officer who took over from Cox gave a very similar assessment. Detective Chief Superintendent John Coles is a bright, active, plain-speaking officer who moved into the Trident hot seat after a punishing time with the Met’s anti-corruption group, followed by a spell in charge of the Flying Squad. He told me that there had been important changes. The number of incidents was down. Relations with the black community had improved. Witnesses were more likely to give evidence. More on these aspects later in the book, but Coles agrees that the challenges facing his detectives remain largely the same.

‘It’s very hard relentless work, but most of the officers who come here absolutely love it. You’re working in one of the most complex investigation environments that there is. You need to preserve the scene of a shooting, you need detailed forensic examination, determined seeking of witnesses and so on. If it’s a non-Trident murder where someone’s stabbed, or it’s a domestic murder, it’s fairly straightforward what you’ve got to do, but if you get a shooting in a nightclub in south London, you’ve got two hundred witnesses you have to find. You’ve got all the problems of identifying who those witnesses are. Nine times out of ten a shooting is linked to another shooting – a reprisal – and sometimes we’re talking about five, six, seven, or even ten years ago. You’ve got the complexities of the different allegiances that change all the time, and the witnesses’ fear of reprisals. You’ve got the complexity of the family background of the victim. Take —, for example. At one stage we had something like twenty family liaison officers on the investigation because there were so many issues coming out of the family set-up. You’re talking set-ups where there can be a dozen fathers within that family group.’

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