Wasting Police Time: The Crazy World of the War on Crime by PC David Copperfield

Author:PC David Copperfield [Copperfield, PC David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monday Books
Published: 2010-11-29T23:00:00+00:00

REAL CRIMES

I’ve touched before on the thorny subject of what to do if you catch some toe rag rifling through your drawers (answer: nothing, if you know what’s good for you) but let’s assume you slept through the whole thing.

Next morning, you’re left with me, bumbling along in the wake of the thieves. Whenever I go to a burglary, and I go to a regrettably large number of them, whatever the Home Office might say, I reach for the modern English policeman’s weapon of choice: the photocopier (double sided, black and white, 40 copies per minute).

I print out leaflets to put into letterboxes asking if people saw anything at about the time of the burglary. I usually do about five houses either side of the attacked property, ten on the opposite side of the street and any other properties that may be significant (shops, garages etc). I also take a detailed statement about what has been taken, the layout of the house, any damage caused and I give the crime number to the injured party. Scenes of Crime Officers will arrive (if they’re sure they can finish up before it gets too late) and try to recover things like footprints and glove marks. Finally, I leave a leaflet offering the services of Victim Support and advise the homeowners to take better security precautions in the future.

The victim’s faith in the police restored (or not), I leave to return to the police station to write a detailed report of my actions. Then the whole thing gets handed over to the burglary squad. That sounds impressive, but isn’t.

In this case, the thieves had left vast amounts of electrical items and so forth and instead stolen bottles of whisky, which was odd and might have pointed the detectives somewhere I suppose.

I probably shouldn’t say this, but the thing about burglary is that if you wear gloves and nobody sees you you’ve pretty much got away with it. There’s the odd occasion when you find the property and some evidence pointing to an offender, but that’s rare. Most burglaries aren’t ‘solved’ in the traditional sense of the word: they’re solved when someone has been arrested for one burglary and confesses to a load of others in order to wipe his slate clean prior to a stretch inside.

Having said that, at least it’s a proper crime, with real victims who are distressed and pleased to see you, so I don’t mind attending and doing what I can.

It’s the fake crimes with idiots treating you like some sort of agony uncle I’m not so keen on.

I’d not been back at the nick for long when a man called Tony Giles came into the police station. The lady who was looking after the front office told me he’d been in yesterday but nobody had been available to see him. In fact, she said Tony had been in about five times before to complain about his ex-wife, Angela. I looked at the incident log. It revolved around a letter he had received from Angela which he thought was quite threatening.

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