Loved this - thank you. I'm sure there are still police like you in the Met, but I'm equally sure the Command Structure does its level best to breed the common-sense out of them.
Made me think of any number of people for whom humanity and a bit of space made all the difference! I too read that story and was mystified as to why you would choose to use that option, I hate 9 o’clock juries especially by arm chair observers, but this one is V hard not to comment on.
Nice one Dom, I love these real stories of the colourful characters that seem to populate often drab and grey places. Glasgow's east end seemed to have more than its fair share, but social status was no deciding factor. One day it was lonely old guy complaining of diminutive (we thought 'young') people running around his single room and over his bed where he lay. His descriptions suddenly sprang to life as the TV adverts came on his telly - the Tetley Tea Folk. Next it was a local authority finance director writing all over the walls of his plush office as if he was planning an Apollo launch or designing a new pharmaceutical. No batons necessary - lots of listening and nodding in the right places.
Not commenting directly on the trial, but I'm always amazed at the lack of accountability put towards medical staff (of all grades) in comparison to the Police.
Finish scraping up the remains after a jump and the staff at the "secure" unit will shrug their shoulders and say they put out a misper report.
Similarly here, between the untreated infection and the lack of willingness to run through a proper decision making routine, that would've most likely said, "just leave him there until he falls asleep," there seems to be huge chunks of this misadventure will not be properly addressed until the "lessons will be learned" statement.
Although not in quite the same realm of dealing with mentally ill patients (although we did do a lot of that as we had a mental hospital on our beat) a colleague and I were called to help clear out a late night venue of revellers.
It was 2 am'ish and it was a special licence event of people from a specific section of the community. Important because, by and large, they all knew each other.
We ascended the steel fire escape stairs, two levels of them and went into the venue. We has tunics (it was the early 80's) and were armed with a set of handcuffs, a wooden baton and a whistle (Acme Thunderer) each. It's worth mentioning Force Standing Orders required the baton to be concealed in a pocket stitched into our trousers with the strap tucked out of sight. Similarly, the handcuffs should not be seen by the public and the only thing obvious was the chain for the whistle, which was designed to be obvious in the event a cop was incapacitated and a member of the public could use it to summon assistance. Quaint. We had progressed to personal radios for that purpose.
Anyway, the music was finished and people were standing around the hall supping the dregs of their pints. We wandered around chatting with folks politely reminding them they were well beyond the grace period to drink up, and if they wouldn't mind would they finish up and leave the venue, so the staff could get home. All very standard and rather good PR as we joked and laughed with the punters as we went round. We did the second round, this time instructing them this time and the last of the reluctant ones complied and began drifting out.
But there's always one, always! Now, I'm 6'2" and played rugby. My colleague was 6'4" and was a good footballer, so we were as fit as butchers dogs. We approached a group of 3 or 4 scrawny Glasgow neds for the second time, who were obviously not interested in doing what they were asked by a couple of pigs. My affable colleague approached them and told them to finish up or he'd take their half full pint glasses from them. All but one did and he turned bolshy. My colleague moved to relieve him of his glass, which he drew his arm back to the perfect position to launch a 'glassing' attack.
Being a bit older and wiser than my colleague, I had crept up behind the little b**tard and grabbed his hand and the glass before he could launch an attack.
He went ballistic. It's almost impossible to describe the violence a 5'6", scrawny, drunk ned can perpetrate when he thinks he owns the world. We had him pinned to the ground but could only manage to get one wrist in a handcuff. The remaining punters (perhaps 30 of them) all gravitated towards the stage, watching proceedings and getting irate at their mate being 'beaten up' by two cops. It was nothing more than a wrestling match.
We had put out a call for assistance and two guys arrived, foolishly with their batons drawn. The crowd on the stage became vocal and then represented a real threat as they began to move forward, at which point I bellowed at our colleagues to put their sticks away. That was the trigger for the onlookers response, not the presence of cops in tunics.
Within seconds four of us managed to daisy chain two sets of cuffs and secure the guys hands and the rest was routine. The crowd calmed down as we carried the ned, horizontally, to the fire escape and closed the door behind us.
It wasn't the end, though. The ned kicked his legs free from the two cops holding them, they hit the top step of the steel fire escape, and he launched himself, breaking the grip of two of us holding his arms, and using his face as a shock absorber on every one of the 30 or 40 steel steps on the way to the ground.
I thought he was dead when we reached him. No time for an ambulance (it was Saturday night in Glasgow and they would be otherwise occupied), we put him in the back of our Ford Escort van and headed for the hospital. The casualty on our side was my 6'4" colleague had displaced his patella from its usual location, to about four inches higher on his leg. Football career instantly over.
And the point of all this is that cops drawing weapons to threaten the public is rarely a wise move. As we were told, if you draw your baton, it's because you damn well need to use it for self-defence. "It's not a fucking magic wand!" as bellowed by every instructor at Tulliallan Police College.
In the case of the demented old geezer, when I watched the video in utter horror, I thought, "how the hell do they expect him to react when faced with uniforms pointing weapons at him? He might be reliving his WW2 past in his mind, and these are German officers approaching him".
Couldn't they just have asked the staff for a couple of blankets to toss over him?
I did my MPS uniform stint south of the River, where we had the 'Madsley' 'Hospital'. I recall some very interesting and sad discussions with the mentally ill waiting in the holding area, worryingly they often made sense ? and my empathy nodes were still just about intact !!
Being a 'County Mountie' communication and dialog was the first go to.
Funny enough I remember being first to arrive at a fella refusing to leave a bus (MH issues), I started engaging in conversation, not really making much progress, when I became aware of others from my Relief arriving behind me. Within seconds I was pushed aside and 4 colleagues had him cuffed and stuffed in the Station Van.
My empathy and tolerance nodes eventually dissolved and I left Response and went to work with 'special' people in special departments !?
Dom I was a PC on BH about 13 years after you and the mention of St Charles mental hospital brings back the memories. It's the smell that comes first then the sense of utter despair that I felt every time I went there to report some petty nonsense when on the 18 car. Finally the borough got wise and put dedicated PCs in place to deal with all the quite literally insane "crimes". I remember once extracting from a Grenfell crack den a screaming sweaty suicidal bloke on 136. We fought him passively in the van all the way to the gates and even with my barrel chested steroid popping oppo between the two of us it was like wrestling with a snake. Stuck in the air lock for an hour while they prepared for him and like you did here just by finding that common thread of decency we got him to settle down long enough to get through to the ward. I went on the DC track shortly after this.
I suspect I'm going to make you jealous. This entire incident only generated a short IRB. The hospital wasn't interested in making any allegations. There was no need for any crime report or sanctioned detection to feed the HOCR monster. I just made some notes and held the old geezer's hand. Then I had a cup of tea. I doubt, apart from a CAD number, there was any record of what happened whatsoever. Just another call on another day.
Crew of Echo 3 took down a machete wielding escaped mental patient in a dark narrow corridor armed only with small round shield and fire extinguisher. The big strong lad from EW2 who dropped kicked him almost certainly helped too. Carted the bloke off to custody. Last seen bollock naked talking to President Clinton via his invisible wrist radio. Poor sod.
While I'm writing irrelevant or marginally relevant comments, may I impose on your patience once more? (Especially as we are miles apart, you don't know where I am - probably - and you might still have that acrylic thingy).
"We had no tasers or incapacitant sprays. This lack of ‘tactical options’ made you think, primarily because you had to".
Reading those words, I immediately thought of this very similar remark in a wholly different situation:
'Turing was thoroughly dismissive of the EDSAC. He wrote: “The ‘code’ which he [Wilkes] suggests is however very contrary to the line of development here, and much more in the American tradition of solving one’s difficulties by means of much equipment rather than by thought”'.
- David Leavitt “The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer”
If someone started a religion to worship Alan Turing I would sign up right away. I might even train to become a priest. So I treasure that comment, and think of it whenever I come across anyone - usually, though not always, American - trying to solve a problem "by means of much equipment rather than by thought".
Dealing with MH calls, with a frankly deplorable lack of training and relying purely on an individual officer’s ’people skills’ was an all too frequent occurrence at Vine Street/West End Central back in the day.
Then again, trainee cops used to be selected because they possessed those very same people skills. Funny eh ? Doesn’t seem to be the case now.
Keep up the good work Dom, there but for the Grace of God go many of us …
"Mr. Burgess died three weeks later, having contracted covid".
I assume Mr Adler isn't a medical or scientific expert on viral respiratory diseases. Neither am I, but I have spent some time reading up on them.
And such an assertion strikes me as hugely questionable. Certainly, Mr Burgess died. Medical science advanced to the point of getting such determinations right - usually - long ago. But how do they know he had "contracted Covid"? He presumably showed symptoms of severe respiratory infection, but how do they know it wasn't ordinary pneumonia or one of the many other types of RI?
The only procedure I know of to diagnose "Covid" would be PCR or the less reliable lateral flow test. But Dr Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing PCR, categorically stated that it could NOT be used to diagnose disease! All it does is to multiply (in a literally exponential way) any tiny piece of DNA or RNA. That's useful if the original sample is too small for analysis, or if it needs to be shared around to different labs. I have seen a video of Mullis saying that you can use PCR to detect virtually anything in anybody, because all human bodies contain all kinds of tiny viral fragments.
Significantly, when I now search online for that video, all I get is dozens of hits on "fact checking" sites denying that Mullis ever said that - or that if he did he was wrong. Some way that there is no evidence Mullis made any such statement. I wonder if that is literally true, in that they have managed to delete every single copy.
Sorry to go "down a rat hole" on such a peripheral topic. But I find it very hard to let such things go, as they show that someone honest and well-informed has been successfully lied to. Intelligence doesn't help much if everyone tells the same lie.
Dom, your account brings back many memories about my time in the early 70's as a young PC working from West-End Central. Soho and the West End in general was full of 'slightly not right. We were always able to deal with them without resorting to violence. Sad times we live in I am afraid. Excellent post, keep them coming
Dom, your account brings back many memories about my time in the early 70's as a young PC working from West-End Central. Soho and the West End in general was full of 'slightly not right. We were always able to deal with them without resorting to violence. Sad times we live in I am afraid. Excellent post, keep them coming
I thought the same when I saw the Sussex story. I had a standoff with a particularly violent local as I turned up for LT custody duties. The suite was filled with a load of young PCs looking anxious and a bit concerned. One of our regular subjects, who I’d got to know quite well, was refusing to return to his cell because he “still ain’t ‘ad a fag” which early turn had promised him. He was threatening to kick the fuck out of anyone who tried to put him back before he ‘’ad ‘is fag’ “Bring the TSG, I’ll kick the fuck out of them an all” he shouted.
I cleared out all the officers, thereby removing his audience, and asked a couple of our female DDO’s to escort him back to his room, which they did. As he passed he turned and said frustrated, “You fuckin knew I wouldn’t hit a bird didn’t you”. Section 1 of the Ways and means act
Beautifully written as always Dom - thank you for making me believe that I did the job as it should have been done xx
Loved this - thank you. I'm sure there are still police like you in the Met, but I'm equally sure the Command Structure does its level best to breed the common-sense out of them.
Made me think of any number of people for whom humanity and a bit of space made all the difference! I too read that story and was mystified as to why you would choose to use that option, I hate 9 o’clock juries especially by arm chair observers, but this one is V hard not to comment on.
Brilliant writing Dom. So interesting and always such an enjoyable read. A compilation of such experiences would make for a great book…..
Nice one Dom, I love these real stories of the colourful characters that seem to populate often drab and grey places. Glasgow's east end seemed to have more than its fair share, but social status was no deciding factor. One day it was lonely old guy complaining of diminutive (we thought 'young') people running around his single room and over his bed where he lay. His descriptions suddenly sprang to life as the TV adverts came on his telly - the Tetley Tea Folk. Next it was a local authority finance director writing all over the walls of his plush office as if he was planning an Apollo launch or designing a new pharmaceutical. No batons necessary - lots of listening and nodding in the right places.
Not commenting directly on the trial, but I'm always amazed at the lack of accountability put towards medical staff (of all grades) in comparison to the Police.
Finish scraping up the remains after a jump and the staff at the "secure" unit will shrug their shoulders and say they put out a misper report.
Similarly here, between the untreated infection and the lack of willingness to run through a proper decision making routine, that would've most likely said, "just leave him there until he falls asleep," there seems to be huge chunks of this misadventure will not be properly addressed until the "lessons will be learned" statement.
Although not in quite the same realm of dealing with mentally ill patients (although we did do a lot of that as we had a mental hospital on our beat) a colleague and I were called to help clear out a late night venue of revellers.
It was 2 am'ish and it was a special licence event of people from a specific section of the community. Important because, by and large, they all knew each other.
We ascended the steel fire escape stairs, two levels of them and went into the venue. We has tunics (it was the early 80's) and were armed with a set of handcuffs, a wooden baton and a whistle (Acme Thunderer) each. It's worth mentioning Force Standing Orders required the baton to be concealed in a pocket stitched into our trousers with the strap tucked out of sight. Similarly, the handcuffs should not be seen by the public and the only thing obvious was the chain for the whistle, which was designed to be obvious in the event a cop was incapacitated and a member of the public could use it to summon assistance. Quaint. We had progressed to personal radios for that purpose.
Anyway, the music was finished and people were standing around the hall supping the dregs of their pints. We wandered around chatting with folks politely reminding them they were well beyond the grace period to drink up, and if they wouldn't mind would they finish up and leave the venue, so the staff could get home. All very standard and rather good PR as we joked and laughed with the punters as we went round. We did the second round, this time instructing them this time and the last of the reluctant ones complied and began drifting out.
But there's always one, always! Now, I'm 6'2" and played rugby. My colleague was 6'4" and was a good footballer, so we were as fit as butchers dogs. We approached a group of 3 or 4 scrawny Glasgow neds for the second time, who were obviously not interested in doing what they were asked by a couple of pigs. My affable colleague approached them and told them to finish up or he'd take their half full pint glasses from them. All but one did and he turned bolshy. My colleague moved to relieve him of his glass, which he drew his arm back to the perfect position to launch a 'glassing' attack.
Being a bit older and wiser than my colleague, I had crept up behind the little b**tard and grabbed his hand and the glass before he could launch an attack.
He went ballistic. It's almost impossible to describe the violence a 5'6", scrawny, drunk ned can perpetrate when he thinks he owns the world. We had him pinned to the ground but could only manage to get one wrist in a handcuff. The remaining punters (perhaps 30 of them) all gravitated towards the stage, watching proceedings and getting irate at their mate being 'beaten up' by two cops. It was nothing more than a wrestling match.
We had put out a call for assistance and two guys arrived, foolishly with their batons drawn. The crowd on the stage became vocal and then represented a real threat as they began to move forward, at which point I bellowed at our colleagues to put their sticks away. That was the trigger for the onlookers response, not the presence of cops in tunics.
Within seconds four of us managed to daisy chain two sets of cuffs and secure the guys hands and the rest was routine. The crowd calmed down as we carried the ned, horizontally, to the fire escape and closed the door behind us.
It wasn't the end, though. The ned kicked his legs free from the two cops holding them, they hit the top step of the steel fire escape, and he launched himself, breaking the grip of two of us holding his arms, and using his face as a shock absorber on every one of the 30 or 40 steel steps on the way to the ground.
I thought he was dead when we reached him. No time for an ambulance (it was Saturday night in Glasgow and they would be otherwise occupied), we put him in the back of our Ford Escort van and headed for the hospital. The casualty on our side was my 6'4" colleague had displaced his patella from its usual location, to about four inches higher on his leg. Football career instantly over.
And the point of all this is that cops drawing weapons to threaten the public is rarely a wise move. As we were told, if you draw your baton, it's because you damn well need to use it for self-defence. "It's not a fucking magic wand!" as bellowed by every instructor at Tulliallan Police College.
In the case of the demented old geezer, when I watched the video in utter horror, I thought, "how the hell do they expect him to react when faced with uniforms pointing weapons at him? He might be reliving his WW2 past in his mind, and these are German officers approaching him".
Couldn't they just have asked the staff for a couple of blankets to toss over him?
Hi Dom, a great real story.
I did my MPS uniform stint south of the River, where we had the 'Madsley' 'Hospital'. I recall some very interesting and sad discussions with the mentally ill waiting in the holding area, worryingly they often made sense ? and my empathy nodes were still just about intact !!
Being a 'County Mountie' communication and dialog was the first go to.
Funny enough I remember being first to arrive at a fella refusing to leave a bus (MH issues), I started engaging in conversation, not really making much progress, when I became aware of others from my Relief arriving behind me. Within seconds I was pushed aside and 4 colleagues had him cuffed and stuffed in the Station Van.
My empathy and tolerance nodes eventually dissolved and I left Response and went to work with 'special' people in special departments !?
I love reading your posts.
Dom I was a PC on BH about 13 years after you and the mention of St Charles mental hospital brings back the memories. It's the smell that comes first then the sense of utter despair that I felt every time I went there to report some petty nonsense when on the 18 car. Finally the borough got wise and put dedicated PCs in place to deal with all the quite literally insane "crimes". I remember once extracting from a Grenfell crack den a screaming sweaty suicidal bloke on 136. We fought him passively in the van all the way to the gates and even with my barrel chested steroid popping oppo between the two of us it was like wrestling with a snake. Stuck in the air lock for an hour while they prepared for him and like you did here just by finding that common thread of decency we got him to settle down long enough to get through to the ward. I went on the DC track shortly after this.
I suspect I'm going to make you jealous. This entire incident only generated a short IRB. The hospital wasn't interested in making any allegations. There was no need for any crime report or sanctioned detection to feed the HOCR monster. I just made some notes and held the old geezer's hand. Then I had a cup of tea. I doubt, apart from a CAD number, there was any record of what happened whatsoever. Just another call on another day.
Crew of Echo 3 took down a machete wielding escaped mental patient in a dark narrow corridor armed only with small round shield and fire extinguisher. The big strong lad from EW2 who dropped kicked him almost certainly helped too. Carted the bloke off to custody. Last seen bollock naked talking to President Clinton via his invisible wrist radio. Poor sod.
While I'm writing irrelevant or marginally relevant comments, may I impose on your patience once more? (Especially as we are miles apart, you don't know where I am - probably - and you might still have that acrylic thingy).
"We had no tasers or incapacitant sprays. This lack of ‘tactical options’ made you think, primarily because you had to".
Reading those words, I immediately thought of this very similar remark in a wholly different situation:
'Turing was thoroughly dismissive of the EDSAC. He wrote: “The ‘code’ which he [Wilkes] suggests is however very contrary to the line of development here, and much more in the American tradition of solving one’s difficulties by means of much equipment rather than by thought”'.
- David Leavitt “The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer”
If someone started a religion to worship Alan Turing I would sign up right away. I might even train to become a priest. So I treasure that comment, and think of it whenever I come across anyone - usually, though not always, American - trying to solve a problem "by means of much equipment rather than by thought".
Dealing with MH calls, with a frankly deplorable lack of training and relying purely on an individual officer’s ’people skills’ was an all too frequent occurrence at Vine Street/West End Central back in the day.
Then again, trainee cops used to be selected because they possessed those very same people skills. Funny eh ? Doesn’t seem to be the case now.
Keep up the good work Dom, there but for the Grace of God go many of us …
"Mr. Burgess died three weeks later, having contracted covid".
I assume Mr Adler isn't a medical or scientific expert on viral respiratory diseases. Neither am I, but I have spent some time reading up on them.
And such an assertion strikes me as hugely questionable. Certainly, Mr Burgess died. Medical science advanced to the point of getting such determinations right - usually - long ago. But how do they know he had "contracted Covid"? He presumably showed symptoms of severe respiratory infection, but how do they know it wasn't ordinary pneumonia or one of the many other types of RI?
The only procedure I know of to diagnose "Covid" would be PCR or the less reliable lateral flow test. But Dr Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing PCR, categorically stated that it could NOT be used to diagnose disease! All it does is to multiply (in a literally exponential way) any tiny piece of DNA or RNA. That's useful if the original sample is too small for analysis, or if it needs to be shared around to different labs. I have seen a video of Mullis saying that you can use PCR to detect virtually anything in anybody, because all human bodies contain all kinds of tiny viral fragments.
Significantly, when I now search online for that video, all I get is dozens of hits on "fact checking" sites denying that Mullis ever said that - or that if he did he was wrong. Some way that there is no evidence Mullis made any such statement. I wonder if that is literally true, in that they have managed to delete every single copy.
Sorry to go "down a rat hole" on such a peripheral topic. But I find it very hard to let such things go, as they show that someone honest and well-informed has been successfully lied to. Intelligence doesn't help much if everyone tells the same lie.
Died 'with' covid......
I found a brief video giving the gist. https://tapnewswire.com/2025/01/19/video-the-mysterious-death-of-the-inventor-of-the-pcr-test-nobel-laureate-dr-kary-mullis-a-reminder-as-things-ramp-up-again/
I only repeated what the court was told, presumably via a coroner's report.
I thought so. Somehow I feel compelled, whenever I see that sort of thing said, to jump up and down on it for a long time. Mea culpa. 8-)
Dom, your account brings back many memories about my time in the early 70's as a young PC working from West-End Central. Soho and the West End in general was full of 'slightly not right. We were always able to deal with them without resorting to violence. Sad times we live in I am afraid. Excellent post, keep them coming
Dom, your account brings back many memories about my time in the early 70's as a young PC working from West-End Central. Soho and the West End in general was full of 'slightly not right. We were always able to deal with them without resorting to violence. Sad times we live in I am afraid. Excellent post, keep them coming
I thought the same when I saw the Sussex story. I had a standoff with a particularly violent local as I turned up for LT custody duties. The suite was filled with a load of young PCs looking anxious and a bit concerned. One of our regular subjects, who I’d got to know quite well, was refusing to return to his cell because he “still ain’t ‘ad a fag” which early turn had promised him. He was threatening to kick the fuck out of anyone who tried to put him back before he ‘’ad ‘is fag’ “Bring the TSG, I’ll kick the fuck out of them an all” he shouted.
I cleared out all the officers, thereby removing his audience, and asked a couple of our female DDO’s to escort him back to his room, which they did. As he passed he turned and said frustrated, “You fuckin knew I wouldn’t hit a bird didn’t you”. Section 1 of the Ways and means act
Reflects a lot of credit on you, the female DDOs - and actually the prisoner. "An ordinary decent criminal"!
Thanks, I was past rolling around, the girls were brilliant and he was an old school lag who loathed ‘wife beaters and kiddy fiddlers’