Farewell, Reagan and Carter

Why we'll miss The Flying Squad.

Has the Squad stooped its last stoop?

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When an organisation burns its sacred totems, you know the end must be near. For example, Jaguar has rebranded, abandoning the famous snarling cat logo. And the Metropolitan Police appears to be waving farewell to the Flying Squad. As part of the relentless squeeze on police budgets, the legendary armed robbery unit is looking to shed a fifth of its officers. It’s also losing its armed intervention role, handing in its weapons.

The Flying Squad without shooters? It’s like a BLT with no bacon.

I never served on the Flying Squad. I wasn’t the type. Nonetheless, if I’m honest, I’ll admit to being jealous. The Squad had its own distinct culture and rough diamond elan. It’s history was, to say the least, chequered. Its very existence drove conventional police leaders nuts. If the modern Metropolitan Police were a newspaper, it would be The Guardian. And the Flying Squad would be like having Jeremy Clarkson as its star columnist. You can see where there might be some, er, tension.

Nonetheless, the Met will be a poorer place without it.

First of all, I’ll discuss why the Squad’s an asset. I think the Met will miss having a rapidly deployable cadre of detectives capable of armed intervention (i.e. arresting armed suspects during a crime in action - not just armed robberies). I’ll also mention how the Squad was a victim of its own success. I’ll address historic tensions between the Squad and an imperious MO19 (armed policing). I know and admire people on both sides of the divide. They’ve spoken to me candidly about their different perspectives.

Then on a lighter note, we’ll jump in our jam jar and take a tour of the Squad’s arcane world; one of Happy Bags, Nostrils, Mars Bars, Cheese Rolls, Bank Cars and Going Across the Pavement. Flying Squad detectives speak a pidgin form of English known as ‘Cockernese’ (a portmanteau of Cockney and Japanese, on account of it being as unintelligible as the latter if you don’t know any rhyming slang).

I grew up in south London. I’m also a keen observer of police subcultures. Therefore I am able to communicate in Cockernese. I’ve also worked with ex-squad types over the years. I’ve listened to the myths surrounding the grudge between the Barnes Finchley offices, and why Tower Bridge and Rigg Approach considered themselves the acme of Squad-dom. Then the Rigg office was turned over by CIB3 and things got proper naughty.

The Squad had heroes and antiheroes. It had its villains too.

Flying Squad officers arrest a robbery gang on mopeds in Piccadilly, 2016. By the 2010s, the traditional armoured car or bank robbery was becoming a thing of the past.

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If you want a history of the Peaky Blinders-style origins of the Flying Squad, there’s a summary here. Suffice it to say, back in 1919, the Squad was the first motorised police unit. They were ordered to roam an increasingly lawless London, irrespective of divisional boundaries, to combat criminal gangs. Its hand-picked coppers were from the streets they policed. They’d attended the same schools and lived in the same neighbourhoods as the villains they hunted.

The Flying Squad soon became a coveted posting. An elite. And, yes, a clique. Senior detectives who’d served on the Squad played mother bear, protecting it from Met politicking and restructuring. Even during a series of corruption scandals that would’ve sunk any other department.

During the 1990s and into the turn of the century, the Flying Squad remained true to its original remit - proactively investigating armed robberies. These included banks, commercial premises (like jewellers and bookmakers) and cash-in-transit (armoured cars). This might sound strange to a non-police reader familiar with American detective drama (where two detectives usually run a cradle-to-grave operation), but the Squad was unique because it did more or less everything for itself - intelligence gathering, surveillance, arrests and case disposal (i.e. subsequent investigation and trial). That’s genuinely unusual within UK policing, which parcels up operational functions and doles them out to different units. A Flying Squad detective really was the crime-fighting equivalent of the Swiss army knife. It’s why several of the best career DCs I’ve known were from the Squad.

Herein lies a conundrum, though. People who are good at everything are a luxury; Does a unit doing everything for itself run the risk of becoming too Jack-of-all-trades? When I joined the police, we were given far more operational latitude at divisional level. Even as a Pc on a local street robbery squad (which I describe in this article). By the time I left? Initiative was frowned upon. The police operated via process maps and spreadsheets. On the other hand, is it better to have a group of specialists running a proactive job like an assembly line, each taking responsibility for certain tasks?

It’s academic really. The battle has been won. The Met prefers the latter. We’re talking about risk. Guns. A manager would rather have a complex, occasionally disjointed and expensive model that’s procedurally safer (especially in terms to the risk to their careers). An agile unit like the Flying Squad is challenging to manage, and police managers love the illusion of control. Firearms operations involving overlapping units are complex. There’s a lot of moving parts. The post-incident accountability pipeline’s easier when you have clearly delineated responsibilities. If you’re interested, I wrote this article about police command and control.

Aside from the risk of letting detectives, even specially trained ones, cut about in fast cars with shooters, there were other problems;

1. Armed robbery became yesterday’s crime. By this I mean top-tier villains with names like Nosher and Razors taking out Securicor trucks, or looking to steal a diamond from the Millennium Dome. The 21st century, we’re told, is all about cybercrime and safeguarding. Until a well-organised gang demands your Rolex at knifepoint.

2. The Met’s specialist SCD (Specialist Crime Directorate) descended into a jumble of competing and overlapping proactive units, all doing similar stuff (investigating organised criminals involved in drugs and guns). When armed robberies declined, they didn’t want another kid like the Squad on the block.

3. The Met’s armed policing specialists, now known as MO19, sought to jealously control armed operations. They’re perennially sceptical of CID officers having firearms, as if the humble 9mm self-loading pistol was a piece of technology akin to the Large Hadron Collider.

4. The traditional uniform versus CID tensions didn’t help. Flying Squad jobs involved detectives making arrests (‘interventions’) against armed criminals, with MO19 providing an armed containment and / or specialist backup (for example, the 2007 Chandler’s Ford shooting where MO19 officers shot and killed two armed robbers). MO19 wanted control of all armed interventions.

5. Corruption. There have been books written about this, so I’ll not labour the point, but elite units with a clannish, closed culture can breed corruption. Especially in the old days, when the rules concerning informants were lax. The Squad suffered its fair share of scandals, as did the CIB officers set to investigate them. And, as I discovered working on anticorruption, officers masked their criminality by being otherwise good at their jobs.

The Flying Squad’s enemies were as powerful as its friends. Whether they were modernisers or simply jealous, an elite group of clannish, swinging-dick coppers were never going to be flavour of the month with the new Cromwellians running 21st century policing. Sometimes, I’m amazed the Squad lasted as long as it did.

Which is another reason to cheer them on. Every time they’re knocked down, they have a habit of getting up again.

The Millennium Dome robbery, 7th November 2000. Diamonds. Geezers. Crashing JCBs through walls. Speedboats! Reagan and Carter would be proud.

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Yet the Flying Squad survived every attempted neutering or restructuring. Yes, this was partly due to its totemic status. It was also down to something else; when the shit hit the fan, the Commissioner was only a phone call away from summoning a squad of skilled, tooled-up detectives capable of any crime-fighting task. I remember working on the David Copeland nail-bombing case. The Met strained every conceivable sinew to catch Copeland before he struck again. Who was at the pointy end, providing the emergency arrest teams?

You guessed it.

The Flying Squad pinched David Copeland in Hampshire. I remember reading their faxed arrest notes in the SO12 / SO13 Reserve room at New Scotland Yard.

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Now, enough seriousness. Let’s talk about life imitating art. Did the real Flying Squad created the image beloved of TV’s ‘The Sweeney’, or was it the other way around? I suspect it’s a bit of both.

Ex-Flying Squad officers: admit it, you’ve said this sitting in the bank car, haven’t you?

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‘The Sweeney’, which for younger readers was a hit 1970s TV series about the Flying Squad (spawning two successful feature films, three if you include the Ray Winstone version), was the best recruitment tool CID ever had. In the space of a forty minute episode, DI Jack Reagan and DS George Carter would drink, womanise, swear, punch and shoot their way across London. They’d be rude to Guvnors. They made up their own rules. They slammed car doors. They’d pretend to beat up virtually every British character actor worth their salt. They’d get pissed off when their ex-special branch driver left a Mars Bar in the glove box. The Sweeney made Gene Hunt look like a Macarena-dancing, LinkedIn-obsessed, Twitter-monitoring community outreach officer.

In retrospect, I can see why police management no longer dig The Sweeney.

I remember Flying Squad detectives being painfully aware they lived in the long shadow of the legendary TV show (and I only retired in 2018). Most enjoyed it. Why not? It would be churlish not to. It’s like being in the RAF and spurning the stereotype of a pilot with a silk scarf and a moustache, coolly waiting to intercept 109s over Hornchurch. The Squad were certainly a force of nature. When a bunch of them swaggered into the room, there’d be an explosion of banter (they reserved their most imaginative piss-taking for each other). This is either your cup of tea or it isn’t, but it was seldom boring.

So, and without any ado, here’s a quick guide to speaking Cockernese like a Flying Squad officer. For best effect, wear some proper clobber, adopt a gravelly Estuary accent and glue a cigarette to your lower lip.

Bank car - the Flying Squad unit tasked with responding to all armed robberies in the Metropolitan Police District. Usually consisting of two detectives and a driver, its viewed by some as an opportunity to earn overtime, a distraction from the office or a just pain in the arse. Flying Squad dits often seem to start with, ‘I was on the bank car when…’

Bash ‘em Up - make an arrest. This isn’t to say Flying Squad arrests are predicated on brutality, but apprehending Razors ‘going across the pavement’ with a pair of ‘nostrils’ is going to be kinetic.

Cheese Roll - The origin of this one’s a complete mystery. It means to ignore someone, disrespect them or otherwise give them a swerve. ‘I saw Dave the other day, fucker was in a proper mood. I said hello and he gave me a cheese roll.’ I’ve only ever heard this expression used by Flying Squad officers.

Driver, Squad (OTFD) - Flying Squad drivers used to be recruited from uniform. Only Class 1, Hendon-trained Top Guns could apply. Many said it was the best job in the Met for a member of the Helmetry (qv). Drivers got the same overtime as the detectives, much of the kudos and none of the paperwork. OTFD stands for ‘only the fucking driver’. They began replacing PC drivers in the mid-2000s with detectives.

Going across the pavement - the moment when Razors and Nostrils decide to actually do the robbery, thereby meeting the evidential standard for a charge. This is why timing an arrest is crucial, lest a clever lawyer argue Razors and Nostrils were merely ambling by NatWest when they happened to find a shotgun in a carrier bag. You think I’m joking?

Happy bag - the receptacle where Nosher and Razors keep the nostrils (qv), balaclavas and other robbery accoutrements. Important, because it indicates someone’s about to go across the pavement. As in, ‘I’ve got eyeball on subject one, he’s taken the happy bag out of the car.’

Helmetry - uniform officers. Lids. Woodies. And so on. And, of course, drivers. Not a compliment. As in, ‘the briefing officer was a proper wanker, a full Colonel in the Helmetry. I gave him a cheese roll.’

I knew I shouldn’t have gone to work today - not really Squad slang, but included out of interest. Flying Squad detectives assure me armed robbers often claim to have a sixth sense about a job. The good ones go home. The bad ones do the robbery anyway. Then, when they get nicked, the say to the arresting officer, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have gone to work today.’

Nostrils - a sawn-off shotgun. A side-by-side, naturally. You’d have a funny bloody nose if it was an under-and-over.

Peter - Peter Pan = Van. The police vehicle Razors and Nosher are bundled into the back of after they’ve been bashed up.

Slaughter - premises used to store the happy bag and / or loot before and after the blagging. So-called because, once upon a time, old slaughterhouses were a preferred location.

Now, time to test your Cockernese. For example, ‘we were on the bank car when we saw Nosher outside the bookies on Streatham high street. He only went across the pavement, didn’t he? We bashed him up, put him in the Peter Pan and did a s.18 on the slaughter. You guessed it, there was a pair of nostrils in the happy bag. The local Helmetry weren’t impressed, they gave us a cheese roll.’

You see? Every day’s a school day.

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Will the Flying Squad survive? Will the famous stooping eagle becoming a flaming phoenix, soaring from the ashes? I have no idea. All I know is the Met’s giving the impression of surrendering serious and organised crime investigation. It’s too expensive. It’s too risky.

That leaves what?

The NCA? I remember when you’d give those boys and girls a cheese roll.

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