Hunting High and Low
When the Filth get a ‘W’ from the big house and spin a drum*
Met POLSa officers (photo credit Daily Mirror).
*Translation from London cop argot to civilian English: when the CID attend Magistrates Court to obtain a search warrant in order to lawfully enter and search premises
In popular culture, a classic cops-versus-robbers scenario will usually boil down to one of the following;
Chases: usually a car chase, although foot chases (especially across rooftops) are another classic staple of cop fiction (how many 1970s and 80s US cop dramas involve our heroes shimmying down New York fire escapes?). Admit it, you were expecting that link to take you to Bullitt, weren’t you? Ha! I’m too movie hipster for that.
Stakeouts: Quite often the amuse bouche for one of the other scenarios, coppers in vans or cars pointing cameras at villains – then not being caught – is a staple of police fiction. The reality is, of course, quite different.
Gunfights: An American speciality, with Brits hobbled by the inconvenient fact most of our police are unarmed. Nonetheless, if a British TV or movie can squeeze a gunfight in somewhere, it will. Hence utter dreck (although a guilty pleasure) like this. It might be a pound shop Heat, but dammit it’s our pound shop Heat.
Interviews: A more cerebral piece of detective fiction might pit a cop versus a very clever villain. Quid pro quo, Clarice (etc). It won’t be PACE compliant, but that’s besides the point.
Forensics: Clues! We all love clues. And so Popular culture loves forensics as a trope, one where feisty, invariably female, clinicians use their scientific nous to show thick-as-planks coppers what really happened. You can combine this with interviews and get ‘Cracker’ although of course Robbie Coltrane (RIP) was a bloke.
Yet one of the most interesting and universal cops-versus-criminals arenas is woefully neglected. Although it’s a slow burn, it’s physical and cerebral. It often involves science. And even, occasionally, danger. It’s the world of Search (my favourite movie example being The French Connection). So this week I’m writing about how policing often involves very grown-up Easter Egg hunts, and some of the niche search stuff I was involved with as a Special Branch officer.
Cops learn early in service how people will hide contraband anywhere. I remember a Sunday early turn spent wrestling a semi-naked ‘Tom’ (Job slang for a prostitute) in a police cell. Spiky-haired, makeup smudged across her face like warpaint, she resembled a post-apocalyptic Boudicca. I also recall she had ‘sweet’ tattooed across the top of one breast and ‘sour’ across the other.
She was also - to our surprise - armed with a canister of tear gas.
Anyhow, after restraining and cuffing her, the FME (the police doctor, or Force Medical Examiner) en route, somebody smugly asked why she hadn’t been searched properly (the Metropolitan Police are true masters of schadenfreude). The answer was the officers who’d arrested the prisoner had no reason to believe she’d concealed an offensive weapon in her prison pocket.
Which is my way of saying a big part of the Job is looking for things people don’t want you to find, quite often in places you’d rather not look.
As the average police officer progresses in service, they discover search comes in many flavours. Stop and search (the efficacy of which will be debated forever). Vehicles; in the days before putting prisoners exclusively in vans, experienced cops always searched their own police cars too – the moody stuff prisoners hid down the backseats had to be seen to be believed. Searches carried out after raids – rummaging through chests of drawers, sheds, gardens and cars. Specialist officers run video probes up drainpipes and comb football stadiums for bombs with detection equipment. They set up knife arches at big events. Bins and sewers and landfill sites? No problem. Police search for missing persons – MISPERS in Job argot – and dead bodies. They bring in dogs (everyone loves doggos). Webbed-footed coppers search for weapons at the bottom of murky rivers.
You name it, Old Bill will search for it. Summer or Winter. Rain or shine.
Searching isn’t glamorous. It’s not quite as boring as surveillance, but it’s harder graft. A professional search is physically demanding and surprisingly technical. It demands patience, an enquiring mind and bags of commonsense. This makes it a role many are unsuited to and a genuinely Marmite job. But for those who enjoy spending hours on their hands and knees painstakingly looking for bullet cases and cigarette butts (for DNA)? There’s a whole geeky world of Search to enjoy.
These unsung heroes are known as POLSas, or Police Search Advisors. They’re the officers in blue workwear you see at crime scenes. And if you think you can hide stuff from them… good luck. A decent POLSa team will clamber out of their van like a pack of Labradors unleashed on an unattended picnic. Hidden stuff, to them, is an irresistible challenge. They will take absolutely anything and everything to bits to see if there’s something hidden inside; I’ve seen POLSas take a kitchen door off its hinges to reveal a stash of drugs inside hollowed out panels. Plug sockets are unscrewed, revealing memory sticks. They’ll swarm over a car like a plague of blue locusts, finding cleverly hidden clues (like the police computer printout anticorruption officers discovered inside the leather gaiter on a car’s gearstick).
I enjoyed searching and not just because I’m a nosy bastard (although being nosy is a handy prerequisite for coppering). Searching encourages you to… contemplate. Think like the other guy. Where would I hide something, and how? It’s occasionally strangely relaxing. Well, it is until the SIO declares the back garden needs digging up because someone confessed to burying their missus under the patio.
I was never a fully-fledged POLSa, but I passed the not-nearly-as-good Special Branch version. SB maintained a small cadre of volunteers to investigate breaches of the Official Secrets Act (OSA), a key part of which was searching for classified material. The Security Services, unsurprisingly, asked if they were going to be investigated by police, could they at least use properly vetted officers, please?
The training took place at the (now closed) police training facility on Hounslow Heath where the Anti-Terrorist Branch, SO13, search wing was based. The course covered the basics of search methodology, with a strong emphasis on counterespionage. This was back in 1996 or 1997, when the internet was something of a novelty, so a lady from the Security Service showed us brilliantly vintage spy kit; a hollowed-out pair of Cuban heels with a recording device inside. Tiny Minox cameras. Disguise kits with comedy sideburns and moustaches. We were shown how to identify secret writing and basic cryptographic keys. The MI5 lady, formidable and equipped with a desert-dry sense of humour, was the sort of person I imagine volunteering to parachute into occupied France.
The SO13 search wing guys began the course by turning the lights off in our Nissen hut and tossing a thunderflash inside. Hey, it was the 90s and everyone liked winding up Special Branch officers. When they stopped laughing, they taught us the basics; sectoring a room into logical search zones. Working in pairs. Always keeping your hands in your pockets – it helps resist the natural human impulse to touch something interesting, potentially contaminating an exhibit. Ditto the phenomena known as ‘FA Cupping’, which is picking up an exhibit without thinking and holding it in the air like a trophy. Search is meant to be slow, tidy and considered, not the burglary-type rummaging you see on TV cop dramas. It’s like a soldier once explained house-clearance drills to me: slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.
We were trained to use video probes – in Search anything with a potential space inside (a void) is in play and should be investigated. There were mocked-up rooms and vehicles with stuff hidden inside for us to discover, from documents to rolls of camera film to ammunition. We were trained to use the ‘Enforcer’ battering ram. Bashing down doors was very un-Special Branch-like behaviour. “Don’t we have someone to do this for us?” asked a tweedy Branch financial investigator, looking unapprovingly at the ‘Big Red Door Key’. “That’ll play havoc with my back.” We were even taught the semi-mystical Winthrop theory, which I think I understand. This is the counterterrorist version of water divining, but you’re looking for Semtex as opposed to H2o.
I enjoyed search theory; it makes you look at any environment in a completely different way. Shortly after my course I watched The Shawshank Redemption (spoilers for a 30-year-old movie ahoy). As soon as I saw Chris Robbins’s cell I remember saying “I bet the entrance to the escape tunnel is behind that poster on the wall.” I was right, but nobody else was impressed.
Mind you, I guessed the ending of The Sixth Sense as well, and the Met to my knowledge doesn’t run an I can see dead people course.
I worked on several OSA cases, including Operation Oscillate, the David Shayler investigation. In 1997 Shayler was an MI5 officer who handed over (or sold, depending on whose version of events you prefer) a load of sensitive files to a newspaper. I’m not going to dwell on Dave much, except to say (a) he’s done his time (b) he clearly chose the wrong job and (c) he was, reportedly, a very amusing person. A colleague attended a Security Service course with him and said he was a hoot, especially after a few beers. The real villain of the piece, in my humble, was whoever vetted and recruited him in the first place.
I ended up searching Shayler’s flat and hire vehicle. The cheeky rascal left an A-Z inside the car with a large ‘X’ drawn on a random page - possibly in the middle of a reservoir. Rather annoyingly, the Mail on Sunday (who ran the Shayler story) subsequently alleged we more or less trashed Dave and his partner’s flat. This was, to put it politely, bullshit. A (burly) colleague sat on a rickety dining room chair to fill out some paperwork and it broke – and that was it. The MoS subsequently published a photo of the unfortunate piece of furniture as evidence of our KGB-esque behaviour (I’m sure it’s still in an archive online somewhere).
Now, I don’t think the MoS realised a rule of specialist search is to be scrupulously neat and tidy, not only out of professionalism (a police search might be legal, nonetheless it’s still an invasion of privacy) but also to prevent allegations that could adversely impact on criminal proceedings. This is why we always took before and after video recording of the scene, which in David Shayler’s case showed his flat was tidier after we left. With my hand on my heart, I can say the SIO in that case was legendarily professional and universally admired. He simply wouldn’t have stood for a second-rate search. If you know who I’m talking about - and some of you will - I’m confident you’ll agree.
Despite having the evidence to completely debunk the story, the Met hierarchy weren’t interested in going into battle with a Sunday newspaper. It was a deeply political case and New Labour had won their landslide victory less than six months previously – and Shayler revealed MI5 had Cold-War era reporting on more than a few cabinet members. A few SB officers being labelled heavy-handed was the least of the Job’s concerns. C’est la vie. It was a long time ago, and ‘journalists embellish story’ is hardly a shocker, is it? I know what really happened.
The funny thing about that job was ‘Exhibit A’, Shayler’s laptop, was still plugged in and sitting on a coffee table when we entered the flat. He hadn’t used any silky tradecraft whatsoever.
Our team was also used by CIB3, the Met’s controversial anticorruption unit. I imagine CIB3 asked for Special Branch assistance through gritted teeth, as they were all hand-picked CID veterans. The CID, generally speaking, didn’t think much of SB. However, at the time we enjoyed a reputation of being leakproof, which in the murky world of anticorruption is worth its weight in gold. It transpired too many naughty CID officers had News International on speed-dial, after all.
It was searching on an offshoot of a CIB3 job I had possibly my best ‘find’. I won’t go into specifics, as the job’s been covered elsewhere by people more familiar with the minutiae than I. In any case, our middle-of-the-night briefing, at Jubilee House in Putney (where I would later work as an anticorruption officer), was terse - CIB really didn’t want to tell us too much. We were tasked with searching a suspect’s accommodation, someone linked to a number of police officers suspected of corruption.
We divided the apartment into search zones and began sniffing about. Working with another officer as a searching pair, we discovered a shoebox full of old-school cassette tapes under a bed. Remember those? One of the CIB officers rolled his eyes as we began examining every cassette, a task complicated by us wearing cotton gloves under doubled-up surgical gloves. I checked to see if the tiny grub screws showed any signs of removal, in case the cassettes had been disassembled. Then, one-by-one, we removed every cardboard cassette sleeve, examined it and handed it to each other for a second opinion. Part of me enjoyed the CIB bloke’s exasperation at our attention to detail, which probably explained why his team hadn’t found anything of interest.
Finally, I spied an irregular bump in a cardboard cassette sleeve. Using my trusty Leatherman tool, I gently retrieved something. Inside was a folded cigarette paper. Written on it, in pencil, were a number of vehicle registration numbers. I’ve never considered myself the world’s best detective, but that isn’t the sort of thing you innocently hide in a cassette. The CIB guy wandered over. “That might be useful,” he said grudgingly, taking it with an (un-gloved) hand and putting it in an exhibit bag.
Even towards the end of my service I liked going on searches. My last was a guest appearance on a job involving a money-sniffing dog who found fifty grand hidden inside a sofa. There were some lovely watches too (I’m a watch nut) and the look on a bad guy’s mug when he’s told his Rolexes and Breitlings are being seized under Proceeds of Crime is always priceless. Damn, I love search dogs. Then there was the time a very good doggo found a suppressed Spanish semiautomatic handgun in a suburban loft…
I could go on. I know I moan about the Job, but there was stuff we were good at. I hope those skills have been preserved. And if you aren’t in the Job, spare a thought for those poor bastards on their hands and knees at crime scenes.
Those officers are helping solve more crimes than car chases or gunfights ever will.
This article is dedicated to the memory of an old friend and colleague, Graham Miles. I think it was Graham, then a search instructor, who threw the thunderflash on my search course! Dry-humoured and quietly professional, he went on to become a highly successful covert policing specialist. RIP, Graham.
Really enjoying your memory lane. 👏🏻