The Silence of the Pigeons

Things that go bump in the night

Diseased and unloved. No, not a police officer, it’s a feral London pigeon

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I once wrote a terrible crime novel. I attempted to describe London at night, wanting to capture the shared experience of those who worked while others slept. I failed. The novel was rubbish. I burnt it in disgust, although the exercise wasn’t a complete waste of time. As a beginner, any writing – even bad writing – is better than none.

Anyway, it was something about working nights which inspired me to write. In the small hours I began noticing stuff; the swishing noise a blue light makes rotating atop a stationary police car. The dusty-yet-wet feeling on your fingers after peeling off surgical gloves. The scruffy Pc with a numeral missing from his epaulettes. The sharp, chemistry-lesson stink of an alcoholic’s breath, as if you were actually inhaling the cirrhosis.

Besides, the weird stuff that happens after dark’s a gift to any writer; some night shifts felt like living in a Tom Sharpe novel. I used to think this strangeness was synchronicity – that I’d stumbled onto a uniquely odd situation by happenstance. Then, talking to other coppers over the years, I realised it wasn’t.

It was just… policing.

The Job’s a strange occupation. It invites the bizarre. Part of this oddness, I think, is due to the way The Job messes with your brain. The pressure of policing’s like a bottle of fizzy drink shaken violently. Was night duty a pressure valve? The time we unscrewed the cap a little, before the bottle exploded?

This was thirty years ago, before the internet. I suspect things are worse now. Unscrewing the bottle in 2023 would almost certainly end up on Twitter, Sky News and TikTok. Back then, reports were completed on typewriters. Mobile phones – a rarity – had no cameras. Police cars and comms weren’t tracked via GPS. We communicated via analogue radio systems. CCTV coverage was patchy, so the astute could sneak around with relative impunity. Members of the public could actually phone up the CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) room at a police station and talk directly to a human.

To a Generation ‘Z’ police officer, trained via Zoom and equipped with Airwave radios and Body Worn Video cameras, this must seem utterly alien.

Night Duty consisted of a week of 22:00 to 06:00 shifts. From nights, we’d transition onto a 16:00-00:00 shift on Thursday before a weekend off. This sometimes (depending on whether you worked a five or six-week shift pattern) meant you’d return for early-turn on Monday. As you can imagine, given the jetlag effect, you’d spend one day recovering, one day to yourself and one day getting enough sleep to function on your next shift. A team returning to work ‘off nights’ were growly and knackered. And the Brass wondered why people hated them? A hefty body of scientific research shows the ruinous effects poorly-rostered shifts had on health.

Each of us dealt with this assault on our circadian rhythms differently. I knew one utter freak capable of simply reversing his day. He’d go home at 06:00, have a shower, pop a ready meal in the microwave, crack open a beer and watch telly for a few hours. Then he’d go to bed at lunchtime and get up at 20:00. I say he was a freak because (a) I knew very few people who could do this, (b) I certainly couldn’t and (c) he eventually became a traffic policeman.

I struggled with sleep. I avoided booze, save for the odd occasion we visited a market pub (which had special licences to open early) for a fry-up and a few pints. I’d usually go home, catch some zeds and wake up at 14:00. I was young and reasonably fit; my older colleagues suffered. By the end of the week we looked like extras from The Walking Dead.

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Coppers leaving the nick after a week of nights, rejoicing in the knowledge they have to be back at work for 16:00

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Nights were especially punishing when combined with the dreaded ‘exigencies of duty.’ December 1995: I remember arresting someone for a Breach of the Peace. This meant attending court off nights (and no, older and bolder police readers, it wasn’t for the overtime). Arriving back at the nick at 12:00 – having started work at 22:00 the previous night – I was spotted by the duties sergeant, a godlike figure you didn’t want to cross. Knowing I was shield-trained (public order qualified) he told me I was going to Brixton because trouble was brewing. I finally arrived home at 06:00 the day afterwards.

Nobody above the rank of inspector worked nights. There was an on-call ‘Duty Senior’ who’d be roused out of his scratcher in case of a serious fuck-up. And it was a he; I knew of no female supers back then. We loathed these lizards as shiny-arsed nine-to-five merchants, people who’d second guess your decision-making from the comfort of a desk. The sort who nowadays appear in newspapers, talking bollocks about the good old days.

To be fair, things improved, possibly due to Critical Incident protocols. By the early 2010s I remember working a vulnerable MISPER (missing person) case on night duty CID. The (switched-on) duty Detective Superintendent, monitoring the CAD, called out of the blue to offer detectives from other boroughs to help. I’m not sure, but I think he was from Hammersmith. Respect is due, Guvnor. Not all change is bad – the MISPER, a child with learning difficulties, was found safe and well.

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Back to 1993. The Met had adopted ‘Sector Policing,’ whereby officers were given responsibility for micro areas (or sectors). Most of us loathed the system, which wasn’t effective in delivering either response or community policing. We paid it lip service. Here’s a pro tip for managers; an autonomous workforce like coppers will ignore grand plans imposed on them without buy-in. This is precisely what happened with Sector Policing. On nights we were tied to areas unmapped to any real-world demand curve. So if we pretended to tolerate the patrol model on early and late shifts, we actively worked against it after dark – we went wherever necessary to get the job done, fully supported by our sergeants and duty inspectors. A theme of this Substack is the importance of these ranks. We neglect them at our peril.

Most officers patrolled in vehicles, with a couple of coppers on foot (usually probationers) until the pubs closed. My first subdivision didn’t have a lively night-time economy, but on weekends we’d take calls to the main drag to deal with après-club fisticuffs. Then, after 02:00, things quietened down.

To an outsider, London might conjure the image of a night-time city; party places like Soho and Leicester Square. The truth is more prosaic. London consists of 32 boroughs and they’re all different. My first posting had industrial estates in the north and residential areas in the south. Arterial roads ran east to west. The residential parts were predominantly local authority housing (with a large estate which reminded me of a lyric from the Madness song ‘Our House’; there’s always something happening / and it’s usually quite loud). The rest consisted of mainly Victorian and Edwardian properties, with an enclave favoured by the wealthy (including a few celebrities).

This was the real London; simultaneously rich and poor, quiet and loud, old-fashioned and modern, leafy and high-rise. Apart from the usual calls to domestics, minor criminality and drunks, a typical week of nights might include one or more of the following:

Burglars – the best calls were ‘Suspects on Premises’ or simply ‘Suspects On.’ This was a burglary in progress. If you were lucky, you’d get a dog van involved. Coppers hated night-time burglars (the bastards prepared to break into houses with families inside), so watching the stupider specimens trying to fight an Alsatian never got old. To be fair, burglars came in several varieties, including the non-residential types who stole from factories and warehouses. They needed vans to cart away their loot, a reason why we stopped tradesmen’s vehicles in the small hours. Then there were ‘rooftop men,’ or ‘climbers’ who specialised in scaling buildings. In the early days of DNA, a sergeant once sent me up a ladder to collect a rooftop burglar’s turd at 05:00 for forensic analysis (fun fact: burglars have a tendency defecate at crime scenes, a bit like dogs pissing on lampposts). Snapping on a pair of rubber gloves, I put the log in a Tupperware box and presented it to our SOCO. She burst out laughing – you couldn’t extract traceable DNA from faeces in those days.

Shovelling shit for no discernible benefit. I can’t think of a better metaphor for Policing.

MISPERS – Missing Persons. Some were ‘persistent’ MISPERs, kids who went missing every bloody night. They were a pain, to be honest, as they usually turned up when they got bored. But vulnerable MISPERs, i.e. people with disabilities or mental health issues, or very young kids, were taken extremely seriously.

I do remember one notable MISPER who disappeared after attending The Rocky Horror Picture Show musical. She was described over the radio as an “Australian blonde, in her early 20s, dressed in a ‘Frank‘n’Furter costume.” Approximately seventy police callsigns answered the call, including faraway Chelsea’s area car (the infamous Bravo One, rumoured to be so bored on nights it would race to Uxbridge to investigate a missing puppy), an accident investigation team on the even further away M11 and a Thames Division river launch. The young lady was discovered safe and well at her flat – she’d had an argument with her boyfriend and went home early. Yes, female officers rolled their eyes. But they laughed, too. At us, presumably!

Drunk drivers and car chases – You might be surprised to know the majority of drink drivers were caught on early turn – i.e. the morning after they’d been drinking, usually after an accident when they were required to take a breath test. Night-time drunk-drivers were usually super-obvious. You’d either catch them crawling along at a nervy 29 miles an hour or already stationary, their cars wrapped around a tree. A local councillor I arrested, pissed as a rat, actually tried the ‘d’you know who I am?’ line. How I laughed. How many twentysomething coppers give a fuck about the identities of municipal politicians? On the plus side, nights were the likeliest shift for car chases. Even crap ones like this. The best pursuits ended up on the motorway, until county traffic cops ruined everything by stealing your bandit car. The fact you were chasing a souped-up hot hatch in your one-litre engined Rover Metro, while they had a Jaguar, was neither here nor there.

There you are, innocently chasing a bandit car along the M4, when some County Mountie rocks up in a Jag and expects you to give way. Bastards!

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The Weird Shit People Do – this covers miscellaneous fuckwittery and occasional tragedy. Like the bloke who thought he was a werewolf (long story). The guy who dressed like a ninja, complete with throwing stars and a sword, genuinely surprised to find himself being stopped and searched. An autoerotic asphyxiation involving green hairy string and a life-sized poster of Jet from Gladiators. The old Nigerian bloke who’d attend the station’s front office to explain he was on a mission from God (I’d take notes). I once spent an entire night shift in a cell, guarding a hundred and fifty bales of herbal marijuana seized by the Regional Crime Squad. I was stoned by osmosis by 06:00. And that stuff about craving KitKats? It’s true.

The Weird Shit Bored Coppers Do – Sometimes, absolutely nothing happened in our night-time playground. We were gifted a few precious hours of peace. How was it spent? Dicking around, of course. I suppose an excuse was how tough the Job was the rest of the time. Our manor didn’t enjoy great community relations; everything we did was contested by a hardcore of villains, well-versed in playing the system. We felt impotent and besieged. ‘Policing by consent’ was a sick joke. As for the bosses? Our Chief Inspector was obsessed with nonsense like were we wearing our hats when we got out of our cars? We carried casework (we did all of our own files, including relatively serious offences), hobbled by the bloody useless CPS. Most of us had been assaulted, some seriously. A team member was stabbed and almost killed. Someone else was shot at. Then, to top it all, we worked a shift pattern obviously devised by someone destined to run a CIA Black Site.

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In retrospect, stress-related mayhem was inevitable. As Hunter S Thompson famously wrote, when the going gets weird, the weird turn professional. Operational coppers were professionally weird. What else explains the following night duty myths?

1. The sergeant who’d take a polaroid camera and hide near an inspector’s house before the inspector drove in for early turn. When the inspector passed by, the sergeant – hiding in the bushes – took a photo to set off the camera’s flash. The inspector became convinced he’d been zapped by a new-fangled GATSO camera. After his shift, when he couldn’t find any speed cameras, he wondered if he was going mad. The next morning, the sergeant would hide a little further up the road and zap the inspector again. Why the sergeant did this remains a mystery, although (to paraphrase ‘Parklife’ by Blur), it seemed to give him an enormous sense of wellbeing.

2. There was rumoured to be a Pc known as ‘Egg Sniper.’ Egg Sniper was a vigilante superhero, determined to correct the iniquities of the local magistrates’ decision-making. By night he would allegedly hide in his moonlit eyrie overlooking a housing estate walkway, dropping eggs on prominent local criminals. This would cost them more in dry-cleaning fees than the pathetic fines issued by the muppet magistrates.

3. Another officer was said to have a glove puppet alter-ego that only appeared on night duty. A furry squirrel. He would stop motorists for traffic offences. If they seemed nice, he’d let them off without a penalty notice if they apologised to the squirrel.

4. There was the cosmic horror of… The Silence of the Pigeons. Occasionally we’d return to the station yard at dawn to discover a row of dead pigeons neatly arranged in a parking bay. We soon established the cause of death – the flying rats had been run over. Was one of our team a serial pigeon killer? A sweep of the nearby streets revealed tyre marks and feathers. Have you ever tried running a pigeon over? Imagine the necessary patience, skill and knowledge of ornithological psychology. And he or she walked among us. Was it the ex-RUC guy? He was scary. Was it the quiet woman with dimples? It’s often the quiet ones, right? Was it Penry, the mild-mannered janitor? “Should we mention it to the sergeant?” I asked a colleague. “No,” he replied. “I think he’s still outside the guvnor’s house with his camera.”

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I’m so happy people are enjoying this Substack. I especially appreciate your patience in supporting long-form writing in an age of alleged attention deficit. Please continue commenting, subscribing and sharing.

Have a great day and stay safe.

Dom.