On a normal Friday or Saturday the 22:15 hrs briefing at Euston Street is for Op Newfields, which is the City Centre operation to keep the streets as safe as possible for people to enjoy their well earned night out and to minimise the chances of them becoming victims of crime. The Op runs every Friday and Saturday throughout the year, and at the time of this story, was a 22:00 briefing at Mansfield House police station and drew a contingent of officers from each of the six Local Policing Units into the City to assist with the policing operation of the night time economy of the city. The following story is from a few years ago.
Today was no ordinary weekend evening, it was New Year’s Eve, and the briefing room was packed with barely space to stand. The briefing Sgt reminded us to deal with potentially violent situations as early in the evening as possible, with use of Section 27 powers where appropriate to remove potential troublemakers from the City Centre. The Inspector, referred to as the OCI, reinforced the message to deal with potential trouble quickly.
I was crewed with Sally, which was good news as we had worked well together in the past. We were posted out on foot and our brief was to look after the area between Market Place and Market Street, which included Lloyd’s Bar - a busy place and at risk of trouble due to volume of customers alone. We were in position at the Market opposite Lloyds by about 22:45 hrs, and it was cold. Very cold in fact! The staff at Lloyds were great and looked after us by bringing out hot drinks a couple of times. Everyone seemed to be in good spirits.
At about ten to midnight, a member of the public walked past us and said "you better get over there, a woman is being beaten up”. He pointed and we rushed over, to find a woman lying on the floor lying in the foetal position, clutching the area of her abdomen, with a male aged in his late forties standing over her. I did not see him kick her, but from what we had been told and the position in which we found the woman, the suspicion was that he had assaulted her. I moved him away from the woman, who by this time had told Sally that her name was May, and of a similar age to Walter. I moved Walter away from May and asked him to stand against the shop window. It was fairly obvious that both people had been drinking, but it was New Year’s Eve! We were on Market place, which is the road that runs from Hotel Street to Cheapside, with the market on the right.
Walter was compliant, but we clearly needed to speak to him formally about what would seem to have taken place. Normal procedure would be to arrest a suspect, then obtain a statement from the victim, in this case May. Sally explained to Walter that we needed to ‘talk’ with him, and at that point she applied handcuffs and secured his wrists to the front of his body, thus preventing any further injury to May or potential injury to ourselves. Sally the formally arrested Walter on suspicion of assaulting May tonight. At this point Walter seemed to wake up to what was happening. He had just been arrested, and did not like that! He made an allegation that May had assaulted him, and to be fair there was a small amount of blood on his forehead. I tried to keep him as calm as possible.
Sally got on the radio and requested a van to transport Walter to Euston Street custody suite, aka ‘the cells’, and within minutes one had arrived. Again, normal procedure would be to put the prisoner in the back of the van and go with him to custody suite, but Walter had other plans. Let’s just say that he started to kick-off, big time! There were by now four officers at the scene, and Walter decided that he wanted to fight us, so he had to be taken to the floor to restrict the possibility of him kicking, spitting or otherwise assaulting officers. Sally pressed her emergency button on her Airwave terminal (aka radio), to summon for urgent assistance. Once an emergency button, or ‘code zero’ is put out, every radio on that channel will emit an audible and distinctive tone that officers do not like to hear frequently, as it either means that a fellow officer is in immediate need of assistance, or a suspect is running away. In this case we needed back-up, and within a minute or so, two further officers arrived.
Walter continued to kick and twist, making it difficult for him to be restrained. Police helmets had fallen off by this stage, and I later found that the shiny badge on the front of my mine had broken away, leaving me badge-less for the rest of the night. I shouted on the radio some ‘fast raps’ restraints. Within a couple of minutes a van from the Tactical Support Group, or TSG, had arrived to deliver straps. The sliding door of the TSG van opened and an officer leaned towards me, but he paused, then looked at his watch, looked at me and smiled, and said “Happy New Year!” It had just turned midnight. Still, there was no time for a toast or a rendition of Auld Lang Syne. We had Walter to deal with. I quickly took the straps with a reciprocal greeting, and with six officers now present, we applied the straps and despite his initial unwillingness, we got Walter into the back of the van. The internal ‘cage’ door was closed, but before we had chance to close the outer van door, Walter decided not to go without further fight. He started to head-butt the grill. Hard. What an idiot, I thought. But, we have a duty of care to prevent idiots too from harming themselves. The internal door was opened and Walter warned that his continued behaviour would result in being sprayed. He continued to head-butt the van, so a colleague shouted for me to get out of the way whilst he sprayed Walter in the face with Captor spray. That took the fight out of him and he became calm, though now verbally complaining that his eyes hurt.
After all of the frantic activity of the last few minutes, Sally and I turned round to speak with May. She had disappeared! We needed a statement from her, but that wasn’t going to happen for the time being. We transported Walter to the custody suite, then were under instruction to get back out into the city. The rest of the evening was busy, attending the aftermath of a couple of fights and assisting other officers, but there were no more arrests for us.
The revelling had died down by about 04:00, so it was back to Mansfield House to do a crime report and statements etc for Walter before we could finish. I think we got away and back to our local nick at about 07:00. Whilst doing the paperwork I heard over the radio that Walter had become ill and required an ambulance to take him to A&E. Two officers would have had to go with him and stay with him for his time in hospital, known as a ‘bed watch’. Another unseen police resource eater...
I understand that no further action was taken against Walter, as May decided that she did not want to make a statement, there were no other witnesses and CCTV had no coverage of what happened. That's what happens sometimes, but we did the right thing by arresting him.
Notes
*Most officers who duty on Newfields are now based centrally at Euston Street police station, which is the City response hub.
*Section 27 – is a quick way to get people out of the city who are likely to cause trouble because of their presence in an area where alcohol is involved. People served with a s27 notice have a set period of time, normally 10 minutes, to leave the city centre and not return within 24 hours. If they fail to leave, they can be arrested and charged with failure to disperse, which results in a night in a cell and normally a fine of a few hundred pounds.
*The astute of you will notice that ‘fast raps’ have again been used in this episode. They really are used infrequently, which is can be more than said for their appearance in this blog thus far!
*Captor spray is like pepper spray. Read more here.
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