In my life up until this point, the Police had always been my friends, or should I say I had always felt that they were on my side. Then one bright morning in the spring of 1997, I awoke to the sound of splintering wood, and the thunder of boots on the stairs. The thin blue line now stretched up to my front door, and as I sat bolt upright in bed that morning, I heard the sound of a Policeman’s knock at my bed-sit door for the very first time, and it rings in my ears to this very day. You are immediately aware of the gravity of the situation, and your heart begins to race as your senses become attuned to all the sounds beyond the door. The crackles from police radios can be heard on the landing, and you know that something is amiss, but your instinct is to resist. I had no idea as to the reasons for this intrusion, so I sat breathless on the edge of the bed, eyes fixed on the door, hoping they might go away.

"Police, open the door!"

Nothing,

"It’s the Police, open the door!"

Nothing,

Crackle of police radio…

It seemed as if they had given up and moved on to the next room, but my stay of execution was brief, and the beasts were at my door once more, only this time they had the force of a hand-held battering ram to get their evil way. In the blink of an eye the door had been breached, and like a rabbit in headlights I watched as a dozen or so of Lincolns finest stormed into the room, two of them hurling themselves in my direction and pinning me down on the bed where they did not arrest or question me, they just held me. A stocky female policewoman with short spiky hair entered the room and assessed the achievements of her squad, she seemed very pleased. In fact, at this point I do recall noticing that they all appeared to be having a rather splendid time, as if this sort of affair is the police equivalent of a school trip. I was surrounded on all sides by gaggles of eager young police officers, gloving-up and awaiting the order to commence their search, like a pack of gun-dogs they awaited their command, all but salivating at the prospect.

The search began in earnest as the light of the dawn began to break through the curtains, and there I sat on my bed, hands cuffed behind my back and sleep in my eyes, observing the truffle-hunt going on all around me. I had not been arrested.

Communication between my captors and I was limited to me beginning to speak, and them telling me to keep quiet, it seemed that my participation in proceedings was not essential to the outcome. Things did relax after a while, and I was left in my room with one officer rummaging through my dirty washing pile, and one officer guarding the door. They seemed to get the idea that I was not going to try and escape and they loosened up a bit, feeling able to toss the occasional insult my way regarding the state of my room, or how unhealthy I looked, all in a smug self satisfied manner. It is how I imagine one must feel as a guest on the Jeremy Kyle show. It was as if I had invited them round and not tidied up, not at all that it was 6:15 in the morning and they had me cuffed to the bed in my boxers. The female officer even emitted a groan of disgust at the discovery of pornographic magazines in my bedside drawer, something that she would never have found had she not been looking for them; I could keep quiet no longer.

"If I had known you were coming I would have baked a cake" I said "You really should ring ahead you know"

This was a mistake; the police officer is not by nature a good humoured fellow, they take what they do very seriously, and make no interpretations of the law, they merely enforce it. I went on;

"Look, what is all this about? I haven’t done anything wrong, why am I in handcuffs?"

"Look, don’t piss us about, your wasting our time. Just tell us where it is and this will all be over quickly"

"I honestly have no idea what you are talking about; I just don’t understand what you want. What do you want by the way?"

"Come on, don’t play dumb with us, we’ll find it eventually you know"

I thought for a moment and said "So if I told you for example, that there was something in the kitchen, and there was, and you went and found it, would you pack up and go home? I doubt it; you’d just get the taste for more. I’m not playing."

At this juncture I had for the first time realised that the average bobby on the beat is an idiot, someone who spends such a large proportion of their lives dealing with the criminal element that they are no longer able to distinguish it from the lawful. Bullied at school and in search of respect, they are drawn to the profession for all the wrong reasons. Billy Connolly used to say that anyone who wants to be become a politician should by virtue of that very fact, be barred from ever becoming one, and I believe the same is true of the Police. We must question the motives of anyone who wishes to join the Police, and I think deep down in our hearts, we all do. (And I know a few of you out there will be thinking, ’thats a bit harsh, they do a very difficult job and I’m sure they are very nice, well adjusted people. For you I have just two words, ’Traffic Cop’. QED)

At this point a discovery was made in the upstairs flat, and a messenger arrived to convey the news.

"What’s all that upstairs then?" asked the female officer picking cautiously through my dirty linen.

"I don’t go upstairs, that’s Andy’s flat. I live down here, that’s why the door was locked and I’m in my pants."

"You’re still pissing us about sonny Jim; you’re not telling me you haven’t noticed the smell?"

Jesus Christ I thought, Andy hasn’t died up there has he? Oh Jesus fucking Christ no.

"What’s this then?" And in her outstretched hand, she held out before me a bag of yellowy crystalline substance.

"How do you explain this?"

I couldn’t explain it, I had no idea what it was, but I had seen it before, once; during a clandestine trip up the stairs in search of tobacco. All hell broke loose at this point and all caution towards my personal belongings was thrown to the wind. Two more officers joined the search in my room, and reinforcements arrived to search the kitchen and communal areas. At regular intervals I would be pulled into neighbouring rooms to explain suspect items, items that on the whole would prove to be entirely innocent, but you try telling that to a pig with a hard-on. And so it was that I found myself explaining the difference between white and black pepper, the origins of my house-plants, the presence of aspirins in the bathroom cabinet and the contents of empty plant pots. It became Python esq in its absurdity, and anything that bore the slightest resemblance to anything even remotely illegal was bagged up and taken away for testing. The white pepper of which I spoke was even in its branded packaging, and the aspirins in their blister packs, but the plant pots however, were a mystery to me as much as them. They were in the north room of the top flat, and I was taken to them to explain their purpose. As we stood and looked at the pots in the blue light of the morning, I could see no good reason for them being there, but I saw nothing suspicious in the fact that they were, unlike my uniformed friends, who seemed to see in them something worth investigating.

"I have no-idea what they are or what they are for" I said

"So if we have a look in that soil, were not going to find any… seeds?" Came the sarcastic reply.

"Well you might, is that bad?"

By this time, the invaders had run out of rubber gloves and bags, which considering the volume of useless crap they had confiscated was not surprising. I watched as the un-gloved officers sifted the soil in search of illegality, slowly crumbling each handful of earth with meticulous care.

"Why is the soil wet if you’re not growing anything?"

"I didn’t say I wasn’t growing anything, I said they are not mine and I don’t know anything about them"

On they searched, determined to find that which they believed to be there.

They found nothing in the pots, and they found nothing of enough substance to justify arresting me on the day. So they packed up the vans, and disappeared into the morning sun, leaving me sat amongst the chaos caused by there visit. All areas of the building had been ransacked, and the contents tossed into the centre of the rooms, as one would do before decorating, only with much less care and attention, and every door in the property was hanging limp off its hinges. I never saw my white pepper again. It felt more like a burglary than anything else I have ever experienced. That yellowy crystalline substance turned out to be exactly what they thought it would be; it was Amphetamine Sulphate, or Speed. And it transpired that Andy from the mysterious attic flat had been manufacturing large quantities of the stuff up there and selling it around town. A few weeks previous, the police had put an undercover officer in Badgers to keep an eye on his movements, and Andy did not disappoint. Not only had he apparently been knocking the stuff out in a hopelessly indiscreet manner, but he had even tapped up the undercover officer for custom, and it was at that point that his fate bacame sealed.

Ever since this event I have viewed the Police through suspicious eyes, I am reluctant to report crime and want as little to do with these power crazed Nazi’s as is humanly possible. They lost my support on that day, and they lose hundreds more every day of the year with their heavy handed and slap-happy execution of business. In the ten years since this event, the respect that people perhaps had for the police force has dissipated so much as to render any relationship between the enforcers and those they enforce upon moribund. The lack of respect between them and the community at large is down to the laws they are enforcing and the way that they are enforcing them. They prowl the streets in pairs looking for easy collars to bump up their statistics, and anyone is a target. These targets that the government have set the Police mean that policing has now become a numbers game. Did you know for example, that if a Policeman stops a chav in the street, and discovers a spliff about his person, he can write him a fixed penalty notice slap his hand and send him on his way, and that counts in the statistics as a solved crime. So you can see that it’s much easier for an officer to hang around the town centre on Friday nights catching people relieving themselves down ally’s, than to get embroiled in any of that tedious solving of crime. Combine that with our already draconian drug laws and what we have created is a nation that feels constantly under suspicion, criminalised by their lifestyles or any foolish act, and once you have pointed the angry finger of suspicion at someone once, you will have forever lost their trust and respect...

Epilogue

There is a ray of light at the end of this story which allows me to look back on this event with a wry smile, and I suppose a sense of revenge. Do you remember the plant pots, the ones that were inexplicably wet but contained no seeds? Well I later discovered their purpose; they had been placed there as an aid to self relief. You see, Andy found it quite a trek to the toilet from the top of the building, and had devised a way to store large quantities of urine without any of the smell. He would fill large plant pots with soil, and when the need arose, he would piss into them. The soil soaked up the moisture, and some organic process or other dealt with the smell, every other week he would change the soil and start all over again, and it is that which makes me smile as I write this. The image of Lincolns finest on their hands and knees, sifting the urine laced soil with un-gloved hands...some feelings my friends, are beyond description.

Leeson