Stop Search

I was looking back through the threads on a Police forum I'm into and saw one about stop searches in the Met. Apparently, in a trial area, those searched will have the opportunity to makr the officer(s) out of 5 and text the result in. Got me thinking about one search a mate and I did some time back...

We were in plain clothes in the town centre and came off the High Street to a car park behind some shops. Looking over to our right, about 50 yards away, we saw two lads in the car park. One was on foot, the other on a bike, and both were looking into the cars as they passed them, faces pressed right up against the windows. Now it occurred to my buddy and I that these two lads (roughly aged 16) probably didn't own every single car that they were looking into. In fact, and I know this sounds cynical, they might have been looking for things to steal. So we decided to search them.

As we approached to within about 10 yards the lad on the bike clocked us and rode off the other way. With no chance of catching him we turned our attention to the other lad. Even though we knew him, and were pretty sure he knew us (given that we'd arrested him enough times before) we produced our warrant cards and identified ourselves as Police.

He made some comment along the lines of "fuck off, you're not searching me" and continued to walk off. I took his arm and immediately he began to get aggressive with me. So the other bobby took his other arm. We tried talking him into calming down but he was getting more and more violent so we had to take him to the floor and handcuff him in order that we could safely conduct the search without causing anybody injury.

This couldn't have been entirely pleasant for him, because he started to scream about Police brutality and harassment. As we held him still and went through his pockets and coat etc (a process that took a lot longer than it should have given that he kept trying to spit and kick at us) a random member of public walked past us.

The little cherub saw this and decided to gather public support by screaming out "help, the Police are beating me up!"

Without missing a beat, the chap looked down at him, then at us and with a look on his face that suggested he'd had enough of people committing crime in the area said, "I didn't see nothing" and walked off.

This actually deflated our guy a bit so the rest of the search went a lot quicker. And we found...er, nothing actually. So we picked him up, dusted him off and offered him a copy of the search record (reply: shove it up your arse!).

Can't help thinking what my marks out of five would've been. He wasn't exactly a satisfied customer.