Fighting On The Front Line Of Crime Peter James reports on the police fight to stem the tide of lawlessness in one British city
(from The Daily Express, February 2006)

As we turn a corner close to Brighton seafront, a local drug dealer, shadier than his own shadow, clocks us and melts into an alleyway.

I am reminded of Raymond Chandler's immortal words, "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid." It is 9pm on a Friday night in downtown Brighton and I'm riding shotgun in a police van being driven by a man who is very definitely neither mean, tarnished nor afraid. He is one of the many Sussex police officers I have met during the past decade who have impressed me deeply.

Inspector Andy Parr is tough, hardworking and deeply human. His role tonight, like every Friday night, is to stop Brighton and Hove turning into a drunken, drug-fuelled war-zone. No mean task in a city that boasts one hundred thousand vertical drinking spaces, the largest number per capita of injecting drug users in the British Isles and the largest percentage of drug deaths. Not to mention its street gangs, like the TMC (Team Massive Crew) aged 13-16, whose initiation rite requires stabbing or raping a member of the public or beating up a police officer. Brighton is the second busiest police station in the UK. Brighton is also, I was told by a former Chief Constable, the favourite place to live in the UK for first division criminals. Mean streets don't come much meaner.

Inspector Parr is a smart man, who would probably succeed in any, much more highly paid job, to which he applied his mind. He could be enjoying a quiet Friday evening at home with his family. Instead, he will spend much of the night out on foot, in his cap and high visibility jacket, in the numbing Arctic wind that's howling off the Channel and up skanky West Street - Brighton's very own answer to the Las Vegas Strip - marshalling his men, taking abuse from people like the tattooed pond-life who swaggers up to him now, as he steps out of the van, poking him in the chest and asking him, in a voice laced with drunken menace, what his problem is, Jimmy.

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For most police officers the work is more than a job, it's a vocation. I remember one evening, I was down in the cells in the custody centre, when a young constable came in, beaming, high on adrenaline. He said, 'we've just been chasing two bank robbers up the A23. We had the helicopter, the dogs, the works - you should have been with us! I can't believe they pay me to do this job!!!

I knew something of what he felt. The greatest adrenaline buzz of my life was being driven across Brighton in a car, with the blues and two in response to a 999 burglary call on the far side of the city. We covered a journey that would ordinarily have taken twenty minutes, in just ninety-seconds. And whatever the police may say, a lot of them really enjoy that thrill. Who wouldn't?

I think part of the job satisfaction comes from that inside track on the world the police have - of seeing life behind-the-scenes. Part comes from the respect that goes with the job, but as many are aware, that is being eroded. I was in a patrol car in Brighton one morning, and we saw a mother pointing us out to her tiny son. The officer, an experienced beat policeman, a true "old sweat", lip-read: "You watch it, or the cops'll get yer." He turned to me, sadly, and said, "When I was a boy, my mum would said, Nick, if you're ever in trouble, go to a policeman." He blamed much of this sea-change on traffic policing policies, saying that today the only contact most people had with the police was being booked for a motoring offence, and it was giving them a jaundiced view.

Police dramas on television don't help either. They rarely reflect modern policing as it really is, which is why, I discovered most police officers don't watch them. As former Chief Superintendent Gaylor says, "Police dramas are not up to date on how police treat criminals and victims. A lot of police characters are portrayed as insensitive, stupid, lacking in empathy - which is just not a true reflection on the vast majority of today's officers."

Nor does television often portray the violence some officers suffer. I was present when a constable was head-butted by a violent mugger, who subsequently bit the officer's arm and dislocated his thumb. Yet two hours later, his hand strapped, that officer was back out on patrol. In most jobs he would have been at home on sick benefits for weeks.

And then there are the technical inaccuracies. Why, I wonder, don't television writers do their basic research? I have learned that crime scenes are sacrosanct; no one can enter if not fully suited and booted in protective clothing. In real life, Frost would never be allowed in a million years to blunder into a crime scene in his street shoes, mackintosh and hat.

I came into crime writing the wrong way around: Most writers start with an idea or a storyline, then create the characters they need. I began with a character. A real-life character, Detective Superintendent Dave Gaylor of Sussex CID, who subsequently became Chief Superintendent. I shadowed him during research for some of my previous novels, and I became fascinated with his work, most of which then was as a Senior Investigating Officer on major crimes, but additionally he was in charge of "cold cases" in Sussex - crimes committed many years back where no one has ever been convicted. Now with the advent of new forensic techniques, especially DNA, old crime scenes and pieces of evidence can reveal dramatic new clues. It is not an idle boast of forensics that if someone has been in a room, just once in their life, no matter how long ago, give a SOCO team enough time and resources and they will be able to prove it.

During the past decade, I have been given very privileged access to many areas of police work. I've been out on patrol, arrested a burglar, spent time with forensics, been behind the scenes at Gatwick Airport, and seen a few crime scene images that are the stuff of nightmares. It is one thing to write crime fiction, it is quite another thing to see crime in all it horrific, putrefying, tragic reality. I'll never forget the sheer loneliness in one image, of a sad old lady who had killed herself by putting a plastic bag over her head in her bedsit on Brighton seafront. Or another of a Hell's Angel dumped in Shoreham harbour attached to a concrete block, who was recovered, body protected by his leathers, his skull picked clean by crabs. Or a description from Dave Gaylor, which I've used in my new novel, of how he once had to retrieve a severed head from a railway line. It was heavy he said. In more ways than one.

Nothing stands still in the police force. The Dixon Of Dock Green of my childhood seems so quaint now, depicting a police force of just three departments - uniformed plod, CID and the Flying Squad. In Sussex CID HQ there are 22 different divisions alone, including the Scientific Support Branch (SSB), the Tech Support Unit (TSU), the Fingerprint Department, the Photographic Imaging Unit, Commercial Investigating Unit, and the High Tech Crime Unit.

One of my first tasks was to learn how to speak "Police". It used to be doctors with their Latin, and criminals with their rhyming slang, who had their own languages. But now the police seem to be evolving a language of their own: Almost everything today is an acronym. Ranks - PC, DC, DS, DI, departments - CID, CRIB (Crime Recording and Investigation Bureau), FCC (Forces Command Centre), DIU (Divisional Intelligence Unit) SOCO, (Scene of Crime Officers) SOCA (Serious Organized Crime Agency) to their computer technology - SOCRATES (Scene Of Crime database) and HOLMES, (Home Office Large and Major Enquiry System)

Villains and their tools are changing. One of the newest units is the High Tech Crime Unit, where the daily routine of work comprises studying the contents of seized computers. Its former chief, Sergeant Paul Hastings, said, "looking into someone' computer is like looking into their soul. Within one hour of looking at a man's computer, I will know more about him than his wife does."

Technology has led to increasingly sophisticated intelligence: Where the crime hotspots are in a city. What time muggers are most likely to strike (12pm-3am on a Saturday/Sunday) And also some curious facts get thrown up: In the early days of their paedophile investigations, staff at the High Tech Crime Unit discovered, for an unfathomable reason, that a high number of offenders were obsessive Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Star Trek fans - but it had to be both together.

Policing is ever-changing, it has to, in order to keep pace with changes in society and its crimes. Last October I attended the daily morning briefing at Brighton Central police station. One of the officers reported that for the first time in living memory, there had been no burglaries overnight in the city. As a writer it set me wondering. Criminals will never go away, but maybe there is a gradual, subtle change in their methods and targets. The old-style burglar with his mask and swag bag, was after your possessions. Today's, operating from his own home, armed with nothing more than of his laptop, is after your identity.

[This article originally appeared in edited form in The Daily Express].

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