Playing the System

I mentioned in my previous post that after failing an evidential breath test, you will get a “statutory option” if you’re reading was under 50µg.  This means that you can opt to replace that evidential breath test with either a urine or blood test, but that test will be the new result regardless if it’s higher or lower.  The other thing to note is that you don’t get to choose whether its urine or blood, the police officer taking the test makes this decision.

 

Most people of good character would say that they’ve failed the test and there is no point opting for another, especially if the reading is closer to 50µg than the 35µg limit.  However, unfortunately for all of us, the people that do this regularly will always choose the second test because as it stands they will already be charged and a second test gives them precious time to process more alcohol before we get a doctor out to take bloods for example.  The worst that will happen is that they will just get another fail, at which point they are in no worse position than what they started with.

It’s often the case that people won’t know the implications of choices such as these, and however much we feel for someone, we can’t advise them one way or another.  The people that do know the implications are often the ones that we don’t want to take the option, but we can't stop them and sometimes they do get off prosecution because of it.

Drink Driving

Following on from my post about road safety, I mentioned that I attended a RTC recently that was carrying a group of four girls.  As part of any RTC, we breathalyse both drivers as a matter of routine; drunken behaviour can often be masked as shock sets in, so getting a definitive reading is useful to rule out any other offences.

The 18 year old girl that I spoke to was shaken but otherwise ok bar a few bruises and was happy to blow into out breathalyser; unfortunately for her, she blew a roadside reading of 53µg per 100ml of breath.  The legal limit is 35µg, so the rather shaken 18 year old had her first arrest.  Perhaps I’m being a bit naïve here but I honestly believe that this girl didn’t intend to drink and drive, nor did she think that she was unfit to drive.  She said that she had a bit of a heavy night and stopped drinking a bit after midnight.  She was most certainly over the limit in the morning and this had come to a bit of a shock to her, so on top of having the guilt of seeing one of her friends being stretchered into an ambulance and another in pain with some broken bones, she now had the ordeal of being arrested by me. 

I spoke with one of the ambulance staff to see what their intention was for the young driver.  Usually, we would take her to the police station and require her to use the evidential breathalyser for the readings that would be used in the charging decision.  We try and get them to custody as soon as possible because every minute they are on the roadside their body is metabolising the alcohol and we are essentially losing evidence.  However, the ECP (Emergency Care Practitioner) said that they recommend she be taken to hospital just to check there were no unobvious injuries.  I knew at the point that this job would keep me tied up for the rest of the shift. 

We have a procedure for people being taken to the hospital; it involves a rather long form and a kit for taking blood.  One of my colleagues remarked that the form is like an adventure game book, you read a paragraph and then get sent on a quest to page 78 for the next part of the story.  It’s not quite so confusing when you get used to it, but it takes a minute or so to figure out.  Once the patient/detainee has been assessed by a doctor we need their consent to take a sample.  We then have to call out our own doctor to the hospital to draw the blood for impartiality reasons, all whilst the person is losing alcohol from their system.  It took about 2 hours between being arrested and finally getting consent from the A&E doctor.  After having the consent form signed, we were told that she was being discharged from hospital, so although we had started the hospital procedure, we decided that going to a police station would be quicker than waiting for our doctor to arrive, as well as realising A&E wanted the bed back. 

So around 3 hours after being arrested my prisoner is finally on an evidential breathalyser.  My colleague and I were convinced that she would not only blow under the limit but quite substantially below the limit.  She hadn’t had a drink for around 12 hours and her body wasn’t absorbing any more alcohol in her system and at a rough guess we estimate that most people metabolise 10µg per hour of alcohol, so we expected a reading of maybe 20-25µg, well under the legal limit. 

The result surprised us both: the lowest reading of the two we take was 45µg, remember the legal limit is 35µg.  As she had blown over the limit but was under 50µg she had what is called “the statutory option” of having a urine or blood sample instead.  We can’t offer advice on what to take but she was given the options and declined.  I’ll follow up on the implications of this in another blog. 

As she was still over the legal limit, we couldn’t interview her until she had sobered up a bit more which means she probably wouldn’t have been legal to drive until around 1530 in the afternoon at the earliest.   Many of the general public don’t realise quite how long after the night before it can take to properly sober up and this really prove that.

So after just wanting to get a Mc Donalds, this otherwise law abiding 18 year old had written off her car and another, injured three of her friends and one other motorist and will likely get a drink driving conviction for simply not realising that she needs longer to sober up the next day.  The funny thing is that it could have been so much worse and they are actually quite lucky.

Road Safety

I haven’t always been such a staunch supporter of basic road safety, primarily due to the fact that I was ignorant to the reality of the often horrific consequences.  That said I always wore a seat belt if nothing else, just because it seemed the common sense thing to do.

I attended a road traffic collision (RTC) yesterday, where by a car had pulled out of a junction and collided with another oncoming car.  Road speeds were somewhere around 40mph and inevitably there were some injuries.  The first vehicle was a small car carrying a group of four teenage girls, all aged around 18, who were merrily on their way to pick up breakfast at Mc Donalds.  As it happens, my colleague and I were also on our way to get a full English breakfast at a local café – neither of us got our morning meals that day. 

When we got on scene two vehicles lay strewn across the carriageway both with reasonably severe front end damage.  The road was blocked and traffic was queuing in three directions as it was on a T-junction.   What saved this scene from being absolute carnage was the fact that all parties were wearing seatbelts.  We know this for two reasons: firstly, all people involved had some nice wide bruises from the seatbelts and secondly, although there were broken bones and a suspected fractured vertebra, the injuries were not life changing, that is to say that they will in all likelihood make a full recovery.  This would not have been the case if they hadn’t been belted up and we’d most likely had been dealing with a life changing if not fatal accident. 

Despite this, I am still amazed of how many people I see not wearing seatbelts when I’m driving.  It’s not just that it affects the person that isn’t wearing it.  If you are in the back seat of a car unrestrained, then you become an 80kg (or insert your current weight here) projectile flying towards the front seat passengers at whatever speed you were travelling.  Not only that, but its people like me that end up having to see the horrific scenes and scrape you up from the road surface into a body bag.  These people are totally ignorant and it really does anger me.

Another part to road safety that I feel strongly about is helmets.  When I was a kid, I never wore a helmet whilst cycling, and I cycled a lot.  It wasn’t until I saw a rider on a moped go over the bonnet of a car at what seemed a slow speed at which point his egg exploded like an egg on the pavement.  Seeing events like that really do make sure you’re protected.

Sudden Deaths

One of the roles of a Police Officer is to act on behalf of the Coroner for sudden or unexplained deaths.  Unlike the US TV shows, the coroner doesn't attend murder scenes or anything like that int he UK.  In Hampshire (and possibly other parts of the UK) we don't refer to a sudden death in those terms.  The form we must fill out is called a G28 and this is a report that goes to the coroner with details of the person who has died, circumstances and next of kin etc, so we refer to sudden deaths as G28s.

It's funny, for people who deal with violence, blood and nasty people on a daily basis, it's interesting how we don't like to use words such as bodies or death.  A lot of this reason is in case people over hear the police radio.  I'd like to make clear that police radio in the UK is totally encrypted on a propriety digital network called Airwave , so it's not like you can by a normal VHF scanner and listen in to police chatter like you can in the US.  However, with that said, we don't generally say things like "the body has been taken by the undertakers", instead we use police speak like "funerals ltd have resumed", just in case.  I think this is also related to the fact that officers need to distance themselves from connecting people, and using police speak seems to help.

G28s are something that inevitably end up with many war stories being told by various officers about the worst smelling or otherwise nastiest situation.  The worst was mentioned recently when a body had been found in the bath at a house.  The problem was, the body wasn't a fresh one; in fact it had probably been there for around a year.  Now, I'll tell you now, that although I am fortuitous enough not to have seen this first hand, it is quite obvious that leaving an organic body half submerged in water is not going to lead to a pleasant situation.  The body wasn't so much of a body as I thick sludge, with a skeleton in amongst it.

There are many issues that present themselves when seeing a situation such as this: is it suspicious?  How could you tell?  How do you recover the body?  The officer attending did suggest to the controller that pulling the plug may have been the best option, but instead FSU was called.  FSU are the Force Support Unit, similar to the Met's TSG which are normally called for public order situations, but also help in events such as this.  FSU then proceeded to recover the bath and all it's contents, which although rather drastic, seemed the most practical method.

From the few G28s I have attended, which on the grand scale of things have been pretty tame, I can tell you quite categorically that there is a smell that is so distinctive and strong that it will not just sit in your nostrils for the rest of the day, but attach itself to your clothes in such a way that it will never wash out.  Perhaps that last bit is only a false perception, but it many officers will swear blind it's true.  It was mentioned that this particular smell was so bad that when the windows were opened to ventilate the bathroom the smell was so bad that there were several calls to the police with people fearing a major gas leak.

The saddest thing about the story above, is that a person can die and not be discovered for a whole year.  There was no friends or family to wonder about his welfare, even the neighbours didn't notice not seeing him come or go.

The first G28 I ever went to was to a male, probably mid fifties or early sixties, who had tried getting up from his armchair in his living room, hit the deck and died lying face first on the carpet.  He had been there around three days and although had started to ferment, a unit that had been there first had aired out the house so it was easily bearable.  Newbie officers who go to these sort of jobs are usually debriefed afterwards to make sure that the experience hasn't adversely affected them.  Some people deal with death better than others and I didn't feel that this experience affected me that much.  It's was surreal as most of my expectations come from the wonderful world of TV or movies and to be honest, this particular body seemed to have been made up from SFX people working on a B movie who had very much run out of budget - it simply didn't look real to me as bizarre as that sounds.

This brings me to to my most recent G28, a relatively simple job of a pensioner who had died at a care home.  The gentleman was in his 80s and had been admitted to the care home as his was having issues with his digestive system.  I'll start to generalise here (which I try and refrain from where ever I can), but from the older people I have had personal experience of, they are often very proud and only accept help when they absolutely have to.  This was certainly the case with the gentleman I had the sad situation of dealing with; he had not been eating as he was getting diarrhea and was emaciated.  There was what looked to be a recent photo on his window sill and he looked a much healthier weight, so it looked like he hadn't been eating for a while at least.

As the guy hadn't been eating for a while, he had been admitted to the care home to allow him to gain weight.  Unfortunately he had been found in the morning gasping for breath and it was clear to the care workers that this time was limited.  A paramedic in a fast response car was on scene a few minutes later and took over the CPR from the care workers who must have been pretty tired even a few minutes in.

Most of the public don't realise how tiring CPR is and also how degrading it can be.  If you're doing CPR right, then you will likely crack ribs and you may even get to the point where the front of the rib cage is floating on top of the organs; it's not a pleasant situation to get to.  The paramedic mentioned that he was doing CPR for around 30 minutes before he called it off and that even when people are obviously dead, they still have to perform CPR even if this   It's also interesting that paramedics can't certify death, they can only say that someone "is in a condition that is incompatible with life".  I think I remember that during training we can only say someone is dead if we find their head severed from the torso; that's usually a rather large hint to death.

So after the paramedic briefed me on the circumstances, I asked the control room to call the undertakers.  They can take anything from 30 minutes to several hours, so it's worth doing as soon as you can before you get started on the paperwork.  Actually filling out the G28 isn't so bad when the paramedic gives you most of the details you need.  Next of kin details can be hard to get, but we managed to ascertain that none were local.  We like to give the death message in person.  Some officers don't mind doing it over the phone, but I much prefer doing it in person.  As the nearest next of kin was in the west country so we had to ask a local force to deliver the death message.

The last responsibility of a police officer in these circumstances is to make sure we're classifying the death correctly.  Obviously some deaths will be non-suspicious natural causes and some may be obviously suspicious with many shades of grey in-between.  This requires that we check the body.  Now, I must admit, handling dead bodies is not the nicest of things.  Luckily rigor mortis hadn't set in yet and so they were easy to move if eerily cold to the touch.  No gaping stab wounds were found on either side of the torso, so that was a relief and to make it easier for the undertakers we also removed any jewelry and left it on the bedside table.

After this was finished and the paperwork completed as much as possible my colleague and I had to continue to stay and wait for the undertakers.  In this time, it's a rather surreal experience to be honest; your standing in a small space with a rather large elephant in the room.  The other thing that happens when your dead is that you lose the ability to retain certain solids and fluids that you would usually like to be discrete in disposing of.  Although he was wearing a incontinence pants the smell was gradually getting worse and worse.  Despite this, my colleague and I were talking the normal types of conversations and absolutely not looking up the latest sports results on the MDT (mobile data terminal), albeit closer and closer to the open windows.

After an hour and a bit the undertakers arrived and recovered the body and our job was mostly complete.  Just about an hour worth of writing up, following up making sure the death message has been given and making sure the old gent was wanted for murder or something.  All in all, about 3.5 hours out of our day for such a job.

Occasional Police Officer

So, as some of you may already be aware, in my spare time I like to volunteer to write some paperwork.  This is commonly referred to as being a Special Constable.

For people who aren't entirely clear what a Special Constable is, we are simply volunteer Police Officers who have all the powers of a regular constable, and although perhaps not the same experience of a regular, the majority of the training.  In Hampshire, where I am, we wear exactly the same uniform as a regular, not just similar but exactly the same.  The only way you may identify us is by our collar number on our epaulettes.  Our role is to do the majority of what any Police Officer does: drink tea and do paperwork.

If you're interested in finding out more, have a look here: http://www.hampshire.police.uk/Internet/jobs/specialconstabulary/ 

I'm sure I'll tell a few stories on here about my work on duty, but this is just a heads up for people who may not know how I choose to spend my free time.