A Day in the Life of a Riot Police Officer

Long days and even longer nights

On Monday 8th August I come into work as usual at 2.30pm to prepare for a late shift. We were due to be on duty until midnight. Today is my team’s fourth shift on as we’ve been working over the weekend watching the events in London unfold and preparing ourselves for any potential fallout. On my arrival I’m greeted with a larger amount of officers in the station than usual, it soon transpires that the early turn officers who have been on since 7am, and should be off at 4pm, have been told they have to remain on duty until further notice. It appears that we have started to see smatterings of disorder in Birmingham city centre and we are preparing for the worst!

The decision is made and the early turn officers who are trained in public disorder tactics are told to get their kit together and mobilised to the city centre. The lates trained officers are also told to get their kit ready should they be required to back up their colleagues. Not every officer is trained in public disorder tactics so not everybody can be used; those who aren’t trained are used to fill in where trained officers have been abstracted. My fellow sergeant and I brief our officers at 3pm and we go about the normal business of policing, despite the fact that all hell appears to have broken lose in and around the city. We still have a responsibility to continue our everyday duties of protecting and serving the public who live in our area of responsibility, for many communities life went on as normal.

About 9pm I get the call I need to gather 7 other officers together, all trained we all need to get kitted up into ‘code 1’ - this is full riot protection including helmets and flameproof protective clothing - and make our way to the staging area for a briefing and deployment into the city. The officers who were mobilised earlier from across the force are struggling to deal with the levels of disorder that are breaking out right across the centre of Birmingham. It isn’t long before we are put together with 2 other teams of officers identical to mine, allocated an Inspector to take command, and sent into the centre of the disorder. 

We now have an Inspector, 3 Sergeants including me and 21 officers split into 3 vans and tasked with dealing with 100s of people damaging and looting across the city centre. We hear reports of the Mailbox being attacked, the Bullring and large numbers of shops and businesses across the city being subject to random attacks by large gangs, damage being caused, fires being started and large amounts of looting. We also experience missile attacks by the rioters, injuring several officers in the disorder.  The scariest report we hear is that groups have been seen with petrol bombs and heading towards Police lines. We have the advantage of seeing what has happened in London and start making arrests as soon as we’re on the ground. On the first night of disorder we arrested nearly 150 from across the city, seeking to dissuade people from carrying on their criminal behaviour.

This carried on for 2 days and by Wednesday all officers on rest days were called back into work and there was talk of all officers and staff leave being cancelled. On the first night I was on until 5am Tuesday morning dealing with disorder throughout the city, but there were also officers still on duty from earlier, they were approaching a 24 hour shift. The following day I again started at 3pm and worked through till 6am. Come Wednesday we had officers working 12 hour night shifts on patrols throughout the force area providing both reassurance and a visible deterrent to would be offenders. These crazy hours continued for the rest of the week and into the following week. Officers on my team worked for 13 days straight, mostly 12 hour shifts with about 24 hours off in the middle of the set, this was repeated up and down the country in every force.

Encouragement from the masses

All this aside what has really encouraged me over the last few weeks is the overwhelming support we received from the ordinary law-abiding people across the force area. Messages of gratitude were posted on social networking sites, websites and sent into forces, interviews were conducted on news channels and the majority of these were very supportive of the Police action. These words of thanks were also backed up by the hundreds of people across the country who got involved with the clean-up, arriving on the scenes after the disorder with brooms, shovels and tools to help rebuild the communities that had been marred by this inexcusable behaviour.

It is amazing to see what can be achieved when communities come together with statutory agencies; it brings the communities themselves closer together and gives them a real sense of purpose and a shared goal, at the height of the troubles; communities became united in support and worked together to repair the damage.

All credit should be given to those communities affected for the way that they pulled together and I also feel that credit should be given to Tariq Jahan the father of murdered Haroon Jahan who, despite his loss, appealed for calm and was heard across the nation. I believe that this marked the turning point of the disturbance; it could have deteriorated so much further.

I hope this has given you a little bit of an insight into my world, as a serving officer I’d like to take the opportunity to thank my colleagues up and down the country, the general public for their support and gratitude and organisations like ROC that supported us in prayer.