Page 85 - Once a copper 10 03 2020

the squandered opportunities criminal choices had denied them. By the end
of my attachment, I knew many of them on a first name basis, but I was never
so naïve to let them call me anything other than ‘Boss’.

Birds of a feather flock together. Mixing ethnic groups, whilst encouraged in
free diverse society these days, was not considered wise back in the eighties.
Jamaicans and West Indian prisoners were housed together. The Eastern
European prisoners had to be carefully segregated as did the Indian/Asian
caste inmates with violently opposing religious views.

Whilst I did pick up a little of the difference in cultures, I was and remain no
expert on diversity. A factor that went in my favour in practice, was that I’ve
never acquired enough knowledge to form judgments of any culture or
community, positive or otherwise. I always felt that to do so would affect our
ability to remain impartial.

My three months were soon up, and I was by now yearning for the streets of
Erdington and Kingstanding, to get back to the job I joined to do and had
missed sorely every day of my absence. My last shift was as it started, an early
turn. This gave me the chance to say my farewells to the inmates I’d had a
few humorous or interesting exchanges with. One such experience sticks in
my memory for less pleasant reasons.

Three lads, two Jamaicans and a Rastafarian shared a cell at the end of a
landing on the ground floor. Over the weeks of their remands, we’d shared a
few musical likes and dislikes. They had been surprised at my knowledge and
liking of reggae, a favourite genre of my youth. More than the obvious Bob
Marley and the Wailers, we exchanged views on our taste for lesser known
artists and their recordings. I would receive strange looks from fellow officers
and inmates alike when a couple of us would break out into ‘Police and
Thieves’ by Junior Marvin or ‘War in a Babylon’ by Max Romeo. If only my
colleagues knew that many of these songs were in fact anti establishment in
their themes, but in truth, I just liked the music.

On this my last day, I said my farewells to the reggae rogues as I called them,
as they were being escorted from the cells over to Court for their next
remand hearings. As was part of my duties, I went to their cell to give it a
once over before they returned. On one of the mattresses, I saw a note on
which was scruffily scrawled in a language I recognised as Rastafarian Patois,
(a derivative of Jamaican Rastafarian used in the UK). It read:

“Boss yuh ok di dreads tank di babylon”* (*translated roughly, ‘your cool,
three of us thank the policeman).

I smiled as I read the note which had been left on top of a sock left lying on a
mattress. (I’d not seen them in anything but bare feet). I was to thank my Page85
lucky stars for my three months of ‘trust no-one training’, and the advice to