PTSD in the Police Service - it exists and is deadly

PTSD blights lives, it is not just a condition exclusive to the Armed Forces,

Writes Frank Whistler, who provided this piece...

'The job is what you make it...'

When I joined the Police service in the late 1980's an old Chief Inspector told me that on the first day in the job.

I had no idea what the future was going to be on that initial day, for me it was a change of career and just a means of putting something back into society and leaving it a better place at the end of things.

My service was cut short due to an injury received on duty, by the time I was retired on ill health grounds after about seven years of service, I had had about enough of the job to be honest. But it wasn't something that was just going to rest. The job came back to haunt me most days of most weeks for the next 20 years.

The career

Many people I knew in the job seemed to be able to navigate it without any real apparent stress or be subject to any really testing situations. Perhaps it was just some sort of destiny that although my time in that 'world' was relatively short, it was packed with what some might call 'adventure'. I certainly seemed to see more challenging situations than some of my colleagues.

Situations

The problem with an arena like this is that one moment you can be on foot around a town minding your own business and the next thing, an armed robbery at a bank has just gone off and you're picked up by a Patrol Car and off around the area looking for the offender.

That actually happened to me. On our drive around, I spotted a person on a railway station platform that matched the offender's description from the bank job and my colleague and I went to investigate - unarmed. 

This is no bullshitting or heroics, we went on to the platform and came around behind the person of interest and fortunately, it turned out that our 'suspect' was just an innocent football supporter on his way to a match. 

But that could easily have been a very nasty situation. (You just get in there and have to act. You don't really think about what could go wrong, that's the difference between ordinary citizens and those in the Police service. When most people go to work, their exposure to danger is often a lot less than ours.)

The incident all ended pleasantly and we just went back to what we were doing. They never did get the offender for it. But when you get too many of those occurrences building up, you need a safety valve to deal with it.

The hanged woman

I recall in our force that a policewoman was found hanged. The verdict was suicide. I didn't know her as she was from the other side of the county, but it made me wonder what drove her to this desperate action?

There had to be something that started that process. Why didn't she seek help? That was just the start of the obvious questions in my mind. At each stage of the events that led to her death, why did she not stop or get help? The answer is I don't know. I hope she has found peace.

Sadly, a young man I was at school with hanged himself aged around 27, a terrible waste. Colleagues of mine attended that one. Drugs was a major factor causing psychosis in his case, he got caught with drugs and charged and maybe that tipped him over the edge to take his own life, when his ideal of starting a new life abroad was torn to shreds by
that conviction.

Walking towards possible death

I happened to be walking back to the station one lunch time when a WPC I was with was approached by a member of Joe Public and reported a car with no number plates parked opposite a mainline railway station we were near to. 

In reality, it was off our ground and out of our jurisdiction, but we went to take a look anyway. The WPC was newly engaged, I decided that risking both our lives was stupid and she had more to risk losing than me.

So I gave her my radio and said 'There's no point in us both getting killed' and walked towards the car to investigate. Perhaps a stupid thing to do, someone could have been watching from across the tracks ready to set something off when I got near to it.

To cut a long story short, I'm still here. But for a few nasty moments there was always the possibility that it could have been a car bomb. The walk there to that car I can still recall, it was a lonely place to be. When you think about it afterwards, it really does shock you to consider that your life could have ended then.

There is a fine line between courage and stupidity. I just hope I was on the right side of it then. I thought about the situation afterwards and it did make me take a few deep breaths, then I just got on with things. 

That was just a situation that you had to act on, weighed against the possible distraction of shutting a 4 track mainline rail route which might have turned out to be a false alarm. I got away with it, it could have gone horribly wrong though.

Actions and consequences

The job can take a toll of people's relationships, even people in the job who marry people within, it doesn't always last and I've seen plenty of that happening. The WPC in the last snippet married, it didn't last long. Sadly.

What if I had been killed at that abandoned car? I guess its just the way it goes. Just another person who had died in harness. Or got lucky because I didn't. When I consider my late school friend's lost potential, what he could have done, it made me value things more. 

Because we often have to deal with things in the job that the average member of society doesn't, unless you can manage it, it can build up. These days there is counselling at the drop of a hat, 25 years ago, you just mostly got on with it and dealt with it as best you could.

Some did succumb to stress or alcohol, or gambling for example, but these last items are displacement mechanisms to push away the real cause of the problems. Realising and acting to do something about a recognised problem is a start.

Recognising the problem is the key. Not being able to see the wood for the trees is a big problem, some people can't see they have a problem. That's a dangerous situation starting to form.

Combat stress

The world has become more violent without a doubt since my time in the job, the root cause of most crime back then 25 years ago was to feed drugs habits and not much seems to have changed. DVD players, camcorders, alloy wheels, car stereo systems were the hot crime trends. Just to feed the habit, enough to buy a fix.

It was often the same old faces, doing the same old crimes, same old usually small price for the fenced goods to pay for a drug hit. 

I heard about combat stress and PTSD in respect of a program I saw about the Vietnam war and realised that some of what the American soldiers reported experiencing were things I could understand. 

To me, leaving the job when I was retired on ill health was sudden and final. Although I did continue to work occasionally with some colleagues on unfinished business, I ceased that after about three years, making a break and moving to a different country to make a new life. 

It was about then you'd start more to experience more night dreams where you'd be in a Police situation but you'd either be with no one you knew but they knew you or you'd be somewhere you knew. It was very inconsistent. But in those dreams you always felt a bit of an outsider and that the reason for being in this 'experience' was unfinished business. 

I'd had those dreams within the time in the job, but I suppose they were some sort of occupational hazard and probably discounted as being unusual because of the environment I was in.

But how to deal with it? Otherwise I had a pretty normal 9-5 type existence of sorts.

At the end of the day

Well, what now? How do I fix this? Will it get me? - The really big question was why was I continuing to have these dreams? It was a line in that film - 'Eight years later, they're still fighting the Vietnam war.' A way was needed of putting the old life 'to bed.' 

I worked out that the unfinished business was at the root of all this, but I realised that all I had done was enough in the job, I had had my experience in that arena and it was time to move on to do other things.

That I did professionally, but still these things plagued me. One day I embarked on a writing project which I thought about basing on my professional experience and wrote a fictional book about a fictional Police Force.

Maybe who knows, that the purpose of my service was for this end as part of some great plan? I had started writing novels after I left the job, whilst I looked for something else to do, maybe I was slowly dealing with the unfinished business through that. 

About twenty books later I started on the massive tome, it came to about 510 pages of A4 in all. There was the right mix of how life was then, how people are and a dollop of farce, because I saw plenty of that. Mindful of not giving away 'trade secrets' as such, I based my book on knowledge in the public domain and fictionalised events.

Some characters I based on people I knew or worked with, some on actors I thought could play the roles if it was filmed. The concept was to write a good book, but at the same time it did largely solve my situation. 

The unfinished business was now mostly finished, to the extent that the experiences are now just rare experiences. I was lucky, some can never shake off the unfinished business. Sometimes it winds up killing them. 

It all seems a long time ago. It was.

Mind how you go....

Just before I do, there is another compounding problem, the Police service is run along military type lines and it is easy to become institutionalised in the lower ranks - 

like those in the military also find after they leave, they have to think for them selves, self-start and just 'do things'. 

After years of following orders, this disconnect when added to the major disconnection can add to the strains of leaving 'the job' and act as an additional set of factors in 'tipping someone over.'

Supergrass 25 years on - whey they resonated for their generation

Supergrass playing Alright on Top of the Pops

Supergrass - Alright?

I first saw Supergrass playing on Top of the Pops performing their son 'Alright', which curiously featured Danny Goffey and Mick Quinn swapping instrument roles on this one.

Gaz Coombes toting the Burns Hank Marvin greenburst guitar 

Immediately as a guitarist (and Shadows music player), I spotted the front man (Gaz Coombes) with a Burns Hank Marvin greenburst guitar (designed by Shadows guitarist Hank Marvin in 1963 - check him out!), as the reverby pub piano intro to 'Alright' played, the song was catchy, it resonated and still (just) in my 20's, I thought it sounded great. I still do.

Looking back to this about a quarter of a century later, it is still one of my favourite songs. I was thinking about why good bands are successful. I came to the conclusion that it was because they resonate with their audience.

The young Supergrass - 

if you were in a band with your schoolmates you just understood this

Oxford's Supergrass came along in the Brit Pop era, along with a roll call of bands including Oasis, Blur, Pulp and any other number of post rave music performers. As with the above bands, they all resonated with their (mostly) young audiences who were growing up and finding their music.

If you were in a band with your schoolmates (as they were in those just pre-internet days), you'd likely done the apprenticeship of the pubs and clubs scene as I had done about a dozen years earlier. They'd honed their act live in front of an audience, not in the bedroom in front of the mirror. They weren't manufactured, they were doing their thing, their way. Something that has been largely lost these days with the image conscious industry.

'Alright' inspires and resonates in the same way the Beatles did with 'I wanna hold your hand'. It was upbeat, fresh, new, from a new band and just good. 'Alright' is still played on the radio today and it still sounds fresh and good, which is the sure marker that establishes it as a classic from the also rans of chart music that have largely faded into obscurity.

Supergrass - 'Moving', the CD single cover

Supergrass worked as a group well, as a four piece group, their sound was big and melodic, there isn't any real formal training to be a pop musician, you learn the instrument, get inspired, hopefully write your own songs and play. You need an ear for what sounds good, you need to write songs and find an audience for them. 

Another great track that resonates with me is their song 'Moving'. I came across it on a CD single in a local second hand shop early in the 2000's after I'd moved away from the South East, where I'd lived most of my life up until then. 

Travelling back home up the motorway from the South, I remember looking out over the fields in the fading light at a string of electricity pylons going out into the distance and the song 'Moving' came into my head, yes I had moved and it was a new life and a new place.

The later Supergrass

Again, if we take a Beatles analogy, comparing 'I'm only sleeping', a later Beatles track with its minor key sound, to 'Moving' with a lovely big opening chord which sounds like a minor chord, (but is a sustained chord) and there you have the 'introspective sound', someway away from the bright youthfulness of 'Alright'. 

In the same context, (as was 'Moving' for Supergrass,) 'I'm only sleeping' shows how the Beatles before them had matured in a short time from their initial years, to the more mature sound of what would be described as their later 'introspective' work. Indeed, as their audience matured and the world around them moved on too, so did they. I love playing around with the sound of fragmented and open chords in my songwriting. 

Is there room for more music from Supergrass as a band? I think so, Gaz Coombes remains interested in writing and performing and provided there is the will and the diary co-ordination, the group could still come together to make great music.

Inevitably though people will want to hear the early material. Early as it is, it should not be written off as immature, it is anything but, it is quality because it is still played years after it was in the charts. 

Look back at chart acts of the time from the mid 90's and study the top 40's lists of the time, how many of those records on there are played on the radio today? Not as many as you might imagine.  

The internet brings us many things but it has also brought us too much choice in some respects, many bands out there might put their own songs on YouTube, but they can be lost in the sea of songs, song how to play demo's and cover versions. 

The pubs and clubs putting on live music seems to be less than before, the money for playing in one is less than it ever was, and the opportunities to do so and get a career in music are less so - sadly it seems.

The genius of The Sweeney

Dennis Waterman and John Thaw in the Sweeney

Having nicked a gang of hardcore slags enjoy a post-pagga Players No6

In 1974, the television portrayal of the Police took a new turn. Gone were the cosy days of Z Cars and Dixon of Dock Green, BBC TV's stalwarts of tea-time level television and suitable for all. The era of bumbling Bobbies on the beat pushing bicycles was on the verge of becoming all over, lost in soft focus nostalgia and wouldn't be revived until the Heartbeat series of the mid 1980's.

ITV's Armchair Cinema productions in 1973, spawned 'Regan' -

the prototype of what would become 'The Sweeney.'

In came something new, more exciting, grittier and hard edged. The Sweeney.

The Sweeney evolved from an Ian Kennedy-Martin script called 'Regan,' a 90 minute ITV Armchair Cinema episode screened in 1973, that starred John Thaw as 'Regan', A Detective Inspector of the Metropolitan Police Flying Squad.

What is interesting to observe, is that if you stand back from it and analyse it, that the acting is superb as is the production. It is pretty much a seamless transition, when you compare it to the later 'Sweeney' series made from 1974-1978. It is like they walked off the 'Regan' set and on to the 'Sweeney' set.

That they got so much of Regan 'right' is testament to the quality of the actors as well as the script. This was the golden era of British television and with directors like Ted Childs used on the episodes. Ted Childs would later go on to the Morse series also starting John Thaw.

Having worked with the real Squad a couple of times when I was in the Police service, I can say that they are a different breed of officer. John Thaw's portrayal of a Flying Squad DI additionally far removed from that of the well dressed senior Detective,say someone such as Len 'Nipper' Reed of the Krays era, from only a few years back from the 70's.

Of course Len Reed was factual, whilst Regan was a representation, but likely drawn from the actors observing the real thing at hand. The service did need a good news story as there was a major anti-corruption drive in the early 1970's which often made headlines, for the wrong reasons.

The Flying Squad Ford Consul -

frequently driven hard in pursuit of the Scrotes

It wasn't just the suits that were different, it was the cars. Gone was the softly, softly approach of the Ford Anglia or Morris Minor Panda car, more a grab the collar unmarked 2 litre Ford Granada. The cars were driven hard, the chases more dangerous and often the outcomes were often not good.

Jack Warner as Sgt George Dixon -  a world away from the Sweeney

But this was a reflection of the way that things were in reality. This wasn't the cosy and chummy George Dixon world, this was the world of hardcore slags who often used weapons and drove to get away at any cost.

Hardcore Slags intercepted by the Sweeney

The era was notorious for armed robberies. With much cash carried to pay weekly wages, these were the days long before electronic banking was as widespread to the degree it is today. Any armoured (likely) Ford Transit van was therefore a Golden Goose, just waiting to be cornered by some hardcore slags, likely in a Mk2 Jaguar. Which was probably nicked.

There was more cash about in those days, bank notes were also destroyed after a set length of use and often these shipments for the incinerator were targeted by the armed blaggers of the day.

But going back to the series:

The Sweeney worked on a number of levels, a top quality cast that fitted together well, great acting, excellent script writing, exciting action, great camerawork, in fact every aspect was there. But, it was all done on a shoe string budget, with little flexibility for a take 2.

Often the episodes packed more into the first 5 minute 'taster' section than many progams did in 30 minutes. Each program sector was shot to provide a 15 minute or so window, between commercial breaks, as this series was shot for the ITV market, which was then Britain's only commercial TV station. Seems so long ago.

Jack Regan often came into conflict with his superiors

The Sweeney (and Regan) also showed something new, disrespect for authority in the job. Jack Regan was forever falling foul of his superiors and bending the rules to get results. The thing was that we were all on his side. We wanted him to rough up the blaggers, to nick them, to see the law was upheld. They didn't always win of course, like real life, but you know the types and they'll always come back for another go.

The series attracted some well known actors - like Diana Dors, here

and often gave the spotlight to then lesser known young actors, such as Ray Winstone

Hardcore action as in the episode 'thou shalt not kill'

one of the best episodes in my opinion

It was years later that I watched the Sweeney, as it was deemed 'unsuitable' when I was young and first shown. Funnily enough, a number of locations where I lived at the time of filming were often only a couple of streets away from where I was living or at school.

Indeed, when I was in the Police service years later, I had the job for about an hour to keep the traffic away from outside of a betting shop where ITV were filming a scene for Minder with Dennis Waterman, in about 1993 I recall. I felt like going up to him and saying 'You're nicked Sunbeam' for a joke, but he didn't look too happy, probably because it was chucking it down with rain, so I didn't.

Me doing some film extra work for television

The Sweeney has become a landmark of British television which also spawned two feature films. Looking back at some of the old episodes, we often see unknowns credited or not making appearances in the episodes, along side the seasoned actors, many of whom are now household names.

Although the Sweeney franchise finished in 1978, it could have done another season I feel. The acting was strong, the writing was consistently good, but perhaps John Thaw and others did not want to become typecast? Having been at it for four years of almost constant filming, I suppose we have to accept that they felt the series had come to its end.

We cannot go back and change that, but we do have a wealth of good episodes to watch. It is interesting to look at those old episodes and see how the world has changed, along with the fashions and the cars. Some of it is dated. Well, it all is really. But that gives it some nostalgic charm. Some may yearn for those uncomplicated days, some don't.

John Thaw later had a successful run as Inspector Morse

In this case, he drove a Mk2 Jaguar, rather than chased them

Post Sweeney, the big name actors had perhaps little trouble finding work in the post Sweeney years, the series has been repeated and likely continues to find appeal abroad. The quality of acting and the success of the episodes over 4 years guaranteed work and was a good line on the actor's CV.

Dennis Waterman went off to do the Minder series and other successful series mostly for ITV, John Thaw then starred in the legal drama Kavanagh QC, before his long run in the Inspector Morse series.

John Thaw played the Inspector Morse character differently to his Regan of the Sweeney days. Although, Morse still retains his ability to go off piste and ignore authority, frequently exasperating poor old Superintendent Strange in the process.

Sadly John Thaw succumbed to cancer, but the Morse series metamorphosed in to Lewis, with Morse's sidekick Kevin Whateley playing Sgt Lewis, promoted to Inspector Lewis and continuing the good work around Oxford.

Forty years on, the series still look good.