The Criminal Alphabet (10 page)

The
bottle squad
is an
undercover plainclothes squad dedicated to investigating and catching pickpockets.
They mingle with crowds in city centres, railway stations and shopping centres and
try to catch pickpockets in the act. They're known as the bottle squad because of
the criminal slang for working pickpockets, ‘on the bottle', meaning to follow
someone closely. The London bottle squad, based at West End Central police station,
had a less than savoury reputation in the late 1970s and early '80s for
fitting
people
up
, but they were certainly
efficient at
harassing the
dippers
and keeping
them out of the West End.

See
the Bull

Some black youths call the police
boy dem
, implying that they are no more than boys. The West
Indian patois ‘dem' is a corruption of ‘them', so a literal translation would be
‘boys, them'.

Chimps
is how regular
police officers refer to their less qualified brethren the Police Community Support
Officers (PCSO); although they wear a uniform, they can't issue warrants or make
arrests. It's an acronym for Completely Hopeless In Most Police Situations. Generally, the
police do not have much respect for PCSOs, and think of them as ‘plastic coppers'.
Chimps are sometimes known as ‘hobby bobbys', a reference to the fact that PCSOs
only work part-time.

Coco
is Scottish slang
for the police, named after the popular children's cereal Coco Pops (rhyming slang:
Coco Pops = cops). It's a pretty mild piece of slang on the face of it, but it's
also a bit barbed, as there was a famous clown called Coco, and most Scottish
villains will refer to the police as ‘a bunch of clowns'.

In police slang, a
collar
is somebody who has been arrested, as in ‘I done well
with that burglary case, made two decent collars', from the days when a police
officer had to physically grab suspects by the collar in order to make an
arrest.

See
Pinch

There are several explanations as to how
copper
became slang for the police. I've heard that it comes
from the copper badges the first police force wore, or from the fact that their wage
was a (copper) penny a day. Some people say it's from the acronym for Constable On
Patrol. I don't know which is the correct explanation, but it's still very common
and one of the few less insulting slang words. It was very big in American gangster
films of the 1930s and '40s, frequently used by James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and
George Raft, the big-screen gangster actors of the period. Think Jimmy Cagney in
White Heat
– ‘A copper, a dirty, stinkin' copper …'

See
Old Bill
,
Rozzer

Copsicles
is a slang
term for the new breed of police officers who patrol on bicycles, particularly apt
in the winter months, when they have to brave the bad weather. It's a play on the
words ‘cop', ‘popsicle' and ‘cycles'.

A ‘high-profile' criminal will almost
inevitably become a target for various police squads. In my own experience with the
Flying Squad, I was often a target. A squad will put a suspect under surveillance,
follow them, tap their phone, put a tracking device or listening bug on their
vehicle and note their every move and word to gather ‘intelligence' that might be
used as evidence in any attempted conviction. The squad will do the same to the
suspect's family, friends and business acquaintances. Usually, each target (the
people the police deem to be a part of a suspect's ‘criminal network') is given a
number, so the main target is known as
Target 1
and anyone else the
police are interested in are Target 2, Target 3, and so on.
Crossing targets
is when a target being watched by one squad (say, the Flying
Squad) makes contact with a target being watched by a different squad (say, the
Anti-terrorist Squad). The two targets won't know (if the police are good at their
job or very lucky) they are being watched, but it will be noted by both squads that
there's a connection between the targets and they'll have to decide which squad
takes precedence. A lot of professional criminals mix with a diverse group of
acquaintances who usually have their fingers in more than one pie. For example, a
quartermaster for an armed robbery team might get firearms from someone with a
connection to terrorism, or a professional burglary team may fence goods through
someone who has a connection to car ringing. The world of the professional criminal
is a relatively small one.

See
Ringers and Clones
,
Target 1

Crushers
was a nickname
for the police, popular in the nineteenth century, suggesting their brutality. It
was originally a naval term for the Royal Navy Regulating Branch, who policed
sailors and seamen and were classed as ‘hard men' who would brook no nonsense and
were quick to violence.

C
***
-stable
is an insulting term that
emphasizes the first syllable of ‘constable'; it's usually used to wind up any
police officers within hearing range, often by Saturday-night drunks and
100-yard heroes
.

Darbies
are handcuffs.
Nobody knows for sure where the word comes from. Some say it's because, when two
prisoners were handcuffed together for transport they were known as Darby and Joan;
others that the name probably comes from the phrase ‘Darby's bonds', meaning a rigid
bond and named after an infamous sixteenth-century usurer. It's very old-fashioned
and is rarely used nowadays.

See
Double-cuffed

Desk jockey
is a
disparaging term for any officer who prefers paperwork to patrolling or ‘real'
police work. Some officers are confined to their desks due to illness or injury, but
it's the permanent desk jockey who chooses this line of work who is held in
contempt.

In Manchester, the police are known as
Dibble
, as in ‘I nearly had the door open, then Dibble shows up
with the
blues and twos
screeching', after the police officer in
the children's cartoon
Top Cat
, about a gangster-style cat who lives in a
dustbin and his alley-cat gang. They are forever scheming to pull the wool over the
local beat cop, Officer Dibble. Dibble is a stickler for the rules but also very
stupid.

To be
done up like a
kipper
means to be stitched up or treated very badly. The phrase comes
from the fact that kippers are caught, gutted, boned and smoked before they're
eaten. According to most professional criminals, the police are experts at doing
people up like kippers.

Cockney rhyming slang:
ducks and
geese
= police.

Ekky
is another word for
the police and comes from the fact that, when seen in the rear-view mirror of a
vehicle, the police sign is backwards – ECILOP (‘ekkylop', which is shortened to
ekky). Slang names for the police can be extremely localized and rarely heard beyond
a specific manor or region. For example, in Streatham, South London, the police are
known as ‘the shrubs' because Streatham police station is situated on Shrubbery
Road. But this name would mean nothing to people who do not live or steal in
Streatham.

This is a police acronym for false and
malicious information. Some people, for various reasons, will use the police and the
law in order to satisfy their own agendas.
F&M
is particularly
prevalent in rape and other sex-offence cases and there have been many
well-publicized instances in recent years of both women and men making false and
malicious allegations against people.

FIDO
is an acronym (Fuck
It, Drive On) used by the police for any crime or offence they witness but deem
unworthy of their attention. Some police officers only want ‘big' nickings – the
serious crimes such as burglary, robbery, serious assault – and can't be bothered
with petty crimes such as littering, vandalism or loitering. Some police officers
are very ambitious and they know that the way to gain promotion is by going for
serious crimes and offenders. A good ‘thief taker' will always be admired and
revered in the police force, but a copper who nicks every offender, no matter how
petty the offence, is classed as a nuisance who just creates paperwork. Of course,
there are police officers for whom ‘zero tolerance' is the only way to go.

The filth
is usually
reserved for the non-uniformed branches of the police, or the CID, and is just
another example of the absolute contempt most criminals have for the police. It was
very commonly used in the 1960s and '70s, when there was widespread corruption in
the British police force, in particular among the CID and plainclothes squads.

A
fit-up
is when corrupt
police officers falsify or fake evidence in order to get someone convicted of a
crime. They will ‘fit' the evidence to the suspect so it looks as though they are
guilty. Some police officers will do this as a matter of course if they truly
believe the suspect is guilty. A lot of small-scale police corruption is considered
fair game, things such as ‘verballing' (saying that suspects have admitted something
when they haven't), planting evidence or priming witnesses by ‘accidentally' giving
them information about a suspect so that they will be predisposed to believe them
guilty.

See
Noble-cause corruption
,
Verbals

Flatfoot
is an
old-fashioned word for uniformed police, not much used nowadays as police officers
rarely do foot patrols. It acknowledged the amount of walking done by a uniformed
officer pounding the beat and the idea that this would lead to them having flat
feet.

Four-up
is four people
in a vehicle, as in ‘Yes, Sarge, it's a Ford Cortina with four-up.' It's used mostly
by the police but sometimes also by criminals.

To
frame
someone is to
fix the evidence of a crime to fit the person you suspect, or would like to accuse,
for it, and is a means of gaining a conviction when there is little or no
chance of arresting the real offender. Framing can involve
something as simple as planting a small piece of evidence that points to the
suspect, or as complicated as a large-scale conspiracy in order to get people
convicted. Think of the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, the Bridgewater Three,
the Broadwater Farm Three, the Cardiff Newsagent Three, Judith Ward, Stefan Kiszko,
Barry George, Colin Stagg … the list goes on. These are all victims of
wrongful convictions, and all were cleared, eventually, by the courts.

See
Noble cause corruption

The fuzz
is American in
origin and was in popular usage among the hippies of the Haight-Ashbury area of San
Francisco during the ‘flower power' years of the 1960s and '70s to describe the
police. Although some members of the public were then growing their hair long, the
police and most figures of authority favoured very short hair, usually a buzz cut or
flat-top, which left only a ‘fuzz' of hair on the head. Any undercover plainclothes
police officers could be recognized by their short fuzz of hair.

Gavvers
is a Romany term
for the police, as in ‘You don't wanna be going down there, mush, there's gavvers
all over the place.' Any place where Gypsys encounter a large police presence is
known as ‘gavvers' town', and the name came about because whenever there was a
police action to move Gypsies on, the police would ‘gavver' (gather) them up and put
them back on the road. ‘Gavvers' has now entered the world of everyday criminal
slang and is used not only by Gypsies and Travellers but by all sorts of
criminals.

This is police slang for a black person,
as in ‘Yeah, I nicked a couple of
groids
last night, it was a good
shift.' The reason police once used this offensive word is because on all their
official forms they have to describe the ethnicity of those arrested, of the victims
of crime and the witnesses, and the box they used to tick for Afro-Caribbeans in
less enlightened times read ‘Negroid'. Police officers shortened this to groid and
felt they could use it and the general public wouldn't twig, so it was a secretive
way to express racist views.
See
Police IC
codes