The Criminal Alphabet (12 page)

A
pinch
is police slang
for an arrest, dating from the days when police officers had to pinch the collar of
an individual.

See
Collar

In a
plain brown wrapper
describes police in an unmarked vehicle and originated with the CB radio craze of
the early 1980s, when a lot of American trucker slang made its way into the
language.

Plod
is an inoffensive
nickname for uniformed police officers, after PC Plod in Enid Blyton's Noddy books,
and still much used today. The female equivalent is PC Plonk.

IC
(Identification
Codes), which were introduced in the 1970s, are used by the police in radio
communications and written reports in order to describe the ethnic origin of
suspects and witnesses. Officially, there are seven IC codes, though there is also
an unofficial eighth code. The ethnic
codes of people are usually
initially attributed to them by police officers on visual assessment. If someone is
then arrested or stopped for a search, they may be asked their ethnicity and police
are required to use this self-defined ethnicity over their own assessment. Police IC
codes are as follows: IC1 is White, European; IC2 is Mediterranean, Hispanic; IC3 is
African/Afro-Caribbean; IC4 is Indian, Pakistani or any other South Asian; IC5 is
Chinese, Japanese or any other South-east Asian; IC6 is Middle Eastern; and IC7
(sometimes known as IC0) is ‘origin unknown'.

See
IC8

POV
is a police acronym
for Personally Owned Vehicle, which means something other than a marked and liveried
police vehicle or one of the nondescript vehicles used by plainclothes or undercover
officers. A lot of police officers class themselves as never being off duty so, even
in their leisure time, they will be on the lookout for crime and criminals and may
arrest someone who is wanted or who commits a crime they happen to see. When filling
in reports about these incidents, if they were driving their own car they will use
the acronym POV.

A
ready-eye
is an
ambush, particularly when officers are hoping to apprehend armed robbers. If the
police get information that a robbery, or other crime, will be going off at a
certain place at a certain time, they will get to the target area long before the
criminals and position themselves discreetly close by. They could be disguised as
traffic wardens, builders, road workers or tramps. Once the crime
is in progress, or very soon after, the police will reveal themselves and ambush the
villains. For a serious armed robber, the ready-eye is a kick in the teeth, as not
only will he usually be nicked, he will also know that someone close has informed on
him, as that's the only way the police will have come by the information. Sometimes
a ready-eye will be activated if the police have been following a suspect or
suspects for some time and have a good idea of what the villains are after and
when.

Rozzer
, meaning a police
officer, is a derivation of the slang word ‘cozzer', which is itself a derivation of
the slang word
copper
.

See
Copper

RTA
is an acronym for
Road Traffic Accident. Any crash or ding involving vehicles is classed as an RTA,
which is the shorthand police use when they fill in their contemporaneous notebooks
or write official reports. The police do love an acronym.

An acronym used between police officers,
RTFL
stands for Read The Fucking Log – an instruction for
officers to familiarize themselves with the log recording what has been going on
before they come on duty.

SFQ
is a police acronym
for Stupid Fucking Question, usually in response to a query from a member of the
public or a superior officer, both of whom the police seem to hold in equal
contempt. As they are now under increased scrutiny in these times of mobile-phone
cameras and CCTV, the police are mindful that using acronyms and slang is necessary
in order to avoid embarrassment should they be recorded or overheard by the
public.

If a police officer says he's had a
shout
it means he's had an urgent radio message about a crime
in progress and he must go to the scene.

The Squad
is a police
nickname for the Flying Squad. A bit like Madonna or Beyoncé, this elite force of
coppers is so well known that it can dispense with its full name.

A
starburst
is when
police are chasing a stolen car containing more than one person, the car comes to a
halt and everyone inside jumps out of different doors and heads in different
directions. It's named after a firework called the starburst which shoots into the
air at great speed before exploding sparks and colours.

The suits
is a term used
by uniformed police officers for their plainclothes colleagues in the CID (obviously
because they don't wear police uniform).

The Sweedy
is any
plainclothes police squad from outside London. It's a play on
the
Sweeney
and ‘swede-bashers', which is what London police call anyone
who isn't from London. The Met class all other police forces as ‘farmers and
yokels', less sophisticated than them, and hate having them doing any investigation
on their patch. ‘The Sweedy' was originally coined during
Operation Countryman
, an investigation into corruption in the Flying Squad led by
the police forces of Hampshire and Dorset. Ever since, the Met have despised
non-London forces and use this term pejoratively.

See
Operation Countryman
,
the
Squad
,
the Sweeney

The
Sweeney
are the four London Flying Squads, which deal exclusively
with armed robbery in the capital (rhyming slang: Sweeney Todd = Flying Squad).
Sweeney Todd was the fictional demon barber of Fleet Street who killed his clients,
chopped them up and sold the meat to a local pie shop. The term has fallen out of
vogue with criminals ever since it came into common usage by the general public via
the 1970s television drama series of the same name.
The Sweeney
, starring
John Thaw and Dennis Waterman as DI Regan and DS Carter respectively, was very
popular and did much to glamorize the real Flying Squad. Regan and
Carter were portrayed as hard-drinking, womanizing thief-takers who liked nothing
better than a shoot-out or a punch-up with the villains they were hunting.
Unfortunately, the real Sweeney began to believe their own hype. Since the 1960s the
Flying Squad have been under investigation on many occasions for bribery and
corruption, and many Flying Squad officers have taken ‘early retirement' or been
dismissed. The official name for the Sweeney is SO8 (Special Operations 8), but most
armed robbers now refer to them as the
heavy
mob (because of their
penchant for violence),
the Squad
, or Huns with guns. In 2011 Ray
Winstone and Ben ‘Plan B' Drew starred in a feature film directed by Nick Love based
on the original television show. The film was a blatant glamorization of the Flying
Squad and depicted the officers almost as superheroes who run around London firing
off machine guns, cracking lame jokes and working in state-of-the-art offices.
Needless to say, this was far from the truth, as the real Sweeney usually work out
of pokey offices in the back of police stations and are as terrified of being shot
by the armed robbers they hunt as the robbers are of being shot by them. The film
also intimated that Sweeney officers are in the job for life, when, in fact, their
tenure in the squad is usually for a maximum of four years. This rotation is so they
cannot get too comfortable in the job and succumb to corruption.

See
the Sweedy

When the police put a professional
criminal under surveillance they will give them a code name, usually
Target
1
if there are other targets involved. The importance of the target is
in direct relation to his number, so the top man is
Target 1, the
second most important in the organization is Target 2, and so on. It's handy for
radio shorthand when the police are following or watching criminals. The terminology
is pretty old hat now, though, as a lot of professional criminals use scanners to
listen in to police radios and understand the slang and jargon used by the
police.

See
Crossing Targets

Three Ns
is offensive
police slang for any female who appears to be dressed in a ridiculous or outrageous
manner. It stands for No mum, No mates, No mirror, meaning there is no one or
nothing to tell them how terribly they're dressed and/or made up before they venture
out on to the streets.

Tinned pork
is a
derogatory term used by villains for police officers in vehicles, as in ‘Leave it,
leave it, a tin of pork has just pulled in'.

Tit head
is a derogatory
term for a uniformed constable, based on the shape of the helmet they wear, and is
used by non-uniformed staff to express their amusement and contempt at their
‘inferior' colleagues. The phrase ‘take the tit off your head' means to relax and
stop being a copper for a minute.

Trojan units
are police
units, usually consisting of two or three officers, who patrol in high-speed cars
containing a gun safe. The officers are all
AFOs
(Authorized
Firearms Officers) and the safe contains weapons such as submachine pistols,
automatic rifles, shotguns and gas grenades. The officers have a personal sidearm –
usually the Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol – and are on alert for any calls
involving firearms, serious violence or terrorism. In London the Trojan units
usually use Volvo estates, highly tuned performance models, so they can get to
call-outs very quickly. En route they might receive radio confirmation from a chief
inspector allowing them to open the gun safe and get the big guns out. They got
their name from the Trojan Horse of Greek mythology, the huge wooden horse left
outside the fortified gates of the city of Troy after the siege had, supposedly,
ended. The Trojans pulled the horse inside the gates, not realizing that it was full
of battle-hardened and heavily armed Greek warriors, who descended from the belly of
the horse in the dead of night and opened the city gates to the rest of the Greek
army. Let's face it, how many villains are going to think that a Volvo estate would
hide a high-performance engine and more firearms than some South American
dictatorships? These units were well named.

Undies
is youth slang
for undercover police officers. There are many cases of police officers going
undercover in order to infiltrate criminal or protest organizations, which involves
a police officer adopting a completely new identity, sometimes that of a hardened
criminal, in order to gain
the acceptance and trust of their
targets. Some undercover policemen immerse themselves in this murky world for years
on end, and it has recently come out that some of them instigated, planned and
committed crimes while undercover. Unfortunately, the laws of the UK do not include
a defence of agent provocateur (as does the law in some countries), so if a police
officer (undercover or in plain sight) incites a citizen to commit a crime there
would be no defence for that citizen. Put simply, if a plainclothes police officer
inveigled his way into your life, worked hard at becoming your friend and then told
you there was easy money to be had from stealing or robbing something and you, after
much persuasion, succumbed to his cajoling and encouragement to commit a crime, you
would be arrested and convicted, and stating the fact that you would never have done
it without the intervention of an undercover copper would have no legal weight at
all. Watch out for the undies!

This term was very common up until the
PACE (Police And Criminal Evidence) Act was introduced in 1984, and is still used in
some cases.
Verbals
or ‘verballing' is when a police officer claims
that a criminal has said something incriminating, either at the moment of arrest or
in an interview. I, personally, have been verballed on many occasions. Verbals will
be recorded in a police officer's notebook soon after arrest and usually take the
form of an admission to a crime. The typical police notebook verbal will go
something like this:
‘The arrest was made at 12.47. I said to Mr Smith,
“You know why we are arresting you, don't you?” Smith replied, “Yes, I knew it was
coming, I'm just glad you've caught me before I ended up shooting someone.”' Of
course, Mr Smith may well
be an experienced career criminal and
would say nothing of the kind at the moment of arrest. The police officers see
verballing as a way to bolster their case; their notebooks will be read out in front
of a jury. If there are two or more police officers swearing that you spoke the
incriminating words and presenting their notebooks of contemporaneous notes as
evidence of this, some juries will be swayed. Since the PACE Act was introduced,
it's very hard to verbal someone in an interview, as interviews are now recorded,
but sometimes the police will claim that the accused made admissions on the way to
the interview room or in a cell. A friend of mine, who got tired of being verballed
by the police, decided to speak at the moment of his arrest for the robbery of a
security van. When the Flying Squad officers told him he was nicked, he said, very
loudly, ‘Okay, it's a fair cop, guv.' The police officers recorded these words in
their notebooks, very pleased that they didn't have to make anything up. But when my
friend got in front of a jury and the comments were read out, he just smiled and
told them, ‘Come on, d'you honestly think I would say that? It sounds like something
from an episode of
Z Cars
, or a line from some cheap black-and-white
British gangster film!' It seems the jury agreed with him, as he was found not
guilty. You could say he did a bit of reverse verballing. Nevertheless, despite the
PACE Act, verballing by the police remains a problem.