On suspicion
Chapter 2. The duck principle
Our eyes met across a crowded street. It was suspicion at first sight. It was certainly a whirlwind relationship; the glance became a look and I made my advance towards him. I had never met or even seen him before. Then, twenty seconds later he lied to me, so I arrested him. I had only a few years in ‘The Job’, so I was probably more surprised than he was; he, after all, knew that he had just got out of a stolen car, whereas I could only guess. Or suspect. Or have reasonable grounds to suspect a crime.
I was a uniform constable, complete with traditional dark blue tunic, silly helmet and even sillier stick. Like Dixon of Dock Green, the kindly ‘bobby on the beat’ who had captured the hearts of the nation on 1950s TV. Except I looked about twelve years old (like all new cops) and Dixon was a mature fatherly figure.
Some people are naturally suspicious and can be professionally trained to apply their aptitude, but the rest of us have to learn it. The best possible training in my view is to be a patrolling police officer, faced with a daily diet of people who may or may not be worthy of suspicion in a host of puzzling situations.
Failing that you can be trained in suspicion. Some readers may even have heard of the “Suspicionometer” and the concept that suspicion can be incrementally built. In a ‘suspicion’ lesson, students are given a scenario and asked to individually ‘score’ how suspicious they think it is on a line between ‘0’ and ‘10’. They then discuss it in groups and agree a ‘score’ and the group is asked to explain their grounds for suspicion.
We also teach the memorable ‘Duck Principle’. If it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck.
The man I met that day, was just parking a car, when he looked across at me. My eyes happened to alight on his car just as he pulled up and stopped. He was, however looking at me, so I looked at him back. I was a constable in full uniform and he was driving a stolen car so it is easy to understand his interest. I was familiar with where he stopped, outside the railway station, where people were often dropped off, but where double yellow lines discouraged people from stopping. OK, double yellow lines meant you are not allowed to stop at all, even for a bit, but that’s where ‘officer discretion’ comes in. Dozens of drivers would stop there every day, drop off their passengers and go. But that was not what happened on this day.
Our glance became a look and then all four doors of the car opened simultaneously and four men got out. Now suspicion has been described as your subconscious mind analysing data faster than your conscious mind can process. The simultaneous door opening and four men getting out of the car made me pay attention, as you might do when you notice a duck in the street. Their action looked synchronised, urgent and a bit, well, odd. Then they walked off in different directions. They didn’t look back. They didn’t say or even nod goodbye to their erstwhile companions. They walked off purposefully in a way that could, if necessary, be described in evidence. When you think about this, it is very odd behaviour indeed. They were not, of course, waddling like ducks, but they were walking like ducks and my Suspicionometer was leaping across the dial.
I walked purposefully too. I couldn’t intercept all four, and there was no time to call for back-up, so I just intercepted the driver. When I say “intercepted”, I wasn’t some kind of missile, I just walked across his line of walking and spoke to him, he stopped and he spoke to me. I said, “Is that your car, sir?” And then he quacked, “What car?”
He lied to me. In the circumstances, it was a silly lie, so I almost laughed. It was not the best lie, he was only twenty feet from the car and he knew I had been watching him. I have got used to bare-faced lying now. “You’re under arrest”, I said. “Driving a stolen car”, I said.
There was no dispute, no struggle, just head-down acceptance. We walked back to the car and I called up the police van to take him to the police station. He was driving a stolen car, it turned out. There could have been other explanations for four car occupants to simultaneously depart upon sight of a uniform cop, but that is why we need trained, expert police officers to patrol our streets.
On reading this story, as a non-police reader, or worse still, a lawyer, you might be thinking of all the possible innocent reasons for four guys getting out of a car. But, whilst you are doing that, the suspects have all walked off, forever. Leaving another crime unsolved, another criminal walking free. In my first year of service I would probably not have seen the car at all, in the second year I might of thought ‘that’s odd, I had better give the abandoned car a ticket’. By my third year I was on proactive patrol, looking for crime and criminals, when not distracted by reactive work.
Most operational police officers spend their time being reactive, attending calls to incidents and crime scenes. For reactive work, there is a useful ABC acronym: Accept nothing; Believe no-one; Check everything. For proactive work, we use suspicion. It is the basis of ‘Intelligence Led Policing’, which in my view was a key factor in the collapse of the reported crime rate from the late 1990s. Suspicion is the basis for the ultimate weapon in the proactive policing toolkit, financial investigation (following the money) truly developed from the early 2000s.
I was pleased with this arrest. By then I had three or four years’ service as a uniform patrol officer and was beginning (I felt) to be moderately competent at this kind of ‘proactive’ work. I was never going to be a star, I was often in awe of colleagues on my shift who were much quicker than me in assessing situations. I suspect being a graduate slowed me down, I overthought things. There has been a trend in recent years for police officers to become graduates early in their service. I have not yet heard a compelling case for this costly innovation. During the early 1980s there had been a scheme for existing officers to be put through university, but it had been dropped. This was primarily because Thatcher’s doubling of police pay in 1979 had attracted so many graduates that the police did not need the scheme anymore. This, in the police, is what we call a ‘clue’. Having even one about policing, if you are a policymaker, is so much better than not having one.
I was gaining experience though, I didn’t keep a tally of arrests, but I used to pop the spare carbon copy of the charge sheet in my tray. We had no desks, no computers, we each had one grey steel tray, in a huge wooden rack with everyone else’s. Each tray was a couple of inches deep and a bit bigger than a sheet of A4 for all correspondence. During my first twelve months I reached a hundred charge sheets and stopped counting. The vast majority of these were ‘reactive’ cases, shoplifters ‘given into custody’, people wanted for failing to turn up at court, people arrested at an incident whose arrest was necessary. Where I worked at that time, on an average semi-inner London borough, seven or eight thousand people would be arrested each year.
I have since used the example to teach suspicion, asking classes of would-be investigators, what plausible explanation is there for four young men simultaneously leaving a car as described? Given ten minutes to consider the problem, the students conclude that the action is taken to avoid arrest for a crime.
They conclude that there is insufficient time for the driver to explain the situation to his passengers, so they must already know what the situation is and understand the imminent threat to each of them posed by an advancing policeman. Furthermore, their action is too dramatic to be justified by something trivial, such as trying to avoid blame for a parking infraction. Similarly, the driver was too spooked by his own guilty knowledge, to try and talk his way out. If it was just a parking ticket, he would surely just have just accepted it.
As Sherlock Holmes himself concluded, “Once you rule out the impossible, whatever remains— however improbable— must be true.”
Don't dismiss all lawyers Tristram. When I was a very junior member of the bar I saw quite a few criminal trials. I would say some of us - even lawyers - are naturally suspicious especially once we see what criminals are capable of. Not all lawyers spend their time defending the guilty. Most lawyers want the police to act more quickly to detect and prevent crimes and recognise laws need to evolve to meet the current threats.
Wise words, Tris, and all true..I don't know where you started, however, but I wish I had been there. I had the misfortune to be posted to ID 2 years after the Met took over Airport Division. It was 7 months until I made a crime arrest, an ABH at a Queen’s Jubilee street party in Stanwell, given to me by the heavily experienced crew of Hunter 2 area car, for whom I was tail gunner/observer. Crime arrests, apart from shoplifters from shops in the terminals, were few and far between. I got on the crime squad on the back of 32 in my 2 year probationary period, which was considered outstanding. Nevertheless, spotting suspicion was indeed a learned craft, honed by watching older, experienced officers who had learned their craft at proper police manors like yours. As you know, I took took my police degrees much later in my career, and they really helped my research and reporting skills, but being a graduate at the start wouldn't have helped at all.