The Proceeds of Crime Act provided a very visible form of justice for communities. People were delighted to see the wealth and opulence so lavishly showcased by their apparently unemployed neighbour being whisked away on the back of a police car-transporter or advertised by a ‘House For Sale’ sign as the removal truck trundled away shortly after the prison van.
In 2005 I was promoted to DCI to head Brighton and Hove CID. Personal tragedy had struck the year before when my father died of cancer. I missed him terribly and we had forged an even stronger bond since he had saved our lives in the car crash.
His loss rocked me to the core but I was so proud when the Chief Constable awarded him a posthumous Certificate of Meritorious Service. An award for Special Constables was then commissioned in his name and a display was established in Brighton’s Old Police Cells Museum that marks his life and contribution to policing. My uniform is now displayed there next to his. Back together where we belong.
However, Dad was a strong, no-nonsense, proud man and he would have been thrilled that I had reached such a senior level at the place and in the job we both loved.
I did not go into this new job with any particular agenda other than to do the very best I could to make the city safer and for it to feel safer too. However, I had risen to a level where I could do something about our unjust drugs strategy. Sometimes you have to reach a certain rank to get your voice heard.
The flow of drugs into the city from places such as Liverpool, South London and Wolverhampton appeared unstoppable. We weren’t bad at taking out the dealers. The problem was, no-one in the police was doing anything to stem the users’ insatiable appetite for the stuff that was killing them. So as we locked up the latest gang of pushers more rocked up to meet the unrelenting demand.
Leadership guru Dr Stephen Covey once said, ‘Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.’ We needed to find a different wall.
It’s hard to prove a negative, such as how many people didn’t die or weren’t robbed, so it was always easier for the police’s effectiveness to be measured on the outputs, the things they did that were easy to count: seizures, arrests, warrants. I decided this was going to change. I wanted to talk about saving lives and getting people help rather than how much of this and what weight of that we happened to find, or how many doors we kicked in.
It was a risk. My career could come to a crashing halt. However, I had once been inspired by Chief Inspector Stuart Harrison. Stuart, a maverick with a mission, espoused the belief that ‘forgiveness is easier to obtain than permission’. This stuck in my thoughts as I tried something different.
We were going to find a new way of fighting this unwinnable war on drugs. Our old tactics weren’t working; they never really had. I became like a stuck record going round saying ‘users belong in treatment, dealers belong in prison’. I knew we could slow the demand, get people well again, lock up dealers and cut crime.
Thankfully, I had two right-hand men whose character and vision were critical to what I wanted to do.
My kids used to say when my phone rang at home, ‘Is that Paul again?’ DI Paul Furnell pops up in Dead Tomorrow as the switched-on intelligence manager that he is. Now a Detective Superintendent, he is one of those sickening people: tall, good-looking, intelligent, likeable yet very persistent. He’d call day and night.
The Brighton Divisional Intelligence Unit, which he ran, was not so much the engine room of the division, more its furnace. The energy generated in their expansive open-plan office was white hot. Nothing could ever wait until tomorrow, jobsworths were excluded, everyone was fired up to catch the bad guys and catch them now. In the middle of it was Paul acting as ringmaster, whipping the team into frenzies of activity. The downsides were that he regarded his team’s overtime budget as being a monthly rather than annual allowance and if he had something he wanted to do, he would badger me into submission. A pain in the proverbial but he got stuff done and I needed that.
Sergeant Richard Siggs — Siggsy — was a giant with a big heart. A county rugby coach and former public order trainer, he wasn’t the first person you would think of as suitable to cajole drug users and down-and-outs into treatment and shelter. However, he had already won the national Tilley Award for his work with the street-homeless. His colossal physique together with his gentle nature had a tremendously persuasive effect on people who needed convincing that they should seek help. Tough love, he called it. One reformed drug user, Sean, once told me, ‘If you have Siggsy behind you telling you to go into treatment, you kind of have to go, don’t you!’
The street market works in the city exactly as explained in Dead Man’s Footsteps, as Grace follows a ‘migration’ of users towards their dealer, Niall Fisher, observing their attempts at furtive behaviour.
These migrations are fascinating to watch. A dealer will arrive at a particular place. Word would get out that they were there and dozens of users would emerge from alleyways, squats and the like, briskly descending on the pusher. Following swift, almost imperceptible exchanges of cash and drugs, all would evaporate into the ether, leaving no trace of the trade in death that had just occurred.
So I got Paul to take over the enforcement role of what became Operation Reduction, relentlessly targeting such dealers, catching them in the act, getting them banged up and denying them time to set down roots.
Siggsy, together with the inspirational Director of Crime Reduction Initiatives, Mike Pattinson, developed a partnership that identified the most criminally active drug addicts. Cops and drugs workers patrolling the streets together hunted down those who needed treatment and from whom the city needed a rest. They were given a stark choice: enter the Op Reduction treatment programme that we had created and remain there or be targeted by the police and locked up. A carrot and stick approach but, with Siggsy and his team providing the ‘or else’ factor, in four years over 500 users went into treatment who wouldn’t have otherwise. Meanwhile, during the same period, Paul’s teams arrested around 600 dealers all of whom, faced with the weight of evidence against them, pleaded guilty.
The users were what we branded ‘revolving door prisoners’. We first meet one such convict, Darren Spicer, the fictional prison-dwelling burglar, in Dead Like You. A high achiever at school but his chances blighted by the effects of his father breaking his back falling through a roof, his abusive mother and a spell in an approved school, he inadvertently books himself a one-way trip to the hopeless oblivion that drug addiction brings. A victim of circumstance, like Sam, his whole life becomes a cycle of prison, craving and offending. Branson once tells him that they haven’t bothered to change his bed sheets in Lewes Prison during one of his brief episodes of liberty. They probably hadn’t. The name might be fictitious but the story is spot-on.
The users Siggsy and Mike were targeting were given special treatment to help them break this futile cycle. Their possession and use of drugs was not subject to criminal sanction provided they went to, and stayed in, treatment. Yes, I had to defend falling arrest rates; yes, the numbers of drug seizures fell (although the volume increased thanks to Paul’s focus on the bigger fish); but we cut crime, saved money and saved lives. Not bad going — and I slept soundly at night.
Some sections of the press questioned whether this top cop had gone soft. A government minister made specific mention that the government did not support my views on decriminalization. Thankfully I convinced my bosses that this approach would, in the long run, be more effective and humane than our traditional approaches. As time went on, my critics started to see sense in what I was doing. Brighton was hailed for all the right reasons.