ME AND THE POLICE

PART ONE

I Join The Police

I had grown up in Chalk Farm, London surrounded by police as my poor family home was next to a block of flats occupied by police families and I played with some of the children there and our home was also diagonally opposite to the C10 Scotland Yard Stolen Car Squad offices and garage, under which was the tobacconists shop of which I had became manager after leaving school and I thus got to know a few of the C.I.D. officers from their upstairs offices as they used to come in to buy their cigarettes and sweets.

Whilst waiting for my police application to be processed, I was informed that it could take up to a year, I got a job for London Transport working as an underground train guard. Actually, I had applied to work as a bus driver but I failed the bus driving course, I had problems reversing the huge bus between two poles and was sent on a course to be a train guard instead. It sounds a simple undemanding kind of job doesn’t it? Actually I had to undergo a highly intensive training course at their training school at the White City in West London. You had to learn about the complete train driving and braking system and in the case of an emergency you had to be able to drive the train to safety by yourself, in fact you got to drive a real underground train with fare paying passengers during the course using the 2 different braking systems, one time at an underground station and the other at an outside train station. You then had to pass a very difficult technical exam, so don’t just think that those guys just open and close buttons shouting Mind the doors because they all have all undergone intensive technical training!

I myself did fail to mind the doors one time when on duty on the Northern Line. Dina and her dad, who had come to visit from Israel, came for a ride on my train and whilst chatting to them and not concentrating on my job I had closed the train doors and signaled for the driver to move off and then closed my guards door whilst my head was still outside the door with the tunnel wall rapidly approaching and with my head about to smash into it! I luckily managed to push the button, open the door and get my head back inside in the nick of time! After the initial shock it was laughs all round as I had a great big thick ring of black dirt all around my neck and uniform shirt from the door being jammed on me!

Eventually I received the letter inviting me to an interview with the police and since I had no formal qualifications, apart from English ‘O’ Level and Sociology C.S.E. Grade 1, which is the equivalent of an ‘O’ Level pass, I undertook the police entrance exam, passed it and was sent for a 4 month training course at Hendon Police College in North West London. If I thought that learning about train braking systems was difficult then what I had to study at Hendon was unbelievable! You had to learn most of the relevant English laws and legislation word perfect, and I mean word perfect, and you were tested on a daily basis, so your life from the time of waking and well into the early hours of the night and sometimes early morning, was study, study, study! I eventually got used to the work load and I enjoyed my time at Hendon and did quite well in the final exam gaining 82%, I remember the final passing-out parade with family and friends present as being a very proud moment.

Hendon Police College June 1980

POSTED TO WA

After Hendon was over, I was posted to Battersea Police Station in South West London which was a good training ground as there were a number of council estates and had a large poor black population.

At Battersea Police Station

I had applied to be allocated police married quarters and we were given a 2 room apartment at 1, St. Barnabas House, St. Barnabas Rd, Mitcham in Surrey and I used to drive to work at Battersea about 20 minutes away by car, I think we had a green Austin Maxi automatic which I taught Dina to drive on, so well in fact that she passed her test first time on this automatic car and she then passed it again on our second geared Triumph car. It was a cold apartment with stone floors and I used to put the electric blanket on an hour or so before we got into bed and I did this one evening turning the plug switch on but unbeknown to me the electric fire was also connected to the triple plug and so I inadvertently turned on the electric fire at the same time as this had been placed under the plastic side table of the bed, and whilst we were in the front room watching the film ‘An Officer and a Gentleman’.

Dina and I

We suddenly smelt strong fumes, I went to investigate and discovered our bedroom was well aflame, I called to Dina and we tried to make our escape via the front door and I just about managed to unlock the door and open it, I could smell and taste the poisonous fumes that had been given off by the burning plastic bed in my throat and we were lucky to have gotten out unscathed. We stood outside in our pyjamas in the freezing cold English winter and unbeknown to us was that Dina was already pregnant at that time with our first child, Golan! We were temporarily accommodated in the opposite empty police flat, all alone with no assistance, no furniture and hardly any heating but we got over it and soon we were house hunting and we found a charming newly decorated little house at nearby 16, Thornton Ave, West Croydon, Surrey, for which we paid the princely sum of 28,500 pounds by monthly mortgage.

Dina’s first birth was a long drawn out affair of at least 16 hours of labor at the Mayday Hospital in Croydon with a not so sympathetic mid-wife called Nurse Black. She was West Indian and had obviously assisted in hundred’s of births but this was our first child! In keeping with all of our children’s births, Dina’s parents arrived the day after Golan was born, Golan was born on 9^th August 1982 and 8 days later he had the Brit-Milah performed on him by one of the top Mohel’s (usually a Rabbi and qualified surgeon empowered to perform religious circumcisions) in England who was a friend of a rich cousin from Stamford Hill and of cousin Harry from Canada who had been at Auschwitz with Dina’s father.

Me and Golan

As a new policeman, working at Battersea was a good learning ground as it was a poorer London district (soon to be fashionable place to live for the up-and-coming affluent) populated by a number of council estates inhabited by many poor black families and there was a racial problem there and it’s accurate to say that some of the local police were not exactly sympathetic to the local population so much so that, as with other districts of London at the time of the famous Tottenham riots, we had riots in Battersea and I was equipped with my shield in the front line with fellow policemen charging petrol and rock throwing demonstrators during the riots, exciting times eh? Although I didn’t pay it much attention at the time, you know what with being young as enthusiastic for the job, I was somewhat resented by my fellow police colleges at Battersea as they tended to come to work in order to do as little as possible in their time at work there. Their jobs were secured so they thought why should they exert themselves? I, on the other hand believed and still believe that if I am paid to work then I should work (Work frees the soul, was it Martin Bauber that said that? I can’t remember but it was what the Nazi’s had on a sign as part of their sick sense of humor above the entrance to the Auschwitz Concentration camp as part of the deception that the camp inmates were entering a work camp).

I used to stop many motorists for either minor traffic offences or major ones like driving through red lights and issue many forms for them to produce their driving documents within 5 days at a police station, invariably many instances of no insurance or no test certificates for their vehicle were divulged and my work day was filled with work and the occasional arrest, at that time I was concentrating on driving offences and later would progress to arrests. Being a Jew who obviously had a different religion from the average policeman who would be white Christian or Catholic and as a policeman who was basically showing the others up to be lazy, their way of getting even with me was to call me racist names usually behind my back and to also not want to work with me patrolling the streets, although the newer policemen waited in line for me to work with them as it gave them the opportunity to learn well and to produce results, something they were expected to do as a new officer and something they couldn’t do if posted with an old sweat – the term for an established officer who didn’t feel obligated to produce any results for his days work!

Dina and I came to the realization that life in England wasn’t so warm to say the least and we both had a desire to return to Israel, particularly since the birth of our first child Golan we felt that life in a kibbutz, like we had experienced as a young couple would be ideal for newly weds. We decided to sell our lovely home in West Croydon, we were then at the start of the first property boom but there had been rises but also there had been sudden downfalls in house prices so it still wasn’t a ‘sure thing’ to invest in property but of course in hindsight we should have rented the house out and reaped the rewards as its value grew but no-one knew just how much property values would become inflated and we sold our house for 32,000 pounds, making a small profit and now it would be worth something in the region of 250,000 pounds or more!

We Leave

I resigned from the Police and in March 1983 we moved back to Israel and to the kibbutz were we had first met at Kibbutz Hagoshrim and were given as a new family a nice modern stone cottage with a garden. Life was good at first, I went back to work in the cotton fields, how I loved working outside in the sunshine all day and Dina worked in the children’s house but we soon realized that things were different and it wasn’t the same feeling as when we had been a free young couple for now we had commitments, commitments to the kibbutz and it seemed that everyone wanted to know and seemed to know everyone else’s business and we had very little say in the way that our son Golan was brought up as, we were told by a children’s house kibbutz member, Golan firstly belongs to the kibbutz and then to you! By this time I was fast approaching the age of 30 and if we were to return to England and if I was to re-join the police then it had to be before the age of 30 as that was the age after which you were considered to be too old to join the police. We made our decision and left the kibbutz, a decision we have not regretted albeit that without doubt life can seem to be almost idyllic on the kibbutz, but it also can be boring and monotonous and if you’ve lived the faster city life and been used to buying what you want then kibbutz life isn’t for you.

Dina and I

I Rejoin The Police

We returned to live with my mother in her 13^th floor London council flat and I applied to re-join the police. We thought that since I had only been out of the police for 10 months, we returned in December 1983, then almost certainly a few days later I’d have my police uniform on and would be patrolling the streets again. After applying to re-join I heard nothing, I made repeated telephone calls and wrote letters to the recruiting office, all to no avail. I was kept waiting for 7 solid months before I eventually got a letter with a date to re-join the police and I was dumbfounded that so much time had lapsed and had been wasted and it just didn’t make sense as to why? I was sent to Hendon Police College to re-take the police entrance exam which I again passed and I had also to undertake a new part of the entrance exam which was to run a set distance in a set time.  I mean I was no spring chicken then and I’m sure that even an 18 or 19 year old wouldn’t have found it so easy and even though I passed the written entrance exam I failed the run around the sports track in the allotted time. I was heartbroken and frustrated at the same time for here was I, an excellent and experienced officer with an exemplary record who had been out of the force for just a few months being made to go through the same procedure as a new applicant, it just didn’t make sense to me but it just made me more determined and I was given a chance a few weeks later to re-take the timed run and so in the weeks prior to that I would go out every day and run, run, run! A few weeks later I re-took the timed run test at Hendon Police College and this time I passed and was I soon given a new posting to Chiswick Police Station in West London.

Chiswick Police Station

POSTED TO TC

Chiswick is a lovely part of West London within a short travelling distance from Central London and is a fairly affluent district with one or two own council estates here and there but with really very little trouble at all. I found I had time to concentrate on a different aspect of policing, that of catching criminals which I became expert at! Some of my fellow officers weren’t really interested in arresting people as it meant lots of extra work, particularly paperwork, so that suited me and we had an arrangement that they would concentrate their working day on the more routine and mundane aspects of police work, reporting crime, accidents etc. and I would therefore be free to roam the streets and also the sports fields where I made many arrests, searching for criminals. We were allocated a Police flat in Syon Lane, Isleworth, which was about 20 minutes drive from work and the block was opposite to Sky T.V.’s H.Q. and studio’s. We lived on the first floor at No. 134 and one day Golan decided he was Superman and tried to fly from the balcony dressed in his Superman cape, luckily the only damage he suffered was a twisted ankle in the fall! Golan would play with some of the children in the block one of whom was a son of a guy on my police shift, unfortunately the boy developed a brain haemorrhage and he died, which was very sad.

Most of my work came from stopping cars as Chiswick High Road was the main arterial road to Central London and also Dukes Meadows which were sports fields that abutted onto the river Thames and where lovers would go for trysts in their cars but also youngsters would go to smoke and sometimes deal drugs, then there wasn’t such a liberal attitude to drugs as there is now in England although most of my arrests resulted with a caution which meant the offender was given a second chance (not to get caught again) and a warning and didn’t have to go to court and get a criminal record for the drug offence, which was fair enough. I had my fair share of big arrests too. There was one guy I remember I passed while I was driving my marked police car in Chiswick High Road and as I drove past him he turned his back to me which was somewhat suspicious, I then circled back and as I approached him again from the opposite direction he turned and started walking away. I drove up to him and started to speak to him and I noticed his right hand was in his jacket pocket and he seemed to be holding something large in that pocket, could either be a weapon or who knows what? Upon questioning him some more he indicated a nearby car which he said was his & though and behold in the open ashtray I saw some smoked reefers. I told him I was going to search him and his car for drugs and got him to take his hand out of his pocket and in his hand he held a large bag of a white powder which he admitted was cocaine, I can’t remember exactly how much cocaine there was but it was a few thousand pounds worth. It turned out he had been paid to deliver it to a customer who was supposed to drive up to him at that junction in Chiswick High Road and I had obviously ruined their plans. I never did find out what happened to that guy, I know the case went to High Court and he just got a large fine and not a prison sentence as I understood that he cooperated with the C.I.D. in their investigations. Another good arrest was when I stopped a car opposite to Chiswick Police Station one night and the guy had a few acid tablets (LSD) on him. The night duty C.I.D. couldn’t be bothered and asked me to deal with it and so I took a couple of other uniformed officers with me and we took him to his home in nearby Ealing, in West London to search his room with his mother present and when we opened his bedroom cupboard a large bag of mixed pills fell out, this guy was obviously a dealer, in fact he dealt at clubs and discotheques in Central London. When I took him back the C.I.D. were much more interested this time!

I was always on the look-out for persons acting suspiciously and with a sound knowledge of your powers and the law there was no reason not to stop and question someone you felt was up to no good, I mean sometimes things happen right in front of your very eyes that you don’t believe are happening, for instance, I came out of the front door to the police station at about 9.30 am one Saturday morning after having just finished my breakfast, when I saw two men in their late teens hanging around the electric showroom opposite. They appeared to be drunk but I carried on watching as they walked into the showroom, picked up a large cardboard box from the window display area, put it on one of their shoulders and walked slowly out of the store, then once outside they started to run. I caught up with them and found the box contained a brand new microwave oven which they’d just stolen and the shop assistants hadn’t even noticed their actions!  What is sad is that many of the people who wore police uniforms that I had worked with just weren’t interested or preferred not to see things and they wanted just to complete their 8 hour day at ‘work’ without incident and go home as one less day took them closer to their retirement pension, how sad I thought! What peeved me is when I had good arrests, usually from cars and particularly where the evidence of drug use was so evident and the arrested persons told me that they had been stopped just a few minutes earlier up the road by other police officers who had let them go after asking them a few standard questions and without noticing what was right in front of their noses if they’d care to have looked! I was very good at what I did, which was detecting and arresting offenders every day. I was sharp, alert and most of all hungry and I couldn’t wait to get out on patrol each day. When you consider that police work is invariably taken up by reams and reams of paper work, particularly if you arrest someone, I suppose I shouldn’t blame those who didn’t want to get involved. I kept records of my arrests and also those where I would have arrested them but I had given the arrest to a younger P.C. I was patrolling with and in 1993 I achieved 168 arrests in a year. I got to a turn around of an arrest of about 2 hours on average, which means from the time of arrest and processing the prisoner – booking the prisoner in with the custody Sergeant, interviewing him, fingerprinting/photographing, charging if necessary, and completing the necessary paperwork for the Crown Prosecution Service, then I was free to get back on patrol! I loved my work but there were also the sad and tragic moments as one would expect with such work.

Tragedy

I suppose the saddest and most tragic was when one winter we were called to the scene of children who had fallen into the iced covered lake at nearby Gunnersbury Park. When we got there we saw the large lake covered by thick ice and we were told that two children, a brother and sister who lived nearby in Brentford, had been playing with their dog. The dog had run onto the ice chasing a stick they had thrown for him to chase and the dog had fallen through the ice into the freezing water, the boy who was aged about 10 had gone onto the ice to try and save the dog and had himself fallen through the ice into the freezing cold water, his sister had then gone onto the ice to try and save her brother and she too had fallen through the ice. All was quiet on the ice covered lake when we arrived and the place where they had all fallen through the ice was covered over by a fresh growth of ice. The children’s mother arrived shortly after and it was late afternoon and the evening was descending but we had to wait for the underwater rescue teams to arrive, although they were called the Rescue Team we all knew that that it was only two little lifeless bodies they would be finding but I suppose we all hoped against hope that a miracle would happen and somehow they would be alive. I was tasked with taking care of the mother, which meant taking her account of what she knew and taking the children’s details and of having to reassure her as best one could. Hours passed by as the divers went down time after time and emerged with nothing. The whole area was lit by bright arc lights brought in, a number of ambulances stood by, a small crowd gathered as did some local reporters and many, many police officers, but we were all helpless to do anything but wait. Eventually with the strong arc light illuminating a small circle in the ice that the underwater rescue team had broke in the ice, we saw the divers bubbles break the surface as the diver broke the surface and indicated to his crew a message and then we saw him load something into the waiting wooden boat that they had found by the lakeside and dragged across the ice to where they were working. Then the diver went down and emerged again and the people in the boat helped lift something else he had bought up from the bottom of the lake into the boat. The boat was then dragged to the lakeside and the ambulance crew rushed to them and the two little bodies were put on separate ambulance stretchers and brought to where their mother and I were standing by the two waiting ambulances whose back doors were open and the little girl’s body was placed in one and the little boy in the ambulance nearest us. The mother was asked to identify her little girls body which she did with a tearful Yes as the medical teams starting work on trying to revive her, I went with the mother into the back of the second ambulance where the two-man ambulance crew had started to work on the little boy with the kiss of life, heart massage, injections and various tubes inserted into his breathing tract but all to no avail. They worked for a long, long time but in the end had to accept defeat as their bodies had been underwater for 5 or 6 hours there really had been no chance of bringing them back to life. I wrote my report for the Coroner and I wasn’t called to give evidence at the subsequent Coroners Inquest to establish their cause of death as they accepted my written evidence as there was no dispute as to how they died but the images of those 2 lifeless little children remain with me to this day.

But police work also contained its funny and satisfying moments. One such a time was when I received a call of a woman screaming late one night outside a nearby doctor’s surgery. I drove round and round the area but couldn’t see or hear anything till I turned off my police car’s engine and got out of the car and I then suddenly heard this rhythmic panting. I shone my torch under the star-well to find a couple making love, ok I thought at least she’s not in danger but when I shone my torch on their faces I found that he was the one in danger, he was obviously drunk and was about 18 years old and he was obviously too drunk to realize who he was making love to, as she looked to be in her mid 70’s if not older with a face (and other bits) as wrinkled as a prune and no wonder she had a huge grin on her face, she for sure couldn’t believe her luck! I took a lot of persuading from him not to arrest him and have him appear in court and appear in the local newspaper on a granny bedding charge!

I was sent on a number of Police courses including learning to drive a Police car at high speeds safely through the streets of London and on these driving courses you weren’t subjected to the legal speed limits and I remember driving back towards Hendon Police College with my instructor next to me and with 2 other pupils in the back at 140 mph (nearly 200 kph) in an old unmarked Police Rover down Hendon Way and it’s funny how quiet everyone was in the car, in fact I think they were all holding their breaths and you could hear a pin drop!

Dina at this time was working as a freelance Hebrew/English Translator/Interpreter for the Police and it was a well paid job whenever she was called to Police stations or to court to work and she was involved in a few big cases including a case at the Old Bailey. Her work fitted in well with Dina’s main job of bringing up the kids at home and our kids were raised with lots of love, warmth and affection and I hoped to give them all that I had missed out on whilst growing up.

PART TWO

MY CASE AGAINST THE POLICE

I enjoyed my work as a police officer immensely and I was very good at what I did, but there was a downside to my life as a policeman, that being that I was resented by some of my fellow police officers as my good work tended to show them up for their own lack of work effort. Their resentment manifested itself at first in seemingly innocuous nicknames that they would assign to me, such as ‘Moses’, which although not being in anyway an anti-Semitic barb, when said with other police officers or members of the public being present immediately made me stand out as obviously being different from them, as a Jew.

‘Moses’ was the name assigned to me by the Spanish civilian garage hand at Chiswick police station and was adopted by one or two other officers and he would often shout it across the police station’s back yard at me as a form of greeting! A much nastier name was assigned to me, albeit indirectly, by a fellow officer who was a stringent supporter of the Arsenal football team. Tottenham Hotspurs were their north London rivals and they were known to have a large Jewish fan following with a number of prominent Jews on their board of directors with their famous chairman, Sir Alan Sugar also being a well known Jew, and so they were disparagingly referred to as the ‘Yids’ and ‘Yiddo’s’. A ‘Yid’ is a virulent anti-Semitic name originating from Germany during the time of the Holocaust and refers to those German Jewish citizens who spoke the Yiddish language and Yiddish is usually spoken by religious Jews and Yiddish was the language of the Jewish communities in Europe and still is to this day among those surviving Jewish communities, and this name particularly hurt as my Father-in-law was a survivor of Auschwitz concentration camp and the tattooed Auschwitz prison number was still visible on his arm as a daily reminder of what he had suffered! This officer would also call me ‘Hymie’ and so a conversation or greeting from this particular police officer/Arsenal supporter would consist of him saying to me something like, ‘Hey Hymie, the ‘Yids’ did well on Saturday’, or ‘Hymie, I see the ‘Yids’ lost again’, with his spoken emphasis being on the word ‘Yid’, and it was usually said in a crowded place such as the police station’s staff canteen and he usually said it with a big smirk on his face.

Other ways in which Antisemitism would manifest itself would be in the staff canteen at breakfast time when often the phrase, ‘Oh come on my boy have some bacon’, would be said to me in a heavy Jewish accent, and sometimes the officer(s) would wave the bacon rinds in front of my face, again with a smirk on the face of the police officer doing it and usually accompanied by much laughter from the rest of those officers and civilians present in the canteen, which usually included police Sergeants and Inspectors who did nothing to stop it, and in fact their acquiescence to these events helped their subordinates continue their racist taunts against me unabated.

It was well known that I had converted from Christianity to Judaism and I didn’t keep it a secret, why should I have? I was treated like and I felt like I was considered to be a traitor by my fellow Christian police officers, not that any of them appeared to be in the slightest bit religious although I do not know if any of them were members of the ‘Catholic Guild’ or if they were ‘Freemasons’, both had strong influences with their members in the police force. What I have learnt from the English nation from growing up in England, and I suspect this to be true for the rest of Europe too, is that if you are not a white indigenous Christian then you are not truly classed by them as being a truly indigenous citizen of that country, you are different to them, you are an outsider, a foreigner even who can’t really be trusted. I was successful at work although I felt I wasn’t receiving any reward for my hard work I was doing, I just received resentment and racial abuse.

We had a new Sergeant come to work on our relief and he was an okay kind of guy who went out of his way to show that he was ‘free thinking’ and was not racially prejudice in any way. Although he wasn’t what I would call an active ‘thief taker’, he was one of the fashionably growing tide of police officers who had joined the police force to climb up through the ranks as quickly as possible by passing exams and showing that he was good with the pen. He was often the Custody Officer on duty when I brought prisoners into the custody suite for him to book-in and process and as a new Sergeant on the relief he had to learn the duties involved with being a Custody Officer, a task no-one really liked doing for it was mostly a boring repetitive job, although it did afford him the chance to study for his Inspectors exam, usually in peace and quiet, which, although having only recently been promoted to the rank of Sergeant, he was determined to take and pass as soon as possible. So he became somewhat intrigued by the large number and high quality of prisoners that I would regularly bring in to his Custody Suite and, seemingly intent on getting himself noticed with the higher ranking officers ‘upstairs’, agreed to write a report recommending me for a commendation for my hard work and high number of arrests that I was effecting on a regular basis. He said he would write and submit the report and I gave him some background information including my traffic offences and arrest records, in 1991 I had arrested 164 persons, mostly for criminal offences (at the time of writing I have read that there are police officers who haven’t had a single arrest in a year), and I didn’t hear anything more until I received notification that I was going to receive an Assistant Commissioner’s Commendation for Dedication and Professionalism.

It was a proud moment for me and my family when we went to the Metropolitan Sports and Social Club at Imber Court in Surrey to collect my award, a large framed certificate from the Deputy-Assistant Commissioner handed to me on stage in front of an invited audience and you can see in the below photo, although smiling for the camera, how thin I had became!

The only other award I had received in my police service was a letter congratulating me upon a suggestion I had made to improve the police service by installing brooms in all police vehicles, so that debris from road traffic accidents could be swept up and cleared before further damage is cause by the debris to other vehicles. I also received a nice letter from the Crown Prosecution Service congratulating me on my high professional level of presentation for completing the necessary C.P.S. court paperwork following my many arrests.

My other subsequent Police award was for Bravery in disarming a suspect armed with a loaded gun. This followed a call to a block of flats in Chiswick which had a large round plastic walled pool in the communal garden. Some of the young residents were partying and were making a lot of noise and one of the elder residents, who it subsequently turned out was the former bodyguard of the late King Hussein of Jordan, decided it was disturbing him and he went down and started waving a gun around telling the youngsters to be quiet! When I arrived on the scene and went up to the informants flat, the suspect then suddenly emerged in the hallway still holding his gun in his hand. I went up to him and spoke to him and calmly took the gun from him and arrested him, and luckily he didn’t put up a struggle although he was still irate, but no shots were fired nor was anyone injured and of course, I was unarmed and only carried a truncheon for protection, oh, and my police whistle of course!

Of course these awards did nothing to improve my popularity with my fellow officers who seemed to resent me even more as their tirade of anti-Semitic barbs continued unabated. Neither did a number of stints I did at New Scotland Yard where, because of my understanding of the Hebrew language, I worked as an interpreter for the special operations squad at CO11 on some major operations, one of which resulted in the biggest seizure of cocaine in London at that time, I did an operation with MI5 too.

The constant bombardment of racism directed towards me over time gradually and accumulatively started to affect my health and I became depressed, I found it hard to sleep, I hardly ate and I lost a lot of weight, and I really did look very thin, pale and drawn. I then decided that ‘enough was enough’ and that I decided that, since there was no-one to talk to at Chiswick Police Station, I would lodge an official complaint of racial discrimination with the Commission for Racial Equality at their head office in London’s Victoria.

At the initial meeting with the C.R.E. in 1993 I was advised that, because I was thinking of taking on the might of the Metropolitan Police Force then I should and I must have concrete evidence that would stand up in court. Being an officer fully conversant with the standard of evidence required in legal proceedings, I decided to use my official Police issued notebook, which is used on a daily basis by every Police officer to note evidence, as a daily log of the anti-Semitic abuse suffered by me at the hands of my fellow Police work colleagues. To ensure correct evidence gathering procedures, each entry I made would be date stamped and timed by the tamper proof stamping machine kept in the Custody suite at Chiswick Police Station which I got to use most days that I was on duty, as the racial abuse that I was subjected to continued unabated.

It got to the point that I would come to work, book out the Police panda car and drive out of the Police station’s yard for a solid 8 hours, just to avoid having to come into contact with my police officer abusers and when I did, and when they directed their racist comments at me, I would record them in my police notebook. This became my undisputed and unchallenged evidence at the subsequent court case as it was evidence that was hard to dispute as I had used the correct legal procedures to record my evidence, and although there were not numerous entries of racial abuse written in my police notebook, this was because I did my best to avoid these racist police officers!

The abuse continued and it affected me more and more to the point where I became so thin that the joke going around the station was that I had ‘Aids’, and needless to say not one officer inquired as to my health, and upon visiting my family doctor he immediately ordered me to stay away from work as I was undoubtedly suffering from stress and depression brought on by all that was happening at work! I’d aliken what was happening to me to maybe being bullied at school that continues unabated, but in this case there were no school teachers that you could complain to because all the senior officers at Chiswick Police Station knew what was going on, they witnessed it almost every day, but they did nothing to stop in and in fact on a number of occasions even laughed with the others at the racist abuse being directed at me and at my religion, and so who could I complain to?

After I had collected a large amount of evidence and decided that I just didn’t want to take any more of it, I again contacted the Commission for Racial Equality and informed them I was ready and willing to proceed with taking the Metropolitan Police to court for their illegal racial discrimination. The C.R.E. then duly appointed a firm of solicitors to take on my case.

The whole legal process dragged on and on and in fact the case took 3 years to reach its conclusion in court because whenever a court date would be fixed, the Police solicitors would ask for an adjournment for whatever reason and this happened a few times. Just imagine that you would prepare yourself mentally for a life changing court case against the might of the Metropolitan Police Force and then you would be informed at the last moment, usually the night before, that the court case has been postponed and that we ‘will be informed of a new court date’. Of course mine and my family’s life was now totally full of stress and worry as in taking on the Metropolitan Police Force, I was in effect taking on the British government as the Police Service is funded and controlled by H.M. Home Office and losing this case would in effect warrant me leaving my job and giving up our Police provided house in Wembley and we would be homeless. and I would have to resign with my tail between my legs, for I would consider that I would have no future in the Police force after this.

I had no other support from anyone, not even the Jewish community supported me and they seemed to just want to bury their heads in the sand and not make waves and they never offered their vocal support or any other support to me in any shape or form, and I think that after the case there were a few lines in the press from the Jewish Board of Deputies congratulating me on my victory, but that’s the only time I heard from them – where were they when I needed them? Two reporters were assigned to follow the case, one from a small local newspaper called ‘Shalom Newspaper’ and the other was from the national ‘Jewish Chronicle’ newspaper, and they both printed regular updates and progress in my case as it developed and in fact the Jewish Chronicle’ reporter has been in periodical contact with me.

I later learned that most believed that I had no chance whatsoever of winning my case and luckily for us the Metropolitan Police must have also shared the same opinion, for this wasn’t a high profile media covered case about a black Police officer claiming racial abuse, this was a white Englishman who had converted to Judaism from Christianity making the claim and their approach to the court case seemed to be amateurish and sloppy as they certainly didn’t appear to be ready for what hit them in court!

I had always presumed that the Police would make an out-of-court settlement offer to me to avoid taking the case to court as they had done in a number of previous racial abuse cases, but in my case this didn’t happen and a final date was set for the full court hearing.

Three weeks before the trial was due to begin, the firm of Commission for Racial Equality appointed solicitors who had been handling the case suddenly withdrew from my case therefore leaving me without legal representation. The Commission for Racial Equality was subsequently asked by the Industrial Tribunal why they withdrew their representation of me? They replied that it was done because they were advised that I had no chance of winning the case. I wonder who ‘advised’ them and who put pressure on them to take this course of action?

My only recourse was to then approach the Police Federation and ask them to provide me with legal representation which was my right as a member of the Police Federation, and they duly provided me with a Barrister who agreed to take the case on.

IN COURT

On 6 June 1995 (on the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War) my wife and I went to the Industrial Tribunal in Woburn Place, London with a talented Barrister provided by Police Federation funding and facing the best that the Metropolitan Police could muster, and to be honest, I felt embarrassed for them! The witnesses that the Police called to give evidence were all Police officers I had worked with and each time the Police Barrister asked them, ‘Did you call PC Thomas a ‘Yid’ or other racially abusive names’?  The answer was always ‘Yes’, and so until 9 June 1995 the case went on like this with the Police side bringing police witness after witness who turned into witnesses for us. We called no witnesses ourselves and the Police side really had no defense to the allegations, which begs the question, why did they allow the case to come to court without settling out of court as they had done in previous cases? The answer can only be that they really did underestimate the strength of my evidence and also mine and my family’s commitment to see it through!

There were times when it got hard to carry on and their tactics in delaying the case was to try to break me, to break us as a family, and there is no doubt that because of all the stress and pressure I was under it brought me close to the edge and maybe I fell over at some point, I’m not sure but it’s highly probable that as a result of all I’d gone through that I suffered and still suffer from PTSD.

The final and unanimous decision of the Tribunal was that ‘the Respondent (the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police) unlawfully discriminated against the applicant (me) on racial grounds’ (court case No. 2785/94/LN/B).

In winning my court case I also changed the English racial discrimination laws to now include converts to a religion under its scope.

After our victory, which was reported in the national and Jewish press, we had to prepare for the next stage of our battle which was the compensation court hearing that was scheduled to take place 2 days later at the same London Industrial Tribunal, but unbeknown to us, it would take another year to come to court for the Police in having lost the case now wanted to minimize the amount of compensation that I would be awarded by the court by doing all that they could to besmirch my character. They decided that they wanted me examined and analyzed by 2 of their chosen physiatrists and that ‘our side’ would also have ‘our’ psychiatrist analyze me, bearing in mind that ‘our’ psychiatrist’ would be paid for by the Police Federation funded by the Home Office who funded the police who I had just defeated in court, how impartial would or could he be?

I had never dealt with this profession before, with these ‘doctors of the mind’, and I had no idea what to expect and perhaps I should have been more suspicious and not so forthcoming with information as I was, but these people are experts and if they want to then they can get information from you without you realizing that you are giving it to them, and they can twist and make something you say into what they want it to mean for their own purposes. I stopped going to see one of these so-called experts as I really felt it to be a complete waste of time as I would often walk into his darkened surgery and he would just sit there looking out of the window or looking down at paperwork on his desk and he would keep the same stance of not saying a word nor changing his facial expression but then, every few minutes, he would look at his watch and you would think ‘hang on, I’m here for 20 minutes, are we going to sit like this for 20 minutes, what’s the point’? I would then say something like, ‘Are you going to say anything’? And he would then start writing and after a while he would say something like, ‘Would you like me to say something’? And it would go on like this and I still to this day have no idea what that was all about and I didn’t know if he was the psychiatrist for me or them! I was attending 2 different psychiatrists, if that’s what they were, I actually don’t know what their titles were, but one was working for the Police and the other was supposedly on our side although he was paid for by the Police Federation via the government’s Home Office Department.

They would suggest things to me and I remember that they both seemed to inject the same idea into my head at around the same time, which in hindsight should have suggested to me that something was going on here. They started to suggest that there was nothing really wrong with me even though I was off sick with my family doctor’s certificate stating that I was suffering from stress and depression, the cause of which was the Police’s racially discriminatory practices against me, and that in their opinion maybe I should return to work. Return to work?? How could I return to work in that environment and after I had beaten them in court and proved them to be racialist?? I started to panic and didn’t know what to do and what they subtly suggested was that I should really start to open up to them and that I should reveal to them all of my true inner thoughts about things as, according to them, being called racist names was child’s play and it shouldn’t have caused the reaction it did. Again in hindsight I realize that they were attempting to minimize the blame that could be placed upon the Police for any pain and suffering that I had endured and in lessening this effect it would attract lesser compensation at the subsequent court hearing. But hindsight is a wonderful thing and at the time I was in the hands of what I now consider to have been manipulative experts instructed by their paymasters to get results, and I was under enormous stress in spite of having won the case to see it through to the end and I felt that being forced back to work amongst those police officers who had caused me so much pain and hurt would be the end of me, I really did and maybe not physically or/and mentally, but there would be no reason to not believe that upon returning to work things couldn’t be ‘arranged’ by them to show me in a bad light (I avoided the expression ‘I would be ‘fitted up’ but most know what this means)! There was no way that that I could return to work as a Police officer for I believed that my career in the Police force ended with my court case victory over them but I was still in their pay and was still a serving Police officer albeit that I was off sick, but if these experts said that I wasn’t ‘sick’ and if they recommend that I be ordered me back to work, then what?

They started to lead me into theoretical situations and down avenues I hadn’t really fully explored before, and I tried as hard as I could to think on my feet, for I had to think about what I was saying to them but I also had to give them enough to both agree that I was in fact sick and was not in a fit state to return to work, and all in all they span me around in circles and it became that I didn’t know if I was coming or going. Of course, growing up in the circumstances that I had grown up in and my periods of depression through my teens were just the triggers and reasons that these psychiatrists needed to show that the Police, although guilty of racially discriminating against me, were not wholly culpable for my reactive depression, in other words, they would press hard during the upcoming compensation hearing to argue that they should pay me reduced compensation for my pain and suffering, and for sure they would reveal to the court all that they had found during their expert examinations of me!

So, I had won my court case against the Police but now I would have to face another 2 day court hearing in a battle to gain some financial compensation for what I had suffered at the hands of the Metropolitan Police, and to be honest I had very little fight left in me, they had drained it all out of me and waiting a whole year while all of these constant visits to the psychiatrists were going on and not knowing what would be had left its toll on us all and we really decided that we had had enough of it all.

To further break our resolve and to try to stick the knife in for the last time, the very night before our compensation court hearing was due to be heard in court, our barrister that had been provided to us by the Police Federation funding informed us that he wouldn’t be representing us in the compensation hearing as the Police Federation had withdrawn their funding for him and that we would be left to face the Metropolitan Police on our own in court the next day! This time there really was no time to find a legal replacement for our barrister. The next day outside the court room we made contact with the Police barrister and agreed to settle the case before the court hearing and accepted compensation from them which would enable us to take the course that we had decided was best for us as a family, and that was to resign from the police force and to leave England and return to live in Israel, which is what we did after I had resigned from the Police in July 1996.

ANOTHER BITE

The story doesn’t end there! The police were determined to have another go at getting me after the case had finally finished. I had resigned from the Police Force and we were busily making the final arrangements to leave The UK when I suddenly received a summons through the post to attend court to answer a charge of keeping a dangerous dog! At first we tried to laugh it off, but then we realized that they were serious! I had just beaten them in court and they were trying to get back at me through my dog, how pathetic!  Apparently ‘Major’, our lovely German Shepherd dog, had been in the park when he started fighting with another dog as dogs sometimes do, and the owner had made a complaint to the police. Well, as a former serving police officer I had never ever been called to court to prosecute a ‘dangerous dog’ case and these are rare events indeed, as rare as hens teeth. Though and behold when I got to court there was a Police Sergeant as well as a Constable from Wembley Police Station both chomping at the bit to get me in court and convict me for keeping a dangerous dog – a dog in fact so dangerous that our 2 cats, Pandy and Tiger often used to both jump out of my sons first floor window bedroom onto his back while he was in the back garden to scare him and he used to run shaking into his dog kennel!  Anyway, I had a quiet word with this sergeant and told him that he should take advice on whether he really wants to proceed with this case as I will have the press and TV down to the court very quickly to show how vindictive and petty minded the Police are in having lost the case trying to get back at me! Well, needless to say, the Sergeant and his Constable took ‘advice’ and were never seen again and later I received a letter from Wembley Police Station informing me that the case of keeping a dangerous dog had been dropped.
On 26 August 1996 I left England and emigrated to live in Israel with my wife and 3 children where I started working at the Royal Thai Embassy as a Consular Clerk issuing visas to tourists wishing to visit Thailand and have worked there continuously since and I retire on my 67th birthday on 2 February 2023.

  Nothing seems to have changed in the Metropolitan Police, here’s an article about racist and sexual discrimination from 1 February 2022 read it HERE

In the latest review of the Metropolitan Police from March 2023, the are branded as bein ‘institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic’ read HERE