ISLAND OF SPIKES, WORLD OF COPS

by Rob Lopresti

I discovered James McClure in college when I took a course on mystery fiction. The professor used him as an example of one type of mystery: the one that tells you about some culture or occupation. We read The Steam Pig, the first in McClure’s series of police procedurals set in South Africa and the world of apartheid.

It’s a great book and I recommend it highly, but today’s topic is actually two non-fiction books McClure wrote. Spike Island (1980) is a detailed look at the Liverpool Police Department. Long before David Simon’s Homicide or Fox-TV’s Cops McClure embedded himself in A Division, a long narrow strip of downtown Liverpool, or to put it another way, “a sort of Band-aid stuck over where they ripped the heart out.” McClure describes the constables’ lives as only a master storyteller can do.

“We’ve got x amount of men,” says one of (the detectives), pushing the stairs door open, “but they’re only there on paper! I mean, come Christmas – or the next government inspection—and we’ll have twenty-five detectives and seven cardboard replicas stood in the corner, and they’ll count heads, y’know…

“There’s only one way to stop crime payin’,” he says, holding the ground floor door open. “and that’s to bloody nationalize it. Which is true, isn’t it? Because straight away there’ll be something wrong with the bloody job, and they’ll all be out on bloody strike, won’t they?”

One of my favorite stories in the book involves a man who was arrested for stealing some rope from a building site.

“Occupation?”

“Ah God, this is goin’ to cost me my job, y’ know,” the man says despairingly, turning a shade whiter. “I mean, I know you fellas have got yer duty to do and all, but – y’know, can’t I just put it back like or something?”

The bridewell sergeant shakes his head. “No way, Mr. Morgan,” he says. “You took what didn’t belong to you, and you’ve got to go to court, see.”

Mr. Morgan winces, awed by the absolutes of the law, and plainly mortified by being caught in an act or dishonesty.…

“I suppose I’ve got to say?”

“Yuh.”

“I’m – I’m a school caretaker.”

“Clerk,” says the bridewell sergeant, entering the word on the charge sheet.

“Er, sorry – caretaker’s what I said” Mr. Morgan corrects him politely. “Only been in the job three months, see? And if me bosses—”

“Clerk,” says the bridewell sergeant, very firmly.

The last half-hour has been very confusing and upsetting for Mr. Morgan, so it takes a few seconds longer for the penny to drop.

After finishing Spike Island McClure went looking for an American police force that would give him the same free access he had had in Liverpool. After many rejections he discovered San Diego, where the bosses made only two demands: provide insurance and wear a bullet proof vest.

Not such a surprise, because this is the time and place that Community Oriented Policing was being developed. San Diego was creating a new style of policework, and McClure described it in Cop World (1984).

This is a Hispanic cop explaining his success in the barrio:

I talk to anybody I see – the guy could be the next victim you meet, the next witness, the next informer. If you get along with them, good guys or bad guys, they’re going to tell you what’s going to happen. I MAKE them like me. Some that hang around with the gangs ‘have something’ – I don’t know what it is. Anyway, you know they don’t belong there, and you wish you could save them. I try, but it doesn’t always work. My biggest problem is that I’m an idealist.

Here is a cop explaining the phenomenon of “attitude tickets.”

Say you stop somebody, and you say to yourself you’re going to warn this guy. You walk up to the car and you say, ‘Sir, you just went through the red light. I’d appreciate it if you’d watch it, as it could save your life or somebody else’s.’ And the guy goes, ‘I’m so sorry, I wasn’t paying attention. I won’t do it again…’ Well, that’s it. But if the guy goes, ‘What the hell you stop me for? You guys are always harassing me! I didn’t do nothin’!’ – you write him a ticket.

Well, you could say that’s bad, because you do it because of the way he acted. But obviously he doesn’t care what you say to him, so the only way you’re going to get the point through to him IS by giving him a ticket.

A San Diego officer explains why guts are more important in a female cop than weight and height:

And when it gets down to the nitty-gritty, I’m more worried about intestinal fortitude than about size. I mean, Christ, you can take a baton and hit a guy on the kneecap and totally incapacitate him – and you don’t have to be too damn tall to hit most people on the kneecap!

Inevitably you have to ask how the two police forces compare. Most of the differences McClure notes can be boiled down to one thing: In California both the good guys and the bad guys have guns. In England they generally don’t.

[There is] an obvious contrast between being a British bobby and working as an American cop: the former goes out on the streets hoping not to get hurt; the latter, in hope of not being killed.

I wish someone would go back to Liverpool and San Diego and tell us how things have changed there in the last 30 years.