Dull police work

Text 1: Nineteen Years on the Beat, by Joseph Hurrell

An original autobiography written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

Those who know a policeman only from the newspapers imagine his life to be one of desperate chases and midnight struggles. I served nineteen years in the Division, and I may count the chases on my fingers. For the most part a constable on night duty walks. He walks his beat from ten at night until six in the morning, at two and a half miles in the hour, trying every door and window as he passes, turning the handle of each shop, shining his lantern into every area, until he knows the street better than the men who live in it.

I knew, on my first beat, the sound of every loose slate on Canal Street and the temper of every dog. I knew which baker began work at three and which publican lied about his closing hour. I was cold for six months of the year and wet for most of the rest, and I was so weary by dawn that I once fell asleep standing up against the pump in Market Square, and woke to find the sergeant regarding me with an expression I shall not forget. On a lively night I might take up two drunkards and a stray horse.

Yet I will not pretend that the dullness was all. One night in my seventh year I smelt smoke on Weaver’s Row and found a lodging house alight from cellar to roof. I broke in the door and carried out two children and an old man, and went back for a woman who would not leave without her canary. I was in the infirmary a fortnight. The newspapers called me a hero for a week. Then I went back to trying door handles, and I will tell you a secret: I was glad of it.

Text 2: Four Hundred and Twelve Bricks, by Liam Okoro

An original contemporary blog.

When I signed up as a special constable, a volunteer police officer giving at least sixteen hours a month, I had been watching too much television. I imagined car chases, interviews across a metal table, a dramatic arrest at least once a shift. My first shift, I spent seven hours standing at the edge of a police cordon outside a block of flats while forensic officers worked inside. My job was to stop people walking past the tape. Nobody tried. I counted the bricks in the wall opposite. There were four hundred and twelve, in case you were wondering.

That set the pattern for my first year. I took statements about stolen bikes, and wrote them up for longer than it had taken the bikes to be stolen. I directed traffic around a burst water main. I sat in A&E for five hours with a man who had fallen asleep on a bench and could not remember where he lived. I learned that most policing is typing.

Then, last November, a seven-year-old went missing from a park at dusk. Every available officer was out, and I was one of twelve searching the woods behind the park with torches, calling her name. It was me who heard a small voice from inside a drainage tunnel, where she had crawled to hide from a dog and then been too frightened to come out. I carried her out on my back. Her mother made a noise I will never forget. I went back to typing on Monday. But I understand now why the real officers put up with the typing. You are waiting for the night that matters.

‘Both writers present police work as mostly dull.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what we learn about each writer’s experience of police work
• explain how far you agree that both writers present police work as mostly dull
• compare the ways the writers present routine and drama in their work.

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.