Among the other Lambeth specials were a banker, a bus driver, a printer, a civil servant, a supermarket manager, a pastor, an HR director, a stay-at-home parent, a hospital receptionist, a stagehand, a custody officer, an executive PA and a criminology student. I asked to be placed in Lambeth, where I lived and where I had, until recently, worked as a teacher. There were 400 of us at the ceremony after our training, about to be dispatched to London’s 32 boroughs. For the Met, it is a way to boost numbers on busy weekend evenings. What was it about this job that was simultaneously so compelling and so unappealing?į or the volunteer, becoming a special is an opportunity to learn something new. I was not sure what they did with the rest of their time. I knew the police tackled crime and kept order. I was intrigued to see how they responded to them.

In such circumstances, I wondered whose job it was to grapple with our most complex social challenges – homelessness, loneliness, gang violence, poverty, mental illness, domestic violence – and I suspected the police were the people who confronted these issues at their most raw. Local services had been cut in a huge government austerity drive, from mental health provision to youth clubs to libraries. I was interested in how, and how well, our society was set up to tackle entrenched social issues. I am a former careworker and primary schoolteacher, and this was the lens through which I looked at policing. W hen I became a special constable – a volunteer with full police powers – I was attracted not so much by the role as by what police see and experience, their proximity to vulnerable groups at their most vulnerable moments.

Then, out on patrol, you look for yourself in car windows, shop windows, the mirrors in people’s hallways, your head on a police officer’s body. Putting on the uniform for the first time, dressing in front of the mirror, you watch yourself disappear. “Don’t you have anything better to do than coming round here wasting our time?” If someone dislikes the police, you can be friendly, but the outfit speaks first and louder. Uniform flattens, makes the wearer two-dimensional.

The secret bedroom fear street