Night Shift

I see all manner of things in the course of my job. This week, I've been doing a stint on night duty CID - we only have to do it a few times a year, and it's one of my favourite duties because we have to cover all manner of incidents. The image on the left is the remnants of a typical Saturday night - that broken bottle you see on the floor was smashed into someone's face after a typical drunken brawl. The blood sprayed over the ground nearby was the result of some very deep lacerations that will leave the victim scarred for life. On top of that, over the 7 nights, I've attended a double stabbing, numerous other assaults and a drug-related car crash where the driver had tried to run over and kill some associates.

I've often toyed with the idea of asking for formal permission from the borough commander to do a "photo essay" of various parts of my OCU, just to show people some of the things we police officers face on a daily basis. Until I became a copper, I thought I was pretty streetwise and that there wasn't much I hadn't seen. How wrong I was. I just wish I could share so much more of it with the public. I don't think any images would shock - Hollywood has pretty much taken care of that for us, and nothing really replicates the feeling of "being there". Still, I don't know of any other police officers doing anything similar, and I think it would make a change from all the "Cops on Camera"-type police shows, which, although are fly-on-the-wall in nature, have still passed through the hands of TV editors and producers.