24 Hours in Police Custody: Detective Constable Martin Hart interview

22 September 2014

What’s your job title, and what’s the nature of your work?
I’m a Detective Constable at the Serious Crimes Investigation Team at Luton Police Station. The SCIT team – we make everything into acronyms in the police – deals with GBH, kidnap, blackmail, serious sexual offences apart from rape. That’s pretty much what tends to come through on a regular basis.

 

How long have you been on the force?
I started in ’98, so coming up for 17 years.

 

What was it that made you want to be a policeman in the first place?
I saw an advert in the paper that said, ‘Can you do X, Y and Z, can you talk to people who are drunk’ and things like that. I thought I could tick all the boxes. We’d just got married, and had a young child on the way, and I thought, “Yeah, I can do this. It would be good.” I was one of the oldest at the interview, there always seemed to be people that were better educated, fitter and younger than me, but I managed to get through.

 

Before that, you were a holiday rep in Magaluf. Was that good preparation for joining the police force?
Yeah, very much so. I have a few friends from back then who went on to join different police forces. It was good preparation. The most important things you learn are how to talk to people. Communication is everything.

 

It’s not your standard nine-to-five job. How much does it impact on your free time?
Massively. What my wife and I have learned after all these years is, if we’ve got something special going on and I am at work, we don’t make arrangements. If you’ve got some stuff going down, and you’ve also got plans for the evening, 99 times out of 100 you won’t be able to make your evening plans. Forget it. You won’t get there.

It has a massive impact. You’re lucky if you have a good family that understands what you do and will stand by what’s going on. You turn up at wedding receptions halfway through because of work. You have to be flexible. It’s the families, who bear the brunt of it, I’m afraid.

 

What’s the best thing about what you do?
I think it’s the sense of achievement when you’ve got what you consider to be the right result. That doesn’t just mean locking somebody up. Sometimes you can conclude that somebody hasn’t done something and that’s just as satisfying. You get jobs that are run of the mill, we all have those, but when something is a bit out of the ordinary, or you get a bit more involved with the case for whatever reason, it can become really rewarding.

 

And the worst thing?
The worst thing is frustration, I would say. When you know somebody’s done something, and you would love to get it to court but you can’t get it past the lawyers, or people put a lot of obstacles in your way, that’s when it gets very, very frustrating.

 

What did you think about having cameras in the police station?
I was concerned, to start off with. It wasn’t something that we were used to. I think, by the end of it, people were forgetting that they were there. I was concerned – I suppose I still am – that you can see us at our best and our worst. We’re like a family and so sometimes we bicker and moan at each other and moan about each other but the bottom line is we all work for each other.

And sometimes we let our hair down and have fun. There is still canteen humour. That’s how you cope with certain things. It’s like the military in some respects. We laugh and joke about certain things that people on the outside might think looks wrong, but you need to have an outlet. The only people who will understand are those doing the job that you do.

 

Did you really forget the cameras were there after a while?
I think people become a lot more comfortable with the cameras. When you first see the cameras in there, everyone was sitting more upright, and considering exactly what they were doing before they were doing it. You do relax. You maybe don’t forget that they’re there altogether, particularly if you’re having a conversation about some sensitive material but you do tend to relax more. The first day I was in the office with the cameras, it was a little bit off-putting at times, when they were walking round with hand-held cameras. They say, “Just ignore me,” but they’re standing a foot-and-a-half away with a rather large and expensive camera pointing directly at you. But towards the end, you know the people behind the camera and it seems much more normal.

 

Watching the interviews take place in the interview room is fascinating. Is it an exciting element of the job?
Doing interviews is the bit that I really enjoy. You can get a feel for whether they’ve done it or not in an interview. It doesn’t matter whether they’re talking to you or not. It’s unfortunate that juries and magistrates don’t get to see the interview. It just gets put in text form, and then it might be read out. It becomes very dry. Or you might get a guy who just says, “No comment” all the way through a three-hour interview, and all that’s read out is: “He answered all questions no comment, which is his legal right.”

 

You said you can get a real impression of whether they’re guilty or not. Is that just from body language? Are you trained to look out for ‘tells’?
We’re not trained to study body language. Actually, it depends when you joined. When I joined, there was a little bit of input about non-verbal communication. I think it’s something like 90-plus per cent of communication between human beings is done non-verbally. So I do watch.

Everybody does interviews in their own way, but I don’t tend to take notes when I interview. The reason for that is that I’m watching what they’re doing, where they’re looking and so on. It’s something that I tend to pick up on, and others do as well, while there are others who have their own way of doing things. Everyone has their own style of interview. As long as you stick within the model and do it lawfully, you have to work it to your own style. If you try and be someone else it doesn’t work.

 

Watching the interviews, it’s really not like in the movies. There’s no shouting or banging of tables, is there?
No! If you started behaving like that, shouting and banging the tables, you’d be thrown out. You’d be disciplined. An interview isn’t about proving whether they’ve done it or not. An interview is about giving them the opportunity to give their account of what happened. There’s two sides to every story – in actual fact, there are probably ten sides to every story, because people see things in different ways. We’re there to gather information. Sometimes they might say something that will put them in trouble, a lot of the time they will say stuff that we can go and verify that will get them out of trouble. That’s what it’s about. You don’t go in there thinking “We must crack them. We must get them to say “I did it, guv, it’s a fair cop.” That doesn’t tend to happen that often.

 

How does it feel for you, when you work really hard on a case, and you think you’ve got your man, and then they’re found not guilty? Does it hit your morale?
No, it doesn’t hit morale. Once it goes to trial, it’s in the jury’s hands. No-one knows what’s going to happen. I’ve had trials where colleagues have gone to the Old Bailey, where they’ve been 100 per cent certain, the defence barristers are convinced their client is guilty, and they get a ‘not guilty’ verdict. And there are others where you think “They’re going to be let off,” and they’re found guilty. You just can’t predict it. You could beat yourself up when it happened, but you’d become quite bitter and twisted if you thought about it that way.

 

You’re working in a fairly small area. When you’re out and about, you’ll probably bump into people who you’ve interviewed or investigated. Is that uncomfortable?
You do see people who you’ve interviewed or put before the court. How that goes maybe depends on the sort of person you are. I try to treat people the way I’d like to be treated, when I interview them. I don’t see the point in demeaning people, or being rude and horrible to them. Luton is a very small place. I’ve seen people when I’ve been out with my family. They just nod and say, “hi” and carry on.