crimeculture

“‘Not guilty?’ ‘We all are’”: The Politics of Contemporary Policing in David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet

Katy Shaw, University of Brighton

 

In its heady mix of police procedural, revenge tragedy and hard boiled fiction, the Red Riding Quartet explores connections between reading and detection, appropriating the genre of crime fiction as part of a wider critique of the politics of contemporary policing. Peace argues that due to ‘the way crimes are reported...policemen are faced with things ordinary people don’t see’ and, as a result, close attention should be paid to how ‘these things affect these people.’1  As a mark of respect to their efforts, 1977 carries a dedication addressed not only to the victims of the Ripper but also ‘to the men and women who tried to stop those crimes.’ Across the four novels, police are seen to negotiate the most extreme of circumstances and regularly experience firsthand crime and deviance. Despite these challenges, it is impossible to ignore the fact that in Red Riding the new West Yorkshire force is shown attacking women, torturing suspects and seeking to profit from vice. The corrupt senior cop Maurice Jobson expresses profound disillusionment with the ‘brand-new West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police Brass in their nice new suits and polished shoes with the nice new sheepskins hanging by their trophies and their tankards, the West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police Brass with their beer guts and their wallets bulging in those nice new suits’ (p.278, 1983). Set against a region suffering from social unrest and post-industrial economic decline, the polished image of his re-branded force is betrayed by self-interest and financial motivation.

Historically, UK police forces have fought for regional as opposed to national control and the forces of Red Riding are no exception. In 1836 Leeds formed its own police force out of local funds and in 1850, at the request of the public, the practice of prostitution was brought under police control rather than being banned outright.2  During the twentieth century a permanent police presence withdrew from many rural regions of the UK and outpost police stations were replaced by telephone boxes as hotlines to the new, town-based head quarters. In 1974, the Leeds and Bradford forces amalgamated creating a new single West Yorkshire force covering two million people. The merger had been anticipated for fifty years and was eventually authorised by the Local Government Act of 1972. Within a few years the new force had to tackle two major national law and order incidents - the Chapeltown Riots and the Yorkshire Ripper.3

In his study of the UK police investigation into the Yorkshire Ripper, Michael Bilton suggests that all ‘police forces are like large extended families. They have their own ‘black sheep’; the kids that go off the rails and they turn out okay; the same ‘favourite uncles’ when they are young. There are intra-family rows, and they all come together when the family is criticised.’4  In Peace’s fictional review of the same investigation, duplicity within and between regional forces leads to clan-like hostilities rather than familial co-operation and knowledge-transfer. The goal orientated environment of the British police force is presented as a markedly masculine world in which ‘all the best men’ (p.28,1974) vie for attention and attainment. Petty jealousies reveal the inner mechanics of an organisation whose hegemony is severely under strain. Morale is low and status is everything as men at every level ceaselessly battle to undermine one another. In this very ‘small world’ (p.174, 1980), many highly regarded officers are measured by the ‘trophies and tankards’ of their past achievements. With the advent of the Ripper’s reign, these men find themselves under pressure from claims that they ‘haven’t nicked anyone since Michael bloody Myshkin’ (p.98, 1980). The reputation of the new force and their Detective Chief Superintendant George Oldman is consequently staked firmly in the apprehension of ‘their’ killer.

Played against an ironic musical backdrop of The Police (p.13, 1983) the old guard of the Yorkshire force is set against a new breed of media interest in their policing of a series of major criminal investigations. Journalist Eddie Dunford’s first encounter with George Oldman details ‘a face from before, a big man amongst big men, thick black hair plastered back to look like less, a pale face streaked beneath the lights with a thousand burst bloody vessels, the purple footprints of tiny spiders running across his bleached white cheeks to the slopes of his drunken nose’ (p.4, 1974). Oldman is reminiscent of an earlier style of policing, his physical discomfort with the new media glare leading a veneer of command to ‘melt’. The fear that those in authority have lost control leads to the introduction of Peter Hunter, Assistant Chief Constable of the Greater Manchester force, to head up a covert Home Office enquiry into the Ripper murders. The presence of the ‘most unpopular copper in the North’ (p.8, 1980) fuels paranoia that the West Yorkshire force is under close investigation. As Craven argues, ‘It’s not just about the Ripper, is it? It’s about seeing how many of us you can take down with him’ (pp.86-7, 1980). Hunter does not hide his contempt for the new force and has little regard for the old regime of ‘Angus, Oldman and Noble - Hiding and already beaten, standing between their sandwiches and their better days, their Black Panthers and their M62 Coach Bombings, their A1 Shootings and their Michael Myshkins, those better days a long time gone’ (p.21, 1980).5 Connecting this trio to a series of dubious convictions and coerced confessions, Hunter’s assessment offers a police force sustained by past glory, unable to cope with the ‘recriminations and the blame, looking for lambs, a scapegoat -‘ (p.24 ,1980). His growing unease at the failure of West Yorkshire to apprehend their killer echoes as a losing game – ‘Ripper 13, Police 0, 13-nil, 13-nil, 13-nil, 13-nil...’ (p.57 , 1980) - one that positions the Ripper at home to the visiting detective.

Examining the lives of police under pressure, Peace presents a local and national force characterised by homophobia and racism. Eddie Dunford is warned that ‘Oldman’s got a thing about gypises...and the Irish’ (p.54, 1974) and police dogs are accordingly named ‘Nigger and Shep, Ringo and Sambo’ (p.80, 1983). This ominous warning of institutionalised racism foreshadows the subsequent police attack on Hunslett Carr gypsy camp (p.45, 1974). Casual prejudice is rife in the Quartet and is regularly employed to prey on individuals already in states of extreme vulnerability. On duty and in the community Peace’s policemen display an eagerness to abuse the power of their authority. A petrified Steve Barton is slow hand-clapped by a ring of police officers as they force him to masturbate into a cup (p.81, 1977) while Mrs Ridyard reports to Eddie Dunford that ‘They sat in this house for two weeks, George Oldman and his men, using phone...And they never paid the bill....Phone almost got cut off’ (p.32, 1974). Maurice Jobson makes a petulant civilian drink a pint of Guinness for calling him a ‘Mick’ at a bar, flashing his warrant card as a means of intimidation, Michael Myshkin’s appeal is based on the claim that a police officer forced him to confess, while Jimmy Ashworth apparently hangs himself whilst in police custody. As an anonymous copper reminds Eddie, ‘Big Brother’s watching you...Always’ (p.90, 1974). The omniscient presence of policing and police corruption even extends to the personal lives of officers. Police families are deeply dysfunctional in these novels, the many and varied pressures of the job leading to fractured marriages and alienated children. Maurice’s daughter pointedly declares to her father ‘I’ll never marry a policeman’ (p.222, 1983) while the broken cry of John Rudkin’s wife - ‘Never marry a copper!’ (p.222, 1983) – resonates across the personal and professional relationships depicted by the Quartet.

In this claustrophobic and intensive organisation lies and deception are commonplace while interactions are signalled by casual violence. As Oldman warns Eddie, ‘These are violent bloody times, son’ (p.23, 1974). This is quickly brought to bear on Eddie’s own narrative as he reports that the police ‘beat me unconscious’, ‘urinated on me’ and ‘dragged me by my heels.’ He goes on to claim that the police ‘took photographs, stripped me, cut the bandages off my right hand, took more photographs, and fingerprinted me’ and then ‘hosed me down with ice water until I fell over on the chair’ (p.251, 1974). This violent questioning forms a blueprint for the subsequent police interrogations of George Marsh and John Piggott, in which the burning of a cigarette on the back of the hand, a twisted blanket around the face, a fake shot from a gun and the threat of attack from an animal are used to encourage the detainee to repeat false claims until they are accepted as ‘confession’.

Across the series, police stations become physical manifestations of this covert law enforcement as fortresses detaining and breeding criminals. Fraser recalls descending ‘into the dungeons, keys and locks turning, chains and cuffs rattling, dogs and men barking’ (p.17, 1977) while Eddie notes ‘a noose’ (p.262, 1974) above the door of his cell. The most graphic displays of police violence occur at Millgarth police station in an unofficial interrogation room known as the ‘Belly - the huge fucking hole of a cell right down in the gut, all strip lights and wash-down floors’ (p.77, 1977). Other acts of police violence occur in the full and symbolic gaze of the community. Fraser, Rudkin and Ellis enter the home of the Spencer Boys with ‘A shotgun, a sledgehammer, and an axe’ (p.75, 1977), Craven, Rudkin, Dick Alderman, Jim Prentice, Bill Mulloy and Maurice Jobson raid Jenkins Photo Studio (p.198, 1983) while the Strafford shootings are completed by senior police officers in the moments after the initial attack. Professionally and morally undermined by the innocent image of the ‘Peace Man’ (p.198, 1977) described by his young son, Fraser comes to regard his police colleagues as the state’s ‘own sponsored fucking monsters let loose on the wind’ (p.15, 1977).

In these novels, as in real life, police vice is motivated by corrupt opportunities and easy solutions.6 Obsessively covering up, leaking information and conspiring with criminals, the police are shown using their professional power to obtain money and sexual favours. The source of police corruption in Yorkshire is ‘Controlled vice’, a scheme designed to bring crime ‘off the streets and out of the shop windows, under our wing and in our pocket’ (p.227, 1983). The 1970s was marred by a national scandal involving sections of the London police making similar gains from organised crime. Centred predominantly on the illicit activities of the Obscene Publications Squad and the Drugs Squad, police malpractice extended to a series of controversial miscarriages of justice, most famously involving the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four.7 In Red Riding this historical context is revived and debated by callers to The John Shark Show:

Caller: This bloke Moody, he’s the Head of Scotland Yard’s Obscene Publications Squad right?
John Shark: Was, yeah.
Caller: And all the time he’s accepting bribes and doing favours for these Porn Barons, Un-bloody-believable.
John Shark: All a far cry from Dixon of Dock Green.
Caller: Fuck, he was probably at it and all. Bloody coppers. Make you sick.
The John Shark Show

- Radio Leeds Saturday 4th June 1977 (p.112, 1977)

Mobilised and woven into the narrative to offer a factual underpinning, the individual and internally networked corruption of the new West Yorkshire force is presented as symptomatic of wider internal corruption in the national police body. Re-told through increasingly apoplectic callers, details of this case are re-iterated until a wider picture of police corruption has been unequivocally established (‘And all the cannabis they were taking off darkies they were nicking, this other copper he was selling back to other dealers, and I read this copper who was doing it, he was something to do with A10, that lot that are now Complaints Division.’ – p.232, 1977). Reported widely by local and national press, this story of perverted morals and upturned ethics becomes a byword for the canker at the heart of British policing during the period. While the media revel in their findings, the British public become deeply disheartened with both the press and police. As one radio caller notes, ‘none of it would have come to light if it hadn’t been for the bleeding press. Not very bloody reassuring that, is it? Relying on your lot’ (p.138, 1977).

The voice of the UK media becomes increasingly obsessed with crime and police corruption as the Quartet develops. The unregulated nature of policing and police actions forms a central concern of discourse as members of the public turn to the new interface of the radio phone-in to protest against internal corruption and an apparent absence of justice. Playing in the background to events, every radio programme is ‘about the Yorkshire Ripper’ (p.19 , 1980) while the television plays a seemingly endless range of documentaries that attempt to get inside the ‘Mind of the Ripper’ (p.9, 1980). This presence reaches a peak in 1977 as The John Shark Show takes policing as the focus of its phone-in debates. The contentious topic of police pay rises pulses through these exchanges as callers rhetorically ponder whether they would notice if society started to lock up coppers instead of criminals. As part of this ongoing debate, Part Two of 1977 is entitled ‘Police and Thieves’, radio reports of police corruption and the mysterious circumstances of prisoner suicides gradually growing to dominate the airwaves.

In an attempt to harness the media’s interest, a police publicity campaign mobilises images of the serial killer as a potent press weapon. Ripper letters are printed and sold on ‘to The Sun’ (p.267, 1977) and officers even organise a press conference celebrating their capture of the Ripper before his wife can break the news to their families (p.360, 1983). Claims that the force will ‘paper every surface with a thousand posters saying: The Ripper Is a Coward’ (p.19, 1980) do little to satisfy a public eager to see a killer brought to justice. Complaints that the police have spent four million pounds on ‘bloody publicity’ (p.6, 1980) overshadow these efforts, limiting the impact of a campaign designed to encourage revelation and dialogue. Emphasising the ever-present danger of the Ripper, a heady combination of posters, adverts and press conferences refuse to let the story die, constructing a wider narrative built on speculations between unrelated items of evidence that ultimately work to further alienate the man they seek. Once apprehended, the Ripper actually claims to have ‘changed my methods because the press and the media had attached a stigma to me. I had been known for some time as the Yorkshire Ripper and I didn’t like it. It isn’t me. It didn’t ring true’ (p.354, 1980).

The hunger of the West Yorkshire Police to engage the media as a weapon against crime backfires most notably through the figurehead of George Oldman. In a statement that leads to his demotion, Oldman confesses to the Yorkshire Post that,

Every time the phone rings I wonder if it’s him. If I get up in the middle of the night I find myself thinking about him. I feel after all this time, I feel that I really know him...If we do get him, we’ll probably find he had too long on the left breast and not enough on the right. But I don’t regard him as evil. The voice is almost sad, a man fed up with that he’s done, fed up with himself. To me he’s like a bad angel on a mistaken journey and, while I could never condone his methods, I can sympathise with his feelings (p.6, 1980).

Similarities between hunter and hunted conspire to produce this myth of the Ripper as a shadowy character, one created collaboratively between police and press as a living breathing story for the national imagination. In his desperation for knowledge, Oldman’s sense of familiarity with the Ripper leads the senior police officer to humanise the actions of a killer as error rather than evil. Marked by an all-consuming desire for communication and contact, an open relationship with the media and increasing identification with deviance is ultimately his undoing. Like Oldman, Peter Hunter identifies the shared humanity of the Ripper, openly asserting that ‘He’s the same’ (p.82, 1980) as the people who hunt him, a man who suffers the ‘same patterns we all have, same pressures, rhythms: work, the wife, kids, holidays’ (p.82, 1980). As a result, he becomes frustrated that the ‘Ripper Room are looking for a hunchbacked Geordie with hairy bloodstained hands, flesh between his teeth and a hammer in his pocket’ (p.83, 1980).

Peace is interested in moral degeneracy and shifting definitions of criminality and deviancy. By the end of his Quartet, its many killers are presented not as sub-human but as deeply human. Like many post-Chandler crime writers, Peace demonstrates that the order imposed by the state is not so easily separable from the disorder against which it is apparently arrayed. The police are equally delinquent in his novels and share many facets with the monster they track. Confusion caused by claims to moral righteousness foregrounds a shared humanity as both the police and the Ripper show a primitive relation to the object of their hunt. Mobilising the mafia-like influence of authority, Peace represents a police force motivated by money, an investigation founded on rumour and a public gripped by terror. Turning fear to political advantage, the media manipulates emotion to revive pressure on the public psyche, imposing the politics of insecurity and new threats on collective efforts to reinforce police authority over public space. Asked whether he thinks the new West Yorkshire police force were actually like this, Peace replied ‘Yes, or I wouldn't have written the books in the way that I have. The cases of Stefan Kiszko, Judith Ward and Anthony Steel – all of which involved detectives from the Ripper Squad – offer nothing to contradict my fictions and even a cursory examination of the Ripper investigation itself reveals a monumental degree of failure on the part of senior detectives. Recent revelations (for money) in regard to killing kits only further prove that we do not know the whole story. The survivors and families of the victims, and the communities that were terrorised, still do not know the whole truth and that in itself is corrupt.’8 Implicating the West Yorkshire force in a history of cover-ups, concealments and corruption, his Red Riding Quartet presents the British police as professionally and morally bankrupt during the 1970s and 1980s. Maurice Jobson’s final statement to solicitor John Piggott – ‘Not guilty?’ ‘We all are’ (p.390, 1983) - provides an effective summation of the precariously thin line separating criminal and law enforcer. Marked by misogyny and Masonic connections, the lawless antiheroes of the West Yorkshire Police stand as the ultimate examples of the corruption operating at the heart of the UK during this period.

 

Notes

1 David Peace, interviewed by Ludger Menke, ‘Podcast Nr. 3 – Interview mit David Peace‘, KrimiBlod.De, http://www.krimiblog.de/447/podcast-interview-mit-david-peace.html, accessed 15 January 2009.
2 Lord Shaftesbury subsequently called areas of Leeds ‘a modern equivalent of Sodom’ (Michael Bilton, Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper (London: Harper Collins, 2003, p.41).
3 The Chapeltown Riots occurred in 1975, 1981 and 1987 in the Chapeltown area of Leeds, the same area blighted by the reign of the Ripper. The riots were motivated by racial tension, social deprivation and high unemployment felt most keenly in the inner city.
4 Bilton, 2003, p.589.
5 ‘The Black Panther’, aka Donald Neilson, was a former builder who turned to crime in 1975 when his business failed. He initially burgled domestic homes but progressed to post offices. After shooting three sub-postmasters he became the most wanted man in Britain. His reign came to an end after an unsuccessful kidnap and ransom attempt on heiress Lesley Whittle. After killing Lesley, Neilson was eventually accosted in the early stages of another post office robbery in December 1975.
The A1 and the M62 are two of the busiest roads in the North of England. The M62 coach bombings occurred on 4th February 1974 on the M62 motorway between Bradford and Leeds. A bomb planted by members of the IRA exploded on a bus carrying off-duty members of British military personnel who were on leave with their families, killing twelve people. Although originally convicted for the crime, Judith Ward’s conviction was later overturned due to questionable scientific evidence and the claim that her original confession was forced by investigating police officers.
6 Newburn, T. (1999) Understanding and Preventing Police Corruption: Lessons from the Literature, Police Research Series, Paper 110, London: Home Office.
7 In 1972 it was revealed that a major pornographer has been making illegal payments to seventeen police employees including officers at the most senior level - the Head of the Obscene Publications Squad DCI George Fenwick, his superior DCS Bill Moody, Head of the Serious Crime Squad Wallace Virgo and Head of the Flying Squad Commander Kenneth Drury. As part of the subsequent investigation the Obscene Publications Squad was disbanded and over twenty detectives were asked to resign or dismissed. At their trial in 1977, Judge Mr Justice Mars-Jones claimed that members of the police had engaged in corruption on a scale which beggared description (Barry Cox, John Shirley, Martin Short, The Fall of Scotland Yard (London: Penguin Books, 1977).
The men who formed the group that became known as the ‘Birmingham Six’ - Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Joseph Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, William Power and John Walker – were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1975 for a series of pub bombings in the city of Birmingham, England on 21st November 1974 that killed twenty one people. The crimes were attributed to the Provisional IRA and the six accused Belfast-born Roman Catholic men were taken into custody on 22nd November 1975. Their convictions were later found to be unsafe and subsequently overturned by Court of Appeal on 14th March 1991 due to evidence of police fabrication and forced confessions. The six men were later awarded compensation ranging from £840,000 to £1.2 million. The Court of Appeal stated that ‘Dr. Skuse's conclusion was wrong, and demonstrably wrong, judged even by the state of forensic science in 1974’ (Regina v R v McIlkenney (1991) 93 Cr.App.R. 53-54).
The Guildford Four were also wrongly convicted of carrying out bombings for the Provisional IRA on 5th October 1974 at two pubs in Guildford, England. Although all four men initially confessed, their statements were later retracted amidst claims of police torture and intimidation of both the accused and their families. In 1989 a detective re-visiting the case found that interview notes had been obviously edited and re-typed during the original investigation to produce misleading police evidence. The four men were released on these grounds the same year. On 9th February 2006 British Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized to the families of the Guildford Four, stating ‘I am very sorry that they were subject to such an ordeal and injustice...they deserve to be completely and publicly exonerated’ (Blair apologizes to Guildford Four family". Guardian Unlimited, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2005/feb/09/northernireland.devolution, accessed 29 January 2008.
The collapse of the case and evidence of other miscarriages of justice caused the Home Secretary to set up a Royal Commission on Criminal Justice in 1991. The commission reported in 1993 and led to the Criminal Appeal Act of 1995 and the establishment of the Criminal Cases Review Commission in 1997.
8 David Peace, ‘West Yorkshire Noir?’, BBC Bradford and West Yorkshire, http://www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/content/articles/2008/05/16/david_peace_feature.shtml?page=2, accessed 27 May 2009.
Lesley Molseed an eleven year old schoolgirl from Rochdale, Lancashire was murdered on 5th October 1975. Stefan Kiszko, a twenty six year old tax clerk was wrongly convicted of her murder and served sixteen years in what became an infamous miscarriage of UK justice. At the time of the investigation, three local teenage girls came forward. One claimed that Stefan had exposed himself to her before the murder, one claimed he had exposed himself to her after the murder and the third claimed that he had been stalking her for some time. The police decided that Stefan fitted the profile of the killer and stopped pursuing alternative avenues. Significantly, they also chose to ignore evidence including details of the testosterone the accused was receiving for his hypogonadism that might have made him behave unusually (Further details of this evidence can be found in Jonathan Rose, Steve Panter and Trevor Wilkinson, Innocents : How Justice Failed Stefan Kiszko and Lesley Molseed (London: Fourth Estate, 1997). After a lengthy series of appeals, Kiszko was released in November 1992 but died a year later. Ronald Castree was eventually convicted of Lesley’s murder on 12th November 2007. The senior officer in charge of the original investigation - Detective Superintendent Dick Holland - later came to public prominence as a senior officer on the flawed investigation into the Yorkshire Ripper. At the point of his retirement from the force in 1988, Holland cited Kiszko's and Judith Ward's convictions as being among his finest hours during his thirty five years with the police. Holland was demoted during the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry four years after Kiszko's conviction. In Red Riding, the false confession and imprisonment of ‘child-killer’ Michael Myshkin at the hands of established police officer George Oldman arguably draws inspiration from this contemporary event.
Anthony Steel was convicted of murdering Carol Wilkinson on 10th October 1977. He was given a life sentence in 1979 based on contradictory witness statements and unlikely evidence. His case was finally appealed in July 2000 and quashed in February 2003.
In 2003 Michael Bilton’s book on the Ripper inquiry Wicked Beyond Belief revealed that when Peter Sutcliffe was apprehended he was wearing a V-neck jumper upside down over his legs that allowed him to expose himself while carrying out his attacks. The jury at his trial was not given this evidence and after his conviction, exhibits officer Detective Constable Alan Foster ‘was told to take various items of Sutcliffe's property – including the jumper – to the incinerator because the case was concluded.’ Foster held on to the item because ‘Sutcliffe was looked at for 47 other offences...I thought it was wrong to destroy the jumper because you don't know what the future holds – as has been proved by the emergence of DNA’ (David Bruce, ‘Killing Kit of the Ripper, Yorkshire Evening Post, 22 February 2003, http://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/news/KILLING-KIT-OF-THE-RIPPER.239646.jp, accessed 19 January 2009). As well as proving that the original evidence at Sutcliffe’s trail was condensed by police, the jumper suggests that his murders were in fact pre-meditated and as a result could be used to argue against his release when he completes his thirty year minimum term in 2010.