Free Crime Scene Investigator by Paul Millen Page B

they were also professional and honourable. And so it was in real life.
    In the mid 1980s the Squad was C8 Branch with its main office at New Scotland Yard. Four branch offices in the north, south, east and west of London each contained about fifty officers. They were mainly detectives but there were also also surveillance officers and the famed Flying Squad drivers who were the cream of the Met’s Class 1 drivers. It was their job to get the detectives into the thick of the action as fast and as safely as possible, which they did regularly with heroic bravery and skill.
    For over sixty years the Flying Squad had targeted London’s most dangerous and ruthless criminals, those who carry guns and commit violent armed robbery. The stakes were high with terms of imprisonment of fourteen years and upwards for those caught.
    In reality it was called just ‘the Squad’. There was only one and everyone knew it. In the early 1980s the detectives and drivers were joined for the first time by civilian scenes of crime officers, of which I was to become one.
    By 1982 two scenes of crime officers were attached to the Squad’s five offices covering the four corners and central area of London. Their success meant that by 1984 each of the four outer offices had their own with a manager based at the central office at the New Scotland Yard. I eagerly applied for the northeast London office post, but it was given to a SOCO who was a retired police officer many years my senior. He didn’t last too long in the post and I didn’t have to apply the second time. I was given the job. It would not be the last time I was second choice for a job, but that didn’t hold me back and it was to prove both enjoyable and successful, with a lot of hard work thrown in.
    My appointment to the Squad was probably hastened by my performance in a case which occurred in my last year at City Road. The Squad descended on City Road Police Station with four prisoners in their custody. The men had been arrested for conspiracy to rob and I got actively involved with the examination of the suspects. This involved the taking of hair combing samples amongst other things. When it came to the trial at the Central Criminal Court in London, I was asked by the prosecution barrister to demonstrate how the sample was taken. As I stood in the witness box I showed them how I opened out a kit containing a sheet of white paper and a comb, the teeth of which were seeded with a strip of moistened lint. Showing how I would ask the subject to bend their head forward, I bent my own head forward and demonstrated the thorough combing action, allowing fibres to be caught in the comb or fall onto the sheet. Placing the comb in the paper, I folded the paper around it before placing it in a bag. Looking up I could see all the court, the judge, barristers, defendants, jurors and officials laughing, many with tears steaming down their faces. My bald head had been the focus of everyone’s amusement as I demonstrated how to take a hair combing. Wiping his eyes, the judge composed himself and apologised for himself and on behalf of the court. I replied that I quite understood, but offered that I ‘hadn’t resorted to wearing a wig yet’. The judge’s face changed abruptly and, lowering his head, he looked over the top of his spectacles and told me, ‘I’ll allow you to get away with that, Mr Millen.’ Everyone except the judge and barristers continued to laugh.
    The greatest prize for the Squad was catching a team of robbers ‘on the pavement’, as they committed their offence literally outside a bank or similar premises. Months, sometime years of investigation, surveillance and planning would turn the robbers’ world upside down. The adrenalin rush felt by all those who witnessed such events would never be forgotten. And they would be accompanied sometimes by the bravest and often seemingly reckless pieces of police action, when unarmed police officers would tackle and arrest armed