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Mum's Dad was pretty senior in the TA and my Mum's Mum was an orangewoman. Her sister was RUC reserves or specials or whatever they were called so there was nothing bad said about them in my family. Like I said, I get literal shudders when I think about how I used to think life was like when I lived in NI.
Later in life, my cousin married a guy who used to be in TSG (or whatever the RUC used to call them, I just knew them as riot cops). He said their land rover would just roll into whatever was going on, they'd pile out, hammer the shit out of whoever was with reach, grab a few, jump back into the land rover and fuck off before the tyres caught fire. He said he was told that if the land rover stopped and the doors opened, anyone with arm's reach was fair game. He drives a private ambulance now.
stevo_com-
He said their land rover would just roll into whatever was going on, they'd pile out, hammer the shit out of whoever was with reach, grab a few, jump back into the land rover and fuck off before the tyres caught fire. He said he was told that if the land rover stopped and the doors opened, anyone with arm's reach was fair game.
Yeah, my bro was in them as well, and that was the approach. Interestingly, when bodycams were brought in, there was an internal uproar because this would end such fun and games. But it forced them to do the job properly, they weren't inundated with police brutality complaints, and community relations actually improved - because they were laying off on the brutality, who'd've thunk it?
Also, I was told the worst nights weren't the riots - it was when they had big club nights in the Odyssey, and they had to try to deal with young, 'roided-up, off their faces gym bunnies who wanted to fight the world.
kl
I was brought up with a few of them in the family, then a lot more of my generation joined them. I saw/heard a balance of strict professionalism and utter bigotry/cruelty/inhumanity. Aside from the sectarianism you mention, there were the guys who, on a slow night, would round up any rough sleepers and dump them in another town for a laugh. The guys who would trash the homes of any Indians they were investigating 'because they stink of curry and deserve it'. My brother delighting when he got out of cop school when he found out that they don't really have to do all the de-escalation and low impact physical arrest training, 'because we just kick their shit in'.
More pertinently, my uncle, who was quite high up, asking me when I went to university in England, 'How do you deal with all the blacks? All the senior English guys I meet at conferences tell me they're the problem'.