The other day I went to a training venue and bumped into an inspector that I knew who was coming up for retirement.  He told me that his nephew had recently joined the police and he had given him some advice; ‘Always eat when you can and always rest when you can’.  

I thought the advice was valuable and wished someone had said something similar to me when I had joined some time ago, it would have given me cause for thought particularly when I arrived on the SSU.

On the SSU we start at 8AM or earlier if required and due to the type of things we do and the fact there is no one else to carry out the work if we don’t do it we stay until the job is done.  Sometimes it will be a painstakingly detailed search in a house piled up with stuff or a missing person or major crime search with several elements to it all of which need completing in a given time.  

The longest I have ever spent in one room on a premises search was 14 hours in a loft, I was partnered with Darran and we were searching on the authority of a firearms warrant, the chap had been making ammunition in his loft and we had to separate all the component parts and seize them in order of type, as usual it was crammed to the rafters with family stuff that you accumulate over the years as well as the ammunition.  Darran and I did 14 hours straight in that loft with no food not enough water and leaving the loft to fetch an exhibit bag was our break, our shift was 19 and a half hours in total, the chinese take away that we had at the end of the shift never tasted so good.

Most of the time you prefer to keep going until the search is completed before you eat and then you know the job is done - on a dive site we try to eat on the go but if press are present, it’s a hazardous dive or if you have limited numbers that isn’t always possible.  Sometimes it’s just too dirty or traumatic to allow you to reconcile the thought of having a food break during the search, this may be the case if we are searching at an arson site, a particularly dirty location or for human remains.  

On one job we were called to recover body parts after a man had shot himself in the head with a shotgun outside of his parents house, we had to pick up brain, skull and facial tissue over a wide area so we could repatriate it to join the rest of the body, the parents were inside their house with the curtains closed and we were working on the driveway and gardens, not only did we not feel like stopping because of the type of job we were doing but we felt we wanted to do our job in the fastest possible time to allow the family to open their curtains without being afraid of what they may see and manage the shock they must have felt over what had occurred.

The last time we had cause to sleep in a bizarre location was when we were called to dive for a young man who had drowned in a quarry.  The call came in at the end of the working day and we deployed to the location and dived into the night trying to find his body.  

At 2AM it was clear we needed to get some rest and resume the search at first light.  It was too late to find somewhere to stay and the best offer we had was the floor at the local reserved fire station.  I slept in a filing cupboard in an office, in my diving undersuit using some woollen dive socks as a mattress, my fleece as a pillow and my waterproof coat as a blanket.  Moomin slept in the dive lorry and the rest of the SSU joined easy chairs together in the social room.  

After four hours of rest we went back to the dive site and found the body at 11AM that day.

We’re wise to it now.  We have camp beds and sleeping bags at the Base and stay here regularly but invariably when a call comes in experience has taught us to throw a sleeping bag in the back of the dive lorry.  After all - this is the SSU and you never know where you’re going to end up or when your next food or rest opportunity will be….