Described by the publisher as a ‘moving and personal account of what it is to be a police officer today’, John Sutherland’s memoir is most to be admired for its frank depiction of mental breakdown.
Sutherland has spent more than 20 years in the Met and this memoir, presented in a sequence of short, staccato episodes told in the present tense (which feel like expanded blog entries), covers his entire career to date, including a number of high-profile cases that readers will be familiar with.
Andrew O’Hagan talks about his new book The Secret Life – a funny, alarming and disturbing picture of what happens when digital fantasy meets analogue reality. Plus, he reveals the truth about Julian Assange’s appalling table-manners:
For this reason alone his reportage and analysis will be of interest, although a lack of detail around certain well-known incidents will be disappointing to some — this is not a critical work on the Met, or on British policing’s attitudes and values. On the other hand, Sutherland doesn’t shy away from talking about the target-driven approach to policing where ‘the danger is that we end up doing what’s counted rather than what counts’, or about the ‘squeeze of austerity’ and its impact on policing priorities.
Nicknamed ‘Tarquin’ by his colleagues in the Met in the 1990s, he captures precisely the disquiet of being ‘the geography graduate with a plummy accent and precious little life experience’ in an organisation which has historically recruited more from the school of hard knocks. At times, observing laziness, racism or plain stupidity he is painfully aware of lacking the confidence or experience to deal with such things as he would like.
His feeling that ‘so much of policing can only really be learned by doing’ will raise eyebrows at a time when we are seeing the strategic ‘Tarquinisation’ of modern policing — fast-track entry to senior ranks and the axing of the old requirement that everyone does their stretch as a PC.
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