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George had little confidence in my original tutor’s ability, and took me straight back to basics.
    We were sent to a shoplifter – a 12 year old who had stolen a tube of glue. An absolute bread and butter job for a probationer, but a framework which could be applied to every crime thereafter.
    With the offender lodged in the cells we went to do some of the clerical work. George pulled up a chair next to mine in the parade room and handed me a crime report form. I was about to start filling in the details when he stopped me.
    ‘This is a crime report – you fill one in for every recordable crime you deal with.’
    ‘George I know that.’
    George ignored me and carried on.
    ‘At the top it says Officer dealing – put your name
there
, your rank
there
and your collar number
there.
’ He stabbed the paper with a finger at each appropriate point.
    ‘George, I know.’
    ‘Below that it says offence – put “theft”’
    ‘George, I...’
    ‘Below that it says Act and Section. Put “Section 1 Theft Act 1968”’
    ‘GEORGE, I…’
    ‘LISTEN. My job is to teach you and teach you I will. I’ll tell you what you need to know, and I will assume you know nothing up to the point where I’ve told you. OK?’
    ‘OK’.
    That’s how it was with George. No frills, no messing. He had a job to do and he got on with it. His approach with the public was the same. He gave no quarter and everything was black or white, no compromise. He was a big believer in patrolling on foot whenever possible as a way of finding out what was going on, as it gave you time to assess your surroundings and take things in. As proof of this, when we had finished with our shoplifter we went out in the car but drove only as far as the edge of one of the council estates before parking up, whereupon George began a walking tour of the area.
    To start with it looked quite pleasant – solid, brick built houses from the mid 1950s, play areas for children, neatly tended grass verges, everything of which modern-day social engineers would seem to approve.
    Unfortunately as you went deeper into the estate standards dropped. Grass in the front gardens got higher, graffiti was daubed on walls, wrecked cars were abandoned in front gardens, and smiling children were replaced by feral streeturchins with runny noses and eyes that looked in at least two different directions at the same time. George was in his element. His manner was like a safari guide to a tourist, highlighting features and creatures of interest.
    We stopped by a low hedge where a family were sitting out in the sunshine. Three teenage children – two girls and a boy – lay in deck chairs as their parents watched from the kitchen.
    ‘See them – that’s the Corfield family. They’re all thieves. If you see any of them in town lock ’em up. Parents aren’t so bad now, the son’s just a nuisance, usually drunk, but the girls – can’t keep their hands off anything.’
    All this was done in the way a museum curator would talk about exhibits behind glass, but this was in front of real live people in their own front garden, and at a volume calculated for them to hear.
    The older of the girls spoke. ‘You’re a bastard Mr. Upton,’ she said with a slight smile.
    ‘Maybe,’ said George, ‘but you still call me Mister.’
    She obviously hated him, but also knew he was right in what he said about her, and was wary of upsetting him for fear of becoming even more of a ‘target’ of his than she already was.
    We walked on, into a crescent which put all the others into the shade in terms of grime and general disorder. No one seemed to take any interest in the area at all. Litter, old prams and discarded toys lay with broken glass and half-crushed beer cans. In one garden, curiously, was just the front half of a family saloon car, rusty and useless, like some ‘cutting edge’ work of art but of considerably less valuable. I wondered for a moment whether the rear half formed a similar