I joined the Specials because I’d always wanted to join the police service and I thought I’d give it a go. I was initially only going to do it for a year, and ended up staying and making it into my 25th year.
When I joined the Specials, we were just coming out of the ‘hobby bobby’ era, so we were just breaking away from fetes and carnivals. I was part of the first generation of new Specials who started to push barriers; I didn’t want to be known as a hobby bobby – I wanted to do what police officers did.