During the 1990s, the UK police preferred to be accused of racism rather than corruption. Stop and searches for no reason other than the colour of someone’s skin had managed to turn many law-abiding citizens into cop haters.
But all I ever wanted was to be a good police officer.
I thought I could be the smartest, the toughest, the bravest - but also, the fairest - cop in the neighbourhood. I ended up in an elite, compact, anti-narcotics unit given unrestricted authority to wage war on the area’s drugs underworld, focusing on criminals in and around a vast housing estate.
It was comparable to Rio’s shanty town favelas and the concrete jungle estates of Naples where Gomorrah mafia gangsters still live to this day.
My beat was complex, a tinderbox front line, where we confronted the brutality, the dead, the victims and the perps all in the name of law and order.
But in my upside-down world, those with badges morphed into secret criminals as my unit became the most powerful and feared gang of all.
And when my conscience finally got the better of me, I tried to go straight, only to be brought down by the ghosts of the past.
