Private security is driven by ‘push and pull’ – customer and user demand, and crime and other threats. An esoteric example from the National Archives at Kew is how detention room furniture in police stations had to evolve.
The file Mepo 2/10609 shows how the Metropolitan Police sought to respond to the challenge of those who entered their stations. For instance, on Tuesday, December 14, 1965 a 16-year-old lad forced open a detention room door at Greenwich police station, by splitting the door above and below the mortice lock. The lock itself was undamaged; but the teenager could push the door open. Police repaired it with glue in the crack. More disturbing, Greenwich was a modern police station, only opened in 1962.
The catch was that a detention room was not the same as a cell; they had wooden and steel doors respectively. A detention room opened from the charge room; someone detained might not be charged. Strength mattered in the fixtures and fittings; but also appearances (police didn’t want someone detained to feel imprisoned). By the 1970s, new police stations were having fixed furniture (that enraged people couldn’t throw) such as chairs and benches made of fibre-glass, not teak.
However, in most police stations, detention rooms were used in lieu of cells, if the cells were full. Hence a detention room would have installed a mattress-length standard bench (if the person inside was there overnight). Detention rooms and cells alike also had a WC (toilet). As of 1981, the toilet had a fibre-glass seat; but after an experiment at Leyton police station, Wandsworth and Paddington Green stations had stainless steel closets, with no seats. In the early 1980s, the Met Police was proposing to fit hundreds of mortice bolts; put another way, inside the two detention rooms at more than 100 of its police stations. But the force wanted to first fit them at six police stations, ‘preferably where they will be thoroughly tested’ as a superintendent wrote in 1981. An architectural ironmonger, and GAI member, Yannedis and Company of London E3, quoted for 100 heavy duty mortice bolts, chrome plated, as trialled at Leyton. Each bolt cost £37.28, with fixing screws.
To go back to a November 1979 meeting at New Scotland Yard, Met senior officers discussed detention room furniture, such as a fibre-glass bench that would not withstand a violent attack, and that when broken, sharp edges could be used as a weapon. For safety reasons, then, the Met wanted an end to fibre-glass benches, quoting the example of a bench smashed at Brixton station in 1978.
Another difficulty mentioned at the meeting was that some stations such as Feltham didn’t have any cells, and if such a station had a prisoner, it might be more of a risk to transport them to a station with one. If the prisoner became violent in a detention room, the door was often the first target. Hence a suggestion to line the (wooden) door with a metal sheeting. A Sergeant Clements at Feltham had typed a report in December 1976 as station officer, that in two years at least six times he had to remove a violent prisoner from one of the two detention rooms, and have him restrained in the (open) charge room by officers, ‘who are needlessly put at risk of injury, simply because the accommodation is unsuitable’. Clements gave the example of how in December 1976, with one punch, a prisoner smashed the inspection window glass in the door, causing a piece of jagged glass to fall ‘thus giving the prisoner access to a particularly nasty weapon with which to injure police or of course himself. Fortunately he didn’t accept this challenge’.
As Clements was one of eight sergeants at the station; other sergeants would have other stories. Clements argued that the cost of reglazing the windows and resetting the two inch thick wooden doors would be offset by fitting proper cell doors or frames. Clements, then, was complaining of the ‘absence of good basic security arrangements to cater for the ever increasing threat from violent prisoners’ who might include mental health patients, and deserters. More senior Met men backed Clements in notes on the file.
Such problems had been around for years. Another sergeant in 1971 accepted that a detention room door should look normal on the outside; but argued that inside it should have ‘some kind of metal sheeting’. One night in August 1971 a policeman had brought to Kensington police station two students found drunk in Earls Court. One went in a cell, and the other in a detention room because the others were full, both young men went ‘berserk’. One put his face through the detention room window and broke the reinforced glass, and had to go to hospital. The other man banged on the cell door, and broke the wicket on the door. This added to their charges.
As early as March 1968, according to the file the Met Police commissioner was setting a standard for fittings in detention rooms; such as, no loose benches or chairs; and for the door, and observation panel flap, each to have barrel bolts.
Photo from the National Archives file Mepo 2/10609: Met Police technical drawing of detention room door and frame, one to ten scale, 1980.
