JCIP #340 - Jay Darkmoore

In episode 340 of The Just Checking In Podcast we checked in with Jay Darkmoore.

Jay is a published author, commentator and hosts his own YouTube channel and podcast, discussing issues around policing in the UK. 

He has written several books, including crime novels and his own memoir, ‘The Job's F*cked - The Secret Diary of a Police Officer’, which was published in 2025 and details his 10-year career in the English Police Force as a Police Constable. 

In this episode we do a deep dive into the book and his journey in the Police, how domestic abuse incidents were handled during his time in the organisation, some of the most difficult call-outs he and his fellow officers had to deal with, what is the truth behind ‘non-crime hate incidents’? Is there a ‘two tier’ system in how crimes are handled? And much more. 

For Jay’s mental health journey, we discuss his personal experience of being domestically abused and why that inspired him to join the Police in the first place. 

We also talk about family issues he experienced throughout his early life, his relationship with his mum, the lack of control he felt he had in his childhood and adolescence, and how he went about taking that control back as an adult through his choices and life path. 

As always, #itsokaytovent

You can find out more about Jay's journey, purchase a copy of his books and subscribe to the  Job's F*cked podcast here: https://linktr.ee/Jaydarkmoore.

You can follow Jay on social media below: 

• Instagram
• TikTok

TRIGGER WARNING: this podcast contains a brief discussion about suicide, which some listeners may find distressing or upsetting, so please listen with caution.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Trigger warning. This podcast contains a brief discussion about suicide and suicidality, which some listeners may find distressing or upsetting. So please listen with caution. Hi guys, welcome back to another episode of the Just Checking In Podcast. I'm your host, Freddie Cocker, and this podcast is brought to you by Vent, a place where everyone, but especially men and boys, can open up about their mental health issues, break down stigmas, and start conversations. In each episode, I check in with a special guest. We have a Natsa and a chat about all things mental health, as well as anything and everything else they are passionate about. If it helps that person with their mental health, we discuss it. My special guest for this episode is Jay Darkmoor. Jay is a published author and commentator and hosts his own YouTube channel discussing issues around policing in the UK. He has written several books, including crime novels, and his own memoir, The Jobs Fucked, The Secret Diary of a Police Officer, which was published in 2025. I came across Jay through this memoir, which details his 10-year career in the English police force as a police constable. He talks about the reality of the job that people might not see, the issues and challenges he encountered, and his reasons for entering and leaving the force. In this episode, we do a deep dive into the book and his journey in the police, how domestic abuse incidents were handled during his time there, some of the most difficult callouts he and his fellow officers had to deal with, what is the truth behind non-crime hate incidents, is there a two-tier system in how crimes are handled in the UK, and much more. For Jay's mental health journey, we discuss his experience of being domestically abused himself by his female ex-partner, and why that inspired him to join the police in the first place. We also talk about some family issues he's experienced throughout his early life, his relationship with his mum and the lack of control he felt he had back then, and how he went about taking that control back as an adult through his choices and life path. So this is how my conversation with Jay Darkmoor went. Jay, welcome to the Just Checking In Pod. Thank you so much for letting me check in with you. Just after we connected, you were interviewed by Trigonometry, which I imagine has led to a load of other very great opportunities. I love the book. It was as much of an eye-opening book as a depressing one. So I hope that's a great compliment to you. For the listeners, I'm a little bit nasally because I am on day 16 of COVID. Hopefully on the mend. This is why I'm able to do this podcast and not completely bedbound. How are you, mate? And how has reception been to the book in the last year or so as well? It's completely changed my life, to be fair.

SPEAKER_00 2:53

It really has. It's allowed me to make the transition from working, doing writing in the as a bit of like a side thing to be able to go in full time. And from there, I've been able to build on the YouTube. I've been able to build on multiple different things. But one thing that's really nice about the book, it's not just like it's not just a case of the monetary aspect of it, but it's also like how many people it's reached. And it's how many people have reached it and gone, I want to speak to this person because I didn't actually know all these issues and the reality of what happens behind the locked doors of the police. And not just members of the public, but also, like you said, you know, I managed to get on some quite cool shows as well. So they've been pretty surreal being able to do that, but also more importantly, it's a voice for the people who don't have one. And as a result of that, I've had so many people in the police, so many cops, and even like a lot of teachers, a lot of people who work in the NHS, basically saying, like, thank you for actually talking about this, because we raise our issues internally and they just fall on deaf ears. People say, Yeah, okay, you know, we'll change this, we'll change that, but nothing ever happens. And hopefully, with the notoriety of the book and my voice now being more amplified, those people who didn't have a voice before are now able to actually say what they want to say. So it's been awesome, dude. It's been awesome. I released it in I think it was April, April or May, and my life's just been completely different now. I'm not sitting here making millions, I don't have a Porsche outside or anything like that, but it's allowed me to have the freedom to do what I want. Because prior to writing the book, I used to write crime thrillers. I still do write crime thrillers, but they've kind of taken a bit of a back seat. So, like I said before, I was doing I was doing a lot of writing just in different bits and bats. I was making a little bit of money from it, but not loads. And I really, really enjoyed it. But now I get to do something what I love full time, and it helps people. I've got best of both worlds there.

SPEAKER_02 4:47

Amazing, mate. I made so many notes from the book, and there's so much to discuss, and you love a chat. So without further delay, are you ready to start the show, mate?

SPEAKER_00 4:54

Let's crack on, dude. Let's crack on.

SPEAKER_02 5:00

We're going to start your pod, mate, by talking about your journey through the police and through the lens of your book, the brilliantly titled The Jobs Fucked. So tell me how you got into policing in 2018 after leaving your previous job, which was working as a support worker for children with special educational needs and disabilities or S N D, and why you were inspired to start this journey, first of all.

SPEAKER_00 5:22

So it's a funny answer, really. Most people turn around and say that, oh, I joined the police because it, you know, it's something that always wants to do, or it was a family thing. And part of that is true, a little bit is true, but mine's a bit more like more unconventional. So there's a lot of stuff about my beginning of my journey, which I actually didn't write about. I've spoken about a lot more since, but it wasn't stuff what landed in the book per se. I joined the police in 2015 as a volunteer, and then I transitioned to full-time in 2018. So we did just under 10 years. So I left in September 24. Now, when you consider my family background, being in the police is something which would have never really happened. For example, my mother's side of the family, I don't really have anything to do with them now, but my father was a criminal drug addict. My uncle and my grandfather were both career criminals, always getting locked up and everything else. My uncle ended up getting murdered via a gang shooting, which then my father was tasked. As the story goes, my father was tasked to then clean out the car, which his body was transported in. He ended up basically not doing a good job. The person that shot my uncle was caught, and then my father then fled down south. Never saw him again. That happened when I was about two years old, 18 months, two years old. Then, as a result of that, the officer who was in charge of the family liaison of staying on the case and liaison with the family joy, the murder inquiry, ended up actually getting into a relationship with my mum, and then two ended up marrying each other. This was in the 90s, this was a very different time. This is like 30 years ago, because now that fucking happened. So I grew up obviously seeing him coming home in his uniform, and I remember seeing him there, you know, looking really respectful. And maybe that was a bit of an imprint on me when I was younger, but growing up, I mean, God, I lived a typical kind of party lifestyle when I was 18, 19, you know, I was going out and all the rest of it. And but what really made me actually want to be a Bobby was I used to be a white van man, and I used to break the law a lot when I was driving my van. I've been caught on my phone four times. I have been pulled over speeding, God knows how many times, red lights, I've gone up the slit road the wrong way. I wasn't a very good driver, like it was just rules of the road. Fuck it, I'll do it, I'll do what I want. So I got pulled over and I got bollocked quite a lot by some cops. However, when they would pull me over, I would just generally chat to them, and they were always really nice, it was always really sound. They'd tell me a bit about what they'd been doing, they'd ask, you know, as what I was up to. But I had a lot of interactions with the police as a result of being a classic dickhead white van man. And eventually I thought, you know what, I fancy giving this a bit of a go. There was um somebody who I worked alongside of when I worked in care, who was a volunteer officer, and he was telling me about it and telling me how to get in. And I thought, you know what, why not? I'll give it a go. So I joined, I just attempted it and I thought, oh, I got in. Next thing I know, I'm actually on shift, I'm locking people up, I'm assisting, you know, frontline officers, I'm in cars doing blue lights, so I'm like, this is insane, this is crazy. Then, quite naturally, after a few years of doing that, I then applied to go in the police full-time, which uh I failed the first time on vetting because a lot of family history stuff, some of the stuff which should have happened, uh, ended up happening, and I didn't disclose it, because I didn't think I needed to, so I failed on that side, but then I then transitioned to another force, which is a force I managed to get into, went into that, and yeah, the rest is history, joined in 2018 and left in 2024.

SPEAKER_02 9:00

The book is framed around providing a reality of policing that the public may not see or give them the fuller picture if they do get some sort of insight into it. So, early in the book, you asked the question, what the hell is happening to the British police? So just paint a picture of what modern policing in this country looks like right now for my listeners. You know, what percentage of officers are leaving the force, what is the age demographic of frontline officers, and also just as well, how much did your own perception or maybe even illusion of the police change as you entered it and began to see the reality?

SPEAKER_00 9:33

So, quite a bit there. So I'll start with the first bit. Okay, so what is the reality of policing right now? It's for want to phrase a better phrase, it's an absolute shit show. There are cops on the ground who go out every single day and break their backs trying to look after people. For example, there was an officer who messaged me and said, last night I was single crewed. I got a radio call through of a man who had um a significant bleed when I got there. He was collapsed on the ground. So I got there, I was on my own, and the guy had uh severed trachea so across his throat. So he was bleeding to death. There was a member of the public there who tried to help, trying to hold the, you know, stem the bleeding, going, I don't know what to do. This officer then managed to stop the bleeding, put enough pressure on, call for backup, get some support, said it was about seven or eight minutes before help came. Seven, eight minutes doesn't sound like a long time. Trust me, it is, especially when you're trying to stop somebody from dying. So they then got off three, four hours late, and then they went home, couldn't sleep, and then they were back in the next day to do the exact same thing. That happens all of the time. That could be happening right now while we're talking, but you never hear of it. The only thing you ever hear of is when a cop goes and arrests somebody for a tweet or a Facebook post, which I don't think should happen, but that's another story completely. But what we do is via the frame of the medias, we get this idea of policing that all cops are bastards. We're just there to prosecute innocent people for little things. Like I said, part of that is true. Some things like that do happen, but we do not hear the vast amount of critical things what the police deal with every single day, all the time, hour by hour, which if they weren't there, the world would absolutely fall to pieces. But then the issue is then because of the way the officers are now treated, we are seeing a mass exodus when it comes to the service because when it comes to pay, I believe pay has gone down about 21% in real terms since about 2012-2010. So cops now have to do more work for about a fifth less of what they have, what they had 10, 15 years ago. There is also the way how officers are now treated, officers are seen, it's not really seen as a career anymore. It's seen as you're in for a few years, there's something called the healthy churn, which some supervisors talk about and what's banded around. And what the healthy churn is was years ago it'd be like you join the police, you do your 30 years, you retire with a nice pension, everything's great. Now it's like the police organizations don't want people to go the full 30 years. And the reason for that is because if you're in for three or four years, it means that you're paid off your training, and it means that they don't have to put you on the full salary because you only get that after like seven or eight years. You don't have to go on the full salary, it means that you don't have to be pensioned as well. So you're less of a long-term cost to the force, and it means that they've got three, four years out of here. So if it benefits the force that officers are leaving after a few years, they're not going to make the conditions any better. Because by doing that, it's going to make it actually harder for those. So now what we have is we have a massive issue when it comes to frontline policing, in particular, frontline policing, where around 50% of frontline officers have less than five years experience. I mean, like I said, I did just under 10. I was seen almost like a bit of a relic. It's like, my God, Jay's got 10 years experience. Everyone else around me on my unit had 18 months, two years. There was the odd person, I think there was one other person who had like 18 to 20. But other than that, it was very, very minimal. Now, when I first started on response 10 years ago, it was, you know, I was fresh in, then there was someone who had 10 years, then someone of 15, 20, 25, 28. It was seen as more of a career. And there's a lot of reasons for that. But the main issue is why people are leaving is because people feel like they're being treated like shit. People don't feel valued, they're getting less money for worse working conditions. As a result of so many staff leaving, it means that workload goes up, which means there's more mental health issues, there's more burnout, there's officers going to more things, which then have an effect on them. So PTSD and mental health issues compound. Then there's the whole nature of shift work in general. So the entire system is irrevocably being dismantled, it appears by the very people who are there at the very top. And it's to benefit, in my opinion, it's to benefit them in the long run. They're bringing in policies, they are looking at more stats-based policing now. So when it comes to stats-based policing, officers are being forced to make decisions they might not necessarily agree with in order to make the service look better. And in the book, I talk about how this relates to hate crimes, how it talks to relates about online crimes, and in particular when it comes to domestic violence. So that makes officers unhappy because they are suffering moral injury then. They don't believe that what they're doing is actually helping people, they're harming people. But if they push back, like they're going to go out on action plans, they're going to get in the shit, essentially. So you've got a lot of officers who aren't treated properly, who are underpaid, overstressed, it's not seen as a career anymore. They don't have a lot of staff, there's not a lot of training, there's not the right kind of training, and the work what they joined to do is not what they're actually doing. Now, the next part of your question, what you asked, Freddie, was how was my opinion of when I joined the police? How did that change when I came to leave? When I joined the police, I thought I would be going out, answering calls, and helping members of the public. And that obviously did happen, and I'm very happy to say that I got some really good results and I really, really helped a lot of people. But then there's the other side of the things what they don't tell you about. Now take all the stat chasing and all the moral injury to one side. I didn't realise how much you search for missing kids who've gone missing from a care home. I didn't know how if someone is arrested and they say, Oh, I've swallowed a load of drugs, I need to go to hospital. They've not swallowed a load of fucking drugs. They just want to get out of custody for a little bit. They then have to be sat with and guarded in hospital, could be there for days. And there's also poo watch. I didn't understand that poo watch was a thing. So if somebody has swallowed drugs and they're in custody or they're suspected to swallow drugs, they have to do two clean poos, and an officer's got to sit there and basically monitor them all the time while that's happening. Yeah, they don't say that in the interview, they kind of leave that for when you start. But there's also mental health as well. The amount of mental health calls police go to where people are saying that they want to harm themselves, or you know, they're feeling low, or they've taken pills, or someone could have like a mental health breakdown, like a mental health episode. And yeah, and when an officer goes there, they're not mental health trained. I think you get maybe a day or a few hours, you get the odd refresher here and there, but it's not intensive at all. Plus, that's on top of everything else you have to learn and deal with. So you're going there and you can't section somebody in somebody's house, you're not allowed. You can only section somebody if they're in public. So if you've got someone there who's said, I've taken an overdose, or when you leave, I'm gonna kill myself.

SPEAKER_02 16:46

Or they're violent because they're in a schizophrenic break or whatever it is, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:51

Yeah, I mean, the violent side I can understand because you wouldn't send an ambulance to somebody who's being violent. So you would control them and then wait for paramedics to get there and they would assess and do the rest of it, make sure they need that hospital treatment. But people who say, like, you know, we're gonna hurt myself. Do you please go? They say, Will you come to the hospital with us to get our mental health assessment and pass you over to the NHS who were the trained, you know, medical professionals that say, No, you are stuck there. You can spend hours at somebody's house trying to convince them to go to hospital because you can't leave, because if you leave and they hurt themselves, it's death following police contact. So then you're in the shit again. So I didn't realise how many mental health calls police officers have to go to. A lot of what the police deal with isn't crime. I would argue about 60%, 65% of what police deal with isn't crime. And not only that, even when you are dealing with crime, and it's funny actually, Freddie. So I'll just read you out a couple of things I've been sent today. I put on my Instagram, I said, tell me the most ridiculous job you currently have in your workload. So this is an incident which a police officer is being asked to investigate. Okay? So we have one here, which was I've been asked to do a full inquiry, full investigation report into a solo cyclist who ran into a wall and made a full recovery. There is one of a theft of a plant pot from the front of a house, which is about three pounds. The amount of shit, my navy security light is shining in my garden. So people say, people say, like, when you join the police, you're thinking I'm going to be catching the murderers and the sexual offenders, and yeah, all the stuff you want to do, but then you realise actually about 90% of what you do is just crap. It's shit. But the police are the bottom of the pile. So NHS ambulance, they say, okay, they don't want an ambulance, or okay, they walked out of the hospital. Fine, you know, do your own thing. Social services are like, okay, you know, we don't want to be involved or whatever. The police kind of can't say no. Everything falls down to the police. If the other services are too busy, it's the police that deal with it. And this is again something what you have to understand and what you have to realise when you start. Being in a police is almost like putting out fires rather than dealing with the proper stuff. You are just being sent here, there, and everywhere, dealing with all kinds of things. So bit of a long-winded answer.

SPEAKER_02 19:14

You spoke there about domestic abuse, and we'll get to that in a second. But throughout the book, you detail a whole range of stories of call outs, like you said, you or your colleagues have told you about. Some are funny, some are very dark, a few are quite odd. Sometimes they're a combination of all of that. So, for example, there's one where one of your colleagues has to deal with a mentally ill giant man with a pickaxe. But the one I want to start off with first, and I'll try and kind of get through these very briefly, because there's a couple really powerful ones I want to talk about, particularly from a mental health perspective, is you had to deal with one which was a violent crime inflicted by a knife. Some people call this knife crime, some people call this interpersonal violence. And you said in the book, words can't describe what I saw, and I remember it for the rest of my life. Now, as a young police officer, how did you feel seeing that? And how did you process it afterwards, especially when you talked about post-traumatic stress injuries, as I prefer to call them, rather than PTSD?

SPEAKER_00 20:06

I still think about it now. That was the murder of Brianna Jai. Oh wow, you dealt with that. Yeah, yeah. I was one of the first ones there. That was that one. So basically, what happened was we were sat down, we sponsor busy and stuff. And near the end of my career, I transitioned from frontline and it was still class as frontline, but I was more like office-based, kind of dealing with the things which it was like an investigation real sort of thing. Like CID, but without you know the nice shoes and comfy clothes. So what happened with that was we basically just got a call over the radio saying someone's lying on the floor bleeding heavily. And my sergeant just stood up and we'd get the fucking get out to that. And sometimes, Freddie, when you get a call over the radio, you think, you know, this would be not as expected, or this isn't going to be as bad. But with this one, occasionally you get it and go, This is a bad one. Do you kind of know? And I drove like a twat getting to that. It was in cultured, so it was um quite a distance away from where I was. So I drove like a madman to get there. And I got there, and it was absolute carnage. There's people coming towards me. So the people who actually found who called it in, uh, I spoke to them initially, took the details, and I ran up this dirt track. There was paramedics working on Brianna, paramedics working on them, there were officers with them, yeah. I mean, just that whole thing. And then after the chaos, initial chaos, I was then on scene guard for like eight hours. So it was you know, the cadavers over there, you're in the woods, you're blocking it up. And honestly, at the time, I was a bit like didn't really bother me because you're in work mode. It's like, yeah, okay, this is horrific, this is awful, and it's fucking yeah, it's awful. But it's certainly afterwards, and even now as I'm talking about, I can still see and feel those emotions coming up. And I remember watching the documentary, actually, what came out, and I watched it, and I was crying my eyes out. Like this happened a couple of years ago. Back now, and uh the documentary came out, and I was watching with my partner, and she said, Are you okay watching this? Because I was getting really emotional upset, and and I remember thinking to myself, Freddie, I remember thinking to myself, like, certainly when I was in the job, and a couple of weeks afterwards, after a serious traumatic incident, you have something called a TISM, it's like a debrief. So, what you do is you sit down, and there's trained officers, and everybody who was like first responders, everyone who was initially there, they all go down. You'll basically just go over the internet again, and it's the time to talk about how you feel and reflect. And and I remember thinking before going into that, thinking, why is this bothering me? Like, you know, I'm I'm a Bobby, I'm a copper. I've seen people get stabbed, I've seen mangled bodies and suicides and everything else. Like, you've seen all the bad shit. I remember thinking, like, why is this bothering me? And I remember sitting around this table and we're recounting what we've seen, and I'm kind of holding the emotions back a little bit. And then there was a sergeant who was there, and the sergeant was one of the first ones there as well. And he's like 20 odd years in, a very stoic man, just like a rock of a human being. And even he started breaking apart a little bit, even he started cracking up, and I remember thinking, well, if if he can let his emotions show, I'm alright. You know, I'm okay. So, yeah, in summary, it was fucking horrendous. And I hope them two people that committed that awful, awful killing never see the light of day again because not just necessarily what happened, but even, you know, the methodology and the planning, everything behind it is truly sinister and truly evil what happened. That's definitely one of the worst instances I've been to. And I've been to murders before, you know, I've seen the inside of people's heads, I've seen okay a lot of the bad shit. But yeah, that was bad. That was bad.

SPEAKER_02 23:47

Another part of the job, you tragically have to deal with call outs of suicidal men, and you write how there's been an explosion of mental health call outs more widely. You've spoken about it on the podcast, and you give really two heartbreaking stories in the book here. One your colleague had to deal with, and one you had to deal with. Just tell me which one you feel comfortable disclosing and how it impacted your mental health at the time. It depends which one you're specifically referring to, but I'm happy to talk about whichever, mate. I'm happy to have. So there was one that you dealt with, mate, where you had to check the person's phone for a motive for why that man had taken his own life, and you found this horrific voice note of him, which was essentially a suicide note. And then you also found messages, voice notes from his children telling him to come home after they found out he was missing. How did you feel kind of hearing all of that in totality?

SPEAKER_00 24:36

So I was something what's called kiosk trained. I was the only one in my pretty much my entire department that could do it. So I used to go through a lot of people's phones, which sometimes could be funny. Sometimes you'd see some horrendous stuff, like the amount of ways that someone can take photos of like their intimate parts is ridiculous. So you'd see things like that, and then there was occasionally you'd get some nasty ones, and this was one of those. So it was for Coroner's Court because they wanted to download the phone to try and get some kind of motive behind behind harming themselves. And this guy was about the same age as me or you, you know, 20s, 30s. He was an ordinary guy, he had a couple of kids, and for whatever reason, he's decided that his life isn't worth living anymore. I went through his phone on his notes section. There was a big long, but essentially a suicide note, just talking about his mental health, talk about his depression, talk about how he's tried different channels and he's not worth living anymore. But but the worst part of that was going through his WhatsApp, and on his WhatsApp, he had multiple messages and they were voice notes, and the voice notes were from his friends and family, people saying, Oh, you need to bring me now, you know, some urgence come up. Just people trying to get him on the phone. But the one that was really the hardest one to listen to was off his two young kids, and they were basically just they can't have been any older than four or five, six years old, just on the phone saying, Dad, we love you, please come home. And I still remember that, and I remember afterwards, again, didn't really bother me at the time. Yeah, okay, it used to be a bit shit at the time, but you tend to find with police work and emergency services work is that you deal with the instant at the time, you deal with the instant there and then, and it seems to be afterwards it affects you afterwards you deal with it. And this is why I'm a big advocate of mental health in the services, because at the time you might think it's not bothered me that, but it's later on down the line when this is how PTSD can compound and these things can get worse. So, with that, it was a case of like at the time when it happened, colleagues. I went out and I told the colleagues, like, I've just had to listen to this and deal with this. And they asked, you know, you're okay, but I never sought help for it, but I wish I did, to be fair. I wish I'd have gone over to somebody or my sergeant or someone who's called, can I have a download someone's phone? Can have a chat about it. Because I've had to do that once or twice before when I have dealt with an incident and it has affected me just on the subject of suicides. There was one where he was a hanging, it was one of the first ones I went to, and I've been to a few before, like, but for some reason, this one it just you never know the ones that'll stick with you the most. Like, I've dealt with loads and loads of different shit, some of it was upsetting and all the rest of it, but you don't realise until afterwards that it has had a bit of an imprint on you. And with this one particular one, I remember saying to my sergeant just in passing, I just said, Um, yeah, I keep thinking about that hanging we went to the other day. Like, I just I keep going over it in my head. I went, right, okay. He put his radio down and said, right, back office now. I'm thinking, fuck, have I done something wrong? Like, what's going on? And he just sat down for 10 minutes and he'd just put his radio down and just like, right, come on, let's have a chat. So we went through the instant, we had a talk. He said, like, you know, if you're thinking about things, you need to talk to someone about it because that's your brain's way of saying, I'm not quite processing this properly. And if you don't address it, it will just get worse. So, yeah, if any emergency services personnel or people listen to this or do hear this, then uh all I'd say is like, you know, even if you don't have a debrief with someone else, make sure you have a debrief with yourself afterwards, whether that's you write things down or even voice noting yourself, because it is massively beneficial. And sometimes things will never leave you completely. I mean, like I said, Fred, even just chatting to you, talking about the Brianna Jai incident, or talking about, you know, that particular case with those voice notes, like I can still feel the emotions there, you know, it's not completely gone. And one thing as well, what people don't realise, or it's not spoken about enough, is that police officers are just human beings, they do an extraordinary job, but they are just normal people. They put on that uniform and go and do the job. And when they get home, they take it off, and they're just you know, Joey blogs around the street. The uniform is not armour. We think it's armour, but it isn't. And I know in normal jobs you have to protect your mental health, but in the services, you have to do it even more just because of the nature of the job, you're going to be exposed to more things. And I don't think PTSD in the job is recognised as much as it should be. I think the police federation made an estimate of about 35% at minimum of frontline police officers suffer with PTSD, if not C PTSD. So when we think about PTSD, we mainly think about people who've been through severe traumatic incidents, such as you know, domestic violence or serious sexual assault, or even when it comes to people coming back from war, you're willing to tell a soldier or crack on with it, you'd be fine. But you can argue that when it comes to policing or ambulance or frontline emergency services, you're exposed to that trauma daily. And you know, you might just be sat there at your desk and then you get a phone call and it's like, right, you've got to go out to this now, and then it's it's absolutely horrendous. So it isn't treated as much as it should be, it doesn't recognize as much as it should be. And I think there's a culture in policing of it's changing slowly, but I know of officers who say that I don't want to talk about mental health because I say I want to go for uh firearms in the future. If I've had a history of mental health issues or I've had referrals to occupational health, um, they won't give me a firearms, they won't let me do it. So, for promotional aspects of movement within the organization, it's almost penalized to talk about it too openly because you can be considered as weak and a bit of a liability. That culture needs to change completely, and I don't think that's fair.

SPEAKER_02 30:18

I've got so many questions, so I'm going to try and laser focus on a couple of things here now, mate. So you dedicate a whole chapter in the book to domestic abuse, and this is an issue that I'm extremely passionate about. I've interviewed so many men, male survivors of domestic abuse. I've interviewed women as well, but male domestic abuse is a big focus of mine. And it was surprising but not shocking for me to learn about how this issue is dealt with by the police in 2025. You've got personal experience of it, we'll come to that later in the podcast. Can you just set the scene for me and my listeners as to your experience of being a police officer in handling domestic abuse incidents, particularly from a male perspective when they are the victim?

SPEAKER_00 31:00

So the police have a big push for violence against women and girls. And some officers, some senior officers and some organizations see that as well, if there's a job that comes in, you lock up regardless, you take positive action, but it's heavily inferred what that positive action means. If someone is not coming away in handcuffs, then you know you're in the shit. Plus, on top of that, officers get graded via uh their stats. And if officers don't hit certain targets, they're in the shit. So officers are going to domestic violence jobs. The training you get isn't very good either. You get a day of DA training when you join the police. In 16 weeks of training, you get a day. You get half a day, a couple of hours on stalking and harassment. DA and stalking, harassment cases, certainly domestic violence, are if not the most thing you will deal with, other than mental health calls. So it seems like the things that you have to deal with the most is the things you get the most minimal training on, but that's another thing altogether. DA is a massive problem, and you go to it, and people can become quite numb to it in a sense. It can become, oh, this is another DA job, they can burn out with empathy, suffer out compassion fatigue. But the pressure's there. So if you go to a DA job, this might be the first time this person's actually ever rang the police and has been able to speak out. And if you have an officer who's burnt out and overworked, then they might not recognise the signs or they may not give the right service, which can obviously massively impact that person's faith in the police if they do need to call for help in the future. Dealing with DA jobs, I really liked it. A lot of officers didn't like them because they're very labour intensive. Because not just in the case of, you know, if you have a supported victim, you have to keep them on board and you have to keep them, keep in contact with them a lot, which of course is very important. But juggling that, say if you've got 10 or 20 different victims, what you're carrying, it can be quite difficult to do that. Some victims need a lot more support than others. But I always liked dealing with DA cases because when you got it right and you helped someone properly, you made a world life-changing difference that person's life. Essentially, they're living like with a domestic terrorist, they're living with the domestic potential homicide waiting to happen. But what was happening, Freddie, was people were being sent out to cases and they were having that autonomy taken away from them. Rather than being able to look at the situation and go, okay, this needs an arrest, or this is an ordinary couple which have just had an argument, it's gone off a bit too much, we don't want to lock people up. They were basically being pressured to know somebody's coming away in the handcuffs because we have to prevent violence against women and girls. And if you don't do it, then you're going to be in the shit. So that decision maker was taken away from officers. So it was basically as soon as the police are called, officers were being told to arrest, even if there wasn't really an offence committed, but it was like arrest first, and you know, we'll we'll find out why later. Well I remember overhearing an inspector on the phone to somebody saying um the officer was on the phone going, I don't think there's any crime committed here. And he was going, No, well, lock them up anyway, and we'll sort it out later on. Lock them up for an assault or whatever and we'll sort it out later on. So the law, the law as well, is being manipulated in order to fulfil statistics to benefit people at the very top.

SPEAKER_02 34:24

Just as well, mate. Sorry to cut you, which is ironic because male victims are still counted as women in the violence against women and girls strategy here in the UK. I have heard that.

SPEAKER_00 34:33

I remember speaking to George from the Tin Men. I have heard that. That is correct, currently. And why is that? Beats me. But one thing that was an unpopular truth is that 40% of DA victims are men.

SPEAKER_02 34:46

Correct, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:47

So by saying violence against women and girls, we're not looking at 40% of the problem. I mean, when you consider the line that all gets thrown round, and it is a true stat, is when it comes to domestic homicide, it's two women a week die at the hands of an abuser, which is two women a week too many. You know, it shouldn't happen, and we need to prevent it from happening. But when we look at men harming themselves, if you look at men in DA relationships, some men are victims of homicide as a result of a female partner. But what I find is well, one thing we're not talking about is female abusers, and in particular, when the relationship is finished, women use in the court system to restrict access to children. Also, there's the thing of maybe malicious allegations, be that sexual assault or domestic incidents, domestic violence. There are evil abusive women out there, and this thing of believe all women, I don't think that's true because people lie. And if we believe all women, we are enabling potential abusers to then harm men. I wonder if somebody did a study on the correlation between men who take their own lives and have they been through the court system recently? Have they lost access to children?

SPEAKER_02 35:57

I would like to know a lot that, mate. That is a big thing I need to know more about.

SPEAKER_00 36:00

Yeah. Have they had malicious allegations made against them via an ex-partner? And I wonder how much that homicide rate will change. So two women a week die via the hands of an abusive partner during the relationship or at the end of the relationship, because the the most dangerous time for a female in abusive relationship is actually when they leave the partner. You can massively escalate then. But I wonder how many men and what that stat would say if we accounted for men taking their own lives as a result of child access restriction and everything else. So just going back to what you're saying, Freddie, is when it comes to DA, the law's being manipulated because ordinary people who would say have an argument, the police would go there and they would say, Don't forget, they've got the supervisor or the superintendent or whoever in their area at the time, they would go there and they would say, What's happened? Oh, we've had an argument. Okay, at any point, did you feel worried or scared? Well, yeah, they've never shouted at me before, they got a bit like, you know, a bit shouting, they slammed the door, I was a bit worried. Right, okay. Well, because you felt fear, it's now an assault. So now we're going to arrest generally 95% of the time, we're going to arrest him because he has made you feel fear, therefore he's assaulted you without actually touching you. And when people get arrested, they go, You're arrested for assault. To me, or to the ordinary person, assault means you've hit someone. It doesn't mean you've shouted at someone or you've you've had an argument with somebody. So the guy's getting locked up going, I've not touched her. No way you've shouted at her or you've made her feel fear. And this is how bad it got. It doesn't even have to be the victim, or I'll say victim, you know, the people in the household who've had the argument who are actually saying that something bad's happened. It could be a neighbour has rang in and gone, I can hear a male shouting. Then what the police have to do is they'll go, they'll ring up the sergeant, because that was the policy. You ring up the sergeant, you go, This is the score. The sergeant then speaks to the inspector who wants the stats and make their block look better. The inspector's then going, well, I think that because the neighbours rang in and the male's been shouting, that the female in the house would have felt fear, so therefore arrest them. So it's kind of coming through like false hand, and it's anything to push through the stats. Now, I dealt with loads of cases where I knew straight away where I was sitting opposite the person, talking to them and going, You are here for a statistic and nothing more. You've done absolutely fuck all wrong, and that this is going to be no further action before we've even finished this interview. And there was loads of instances like that, but the difficulty is the difficulty is, Freddie, is that by this blanket approach, we're actually harming victims because take away ordinary people and the impact it can have having somebody being arrested and not being able to go home for three months. Certainly, maybe they're like the breadwinner in the house, they can't support the family for three months because they've had an argument. Maybe the new parents and tensions have just built up too much, and then it's caused a bit of an argument, and somebody's around the police, and because it's overzealous thinking what the police have, in order to improve statistics, to say, look at us, we're helping violence against women and girls, more men are getting locked up, more men are being restricted for the families, more women don't have their breadwinner, you know, or the caregiver there as well. But take all that away and look at like an actual serious domestic abuse case. If you're an officer, you're a police officer, and you are dealing with 10 domestic cases, and you have two of those cases which are serious cases, potential homicides in the future, the amount of time and energy it takes to actually get that over the line or to support people properly is massive. It takes up all of your time and it's really labor-intensive and emotionally intensive, not just keeping the victim on board, but also the evidence gathering as well. Certainly to prove something like controlling coercive behaviour or stalking. Now, those other eight cases, they also need attention. So you've got officers because of the overzealous arrest nature of what is currently happening, officers are dealing with cases which they should never be dealing with, which means that these serious cases, those victims are then feeling unheard, they're feeling forgotten about, and they would then withdraw support. So by this overzealous nature, we're actually harming the real victims by not giving them the proper support, and we are increasing the stress and workload and ruining the lives of ordinary people, as well as you know, the moral injury what's been caused to the officers. Equally to that, by this blanket nature of if an allegation is made, we're going to lock them up and we'll deal with it in custody, we are enabling abusers to use the police as a third-party proxy to then further abuse to their partners. One example of this was there was a victim of serious controlled coercive behaviour who'd been strangled repeatedly, assaulted repeatedly, never felt confident enough to actually make a statement. Anyway, this lady ended up fleeing the relationship with the children. She managed to leave. She took that very brave step to leave. The abuser rang the police and said, We've just had an argument, she's just hit me in the face. I want her locked up. The police then went and lifted her. So then you have a victim of DA who's not had much faith in the police, who's not felt confident enough in the police to make act to take action in a custody suite, in a cell, now being interviewed by the police because their abuser has made a false allegation against them. And there was one case in particular where I remember there'd been a history of DA, a history of bad things happening, but it had all been dealt with. And this was like five, six years ago. And the bloke had a restraining order. That restraining order had since subsided. He posted two letters through his partner's door saying, Please can I see my children? Otherwise, I'm going to take it to court. He was arrested for harassment. And this is where, in custody, I kicked off over this. I said he's not harassing her. He's got every right to ask, can I see my children? He's not threatened her. It's not a course of conduct per se. Yes, it's two incidents, but it wouldn't gratify the criteria for harassment if it comes to charging standards. This person's purely been arrested because it's a tick in the box. The solicitor went crazy, even a custody sergeant went crazy that this has even ever come to them, but it had to be escalated to a superintendent because of the policy. And they wouldn't let it drop. They were like, no, they have to be interviewed. And then that person was on bail. So that means that we have a person on bail who shouldn't be on bail. We're also telling this victim that you know the police are taking action. And then when it, of course, gets no further action from the courts and they say this person should never be in lifted because they've not actually committed an offence, it makes the police look shit because we've promised the victim action when we never should have taken it in the first place. Makes the dad feel worse that, oh, she's at it again. And it happens all the time. But then when you deal with an actual serious case of DA, like I said before, it's so labour-intensive and so difficult to get people over the line, you actually realise the difference between two people having an argument and then being a bit of a shouting match and one person getting locked up and stopping a homicide. The two are very, very different. And I know which one I'd much rather put all my resources into, which is certainly the latter one.

SPEAKER_02 43:00

Trust is a massive part of this process, mate, when it comes to DA incidents. You know, you talk about a story of a case with Rachel, you might have referenced it earlier, where that trust wasn't just broken, it was shattered into a thousand pieces. And you also talk about instance with male victims where they have been systemically let down. You even talk about, most worryingly, an officer who was essentially fired from their job for being domestically abused. So this picture is incredibly stark, not just for officers dealing with victims and survivors, but the officers themselves. What needs to change, mate?

SPEAKER_00 43:31

This is why it's uh it's complete bullshit. This is why this violence gets women and girls, you know, it sounds really, really good. We want to stop violence against women and girls. Oh, fucking course we do. Absolutely, of course we do. If you're a domestic abuser, you should be in prison, never fucking get out. But it's also the mouthpiece for the bosses to go, this is what we're proud of, this is what we're working towards. Anyone commits uh violence to women and girls are gonna get locked up and all the rest of it. So we know already how that's being manipulated, but we also see the bullshit aspect of it. Because when a police officer finds themselves as a victim of domestic abuse, they're not looked after. This one case in particular, which is the one I think you're referring to, and there's been others since we're writing the book, there's more cases come to light, both male and female, who this has happened to. Was this a woman, a woman police officer who was in a domestic abusive relationship with a man. On paper, you think they would get the most support because not only are they part of the remit what the police are pushing forward, they're also a police officer. So they're surrounded by everyone who'd be able to help them. That wasn't the case at all. So what happened was this officer was being pressured to lie and to not go into work by their abuser to say, you're not going into work today, we want to go off somewhere, or I want to do this. Now, naturally, a decision has to be made there by the victim. Do I upset my abuser who I live with, or do I go to work? You go into pick whichever is safest, and in this instance, it was not go to work and appease the abuser. This officer also made disclosures to other people around the office about their relationship, and those officers actually put in statements to say, like, we believe something's going on. This is what this person told me. Eventually, after so long, the abuser was actually arrested for controlling coercive behaviour, and the officer was not allowed to go back to their home, so that officer was then made homeless. So we then have an officer that's then made homeless, and then because they didn't want to make a complaint for whatever reason, there are a myriad of different reasons why victims of DA do not want to make a statement. Totally understand that, which is why it can be so difficult to get a air quotes real victim, proper victim on board, because it's very complicated. This officer, because she didn't want to make a complaint, the abuser was no further action, and then it then transpired that the professional standards department inside the police were then looking at this officer going, Well, you were lying to us throughout the course of this relationship, saying you couldn't come into work. Therefore, your honesty and integrity is now into question, and you're going to be sacked for gross misconduct. So we have a police force that says we want to protect violence against women and girls. We then have a police officer who's a victim of domestic assault. We know that victims of DA lie and make up stories as a way of protecting themselves from their abuser. We know this. However, the force, rather than let the lying go and say we understand why you're a lying because you were a victim of DA, we're some nuance, they've gone, nope, you lied on this day and this day, therefore now you're sacked. So, a force that says we want to protect violence of women and girls has made a woman homeless, ignored her, and then has uh sacked her from a job. How the fuck can they honestly say that they are there to protect people? So, like I said, Freddie, this slogan sounds great. Yes, we want to protect violence of women and girls completely for that, spent a lot of my career dedicated to that cause and doing that. But the way it's implemented is not to benefit people, it's to benefit the senior officers at the top and to make the police force look good so that they can continue pushing forward the Shream, going, look at our arrest statistics, look at how many arrests we have, look at all this and all this. It's bullshit, is what I'm trying to say.

SPEAKER_02 47:27

I want to briefly talk about another issue which is linked to domestic abuse, which is stalking. And this is something you've had to deal with too in the police. We both know that men and women can be perpetrators and victims alike. Women can also stalk other women, men can stalk men. This isn't always from a romantic perspective either. You know, you look at the case of someone like Sally Hughes, who was stalked online by other women. Celebrities have been stalked by crazy fans, you know, the list goes on. It's not just ex-partners. I've spoken with James Bloodworth, who was a survivor of stalking himself, and he spoke very candidly and honestly about how the UK police didn't deal with his case very well. The American police did, and it was a whole kind of ordeal that people can go and listen back to. Just tell me about your experience of this issue too and the double standards that didn't surprise me, but also apparently do exist in the police force too when it comes to stalking.

SPEAKER_00 48:14

So when it comes to DA in general, men are considered the perpetrator. Often an example of this could be as happens many, many times, man rings up the police, as happened to me, man rings up the police, I've been assaulted by my partner, I need your help. They turn up, and then the woman, often the female, says, Well, they did this to me last week. Okay, right. Well, he's getting lifted instead. So there's an absolute double standard when it comes to stalking, and even in the way that they're prosecuted when they get to court. So there's a couple of examples here what I want to give. Now, stalking, again, I believe stalking is one of the most insidious crimes that somebody can be a victim of. It is all consuming. Someone described it, I'd interviewed, he was the head of a stalking unit, and during the interview, he described stalking as a mental rape. It is constantly, all the time, you don't know where this person is, you are thinking about it all the time. But when it comes to classification of crime in stalking, it's just classed as it's very ambiguous. It's any behaviour which amounts to stalking. I think that's a good thing because you can't specifically label the behaviours of stalking. Stalking stalking me online. Online now and all that, yeah. If not, all cases of stalking now have some element of cybercrime to it. But it's been watered down so much that stalking is now you break up with somebody and you message them twice on Facebook, it's stalking because it's interrelational partner related. So it's automatically classed as stalking. Now that massively waters down stalking. There's actually three forms of stalking. Don't even know this. There's stalking, the stalking involving serious alarm or distress, and the stalking with fear of violence. The first one carries uh six months maximum, the other two carried up to ten years in prison. Sounds dead good. You go get locked up for stalking, you go to prison for a long fucking time. Okay, so it's supposed to happen anyway. Now, pretty much every really bad case of DA I dealt with had an element of stalking. It was normally after the relationship had finished and the stalking started that people would then come to the police and go, My ex-partner won't leave me alone. You scratch that surface, you go deeper, you realise, oh, actually, this has been going on for years, and you're a dead person walk in if we don't stop it. So I dealt with plenty of women who have been stalked. They have had trackers put on the cars, they've had the offender wait outside their home for them, wait outside their work. I had one where she said, I don't ever want to speak to you again, don't ever contact me again. So the bloke then left flowers and chocolate on her car. And when he was interviewed, he said, Well, she didn't want to talk to me, so I put them on the car because she didn't want to talk to me, I've not done anything wrong. And when you get into the mind of a stalker, it's obsession, it's fixation, it's unwanted repeat contacts. And they don't believe that what they're doing is wrong. Because if you were to admit that you're stalking them, then you'd stop because you know stalking's bad and you don't want to be labelled as a stalker. I interviewed a guy, he's the same guy I just mentioned, and he admitted to everything you said, yeah, I'm obsessed with it. We will get back together, we are meant to be together. This is just what happens. You know, I just need to keep trying, and eventually she'll get back with me. I remember saying to him, like, this is the criteria for stalking, you fit that. And he said, Yeah, I do, but I'm not stalking her. I just want to get back with her. So it's obsessive. It's not two messages on the fucking Facebook, it's all consuming. When I've dealt with male stalkers and they go to court, this is the big thing with DA as well. It's not taken seriously in court. Like, I remember I dealt with a girl who'd been strangled repeatedly, she'd been stalked, she'd been, you know, assaulted multiple times. It was horrific, her case. And the guy got a two-year suspended sentence at court, a better community service, a fine, and he uh he got a restraining order. Great, didn't see the inside of a prison cell. That poor girl has to live with what he did for the rest of her life. But then when we look at the disparity between male stalking and female stalking, in my experience, female victims of domestic abuse are given even less when they go to court. So, for example, I dealt with a case, and I'll talk about it in the book. I dealt with a case where there was a male victim and he contacted us saying, My ex-girlfriend won't leave me alone. He was suicidal, he was on the verge of an absolute breakdown because what this woman was doing was any way she could contact him, she was trying. She would send him text messages, she would pretend to be other people and send him text messages saying, I'm going to go sleep with your ex-girlfriend if you don't contact her. So a lot of emotional abuse there as well. She would send small transactions via bank accounts with little messages on them, just sending like one penny at a time. She threatened you with a knife, she threatened to expose intimate images of him online, so revenge porn there, sex tortion, revenge porn, all sorts of really nasty shit. I spent months on that case, keeping the guy on board. Mate, when I say he was on the verge of jumping off a fucking bridge, I'm not exaggerating. He was ready, he was ready to go because he couldn't see a way out because she was contacted his work and all sorts. She was trying to dismantle his life unless she got back with him and he didn't want to. She went to court, she admitted what she'd done, she went guilty, and she was given, I believe, an£80 fine and 100 hours of community service, not even a suspended sentence. I think she got a 12-month restraining order as well, but there was never any mention of going to prison. And the comments from the judge, I remember, were along the lines of basically move on and get over it. So they compared they compared it to like a schoolyard fallout, like a tit for tat schoolyard fallout. This woman had abused this man to the point he was ready to end it all. She destroyed his life, tried to destroy his career, had threatened to post intimate images online, and she completely walked free without any kind of real consequence, in my opinion. Never mind all the time what went into that, all the time and effort and energy going into that case. So this is another reason, just we were saying about before about the realities of policing and everything else, is even when you do a really good job and you get someone on board and you do the hard work, they get fuck all at court anyway. So you do all that work, and then nothing happens, and you're there like, why do I bother? Of course, the victim gets justice, you know that the case has been dealt with a lot of the time, yeah. I mean, a lot of the time as well, mate, victims just want to be listened to, they want to be believed. I've dealt with a few cases where no one has ever said, I wish they'd have gone to jail. Often it's not a case of wanting to go to prison, it's a case of just I just want it to stop. And because of the restraint or you know, it does stop. But for me, I'm like, no, it's not taken seriously enough. Again, the whole vibes gets women and girls, the emphasis on domestic abuse, we always hear about it, and it needs to stop. Well, then why is there no real consequence for people that commit it? So it's backwards, but yeah, there's definitely a disparity between the level of punishment when it comes to male perpetrators of DA, who you know, I have dealt with them, they have gone to jail, and then you get female perpetrators of DA. So there's a difference between the fear element as well. This isn't spoken about enough. Generally speaking, when a woman is in a DA relationship, she's afraid for her personal safety, she's afraid of being sexually assaulted, she's afraid of being attacked or you know, killed. It tends to be a male is more fearful of the reputational damage which can occur, whether that's coming out and saying, I've been a victim of DA or the damage which can occur via their abuser, you know, malicious allegations, posting things online, etc. One is physical damage, one is mental damage, and we need to understand that just because they've not necessarily been punched or slapped, they've still had severe emotional and mental damage occur to them as a man that's a victim of DA. It just needs to be really much more taken seriously in the courts, and the police need to deal with it. Doesn't matter whether someone's male or female, I believe it's a case of like I mean, I'm gonna say a stat now, I don't know if it's completely correct, but I think if it's uh if it's a man and a woman go to court for the exact same thing, they've got the exact same criminal history, the man is like eight times more likely or eighty times more likely to be sentenced than a female. The courts are sexist as well. And like I said, I mean, in relation to my own case, I was arrested for a domestic assault when I was the victim of domestic assault because my ex-partner made an allegation against me after the fact. So I know firsthand experience, I think this is why I used to get so like upset and so impassioned when I see a bloke get lifted. In my mind, simply because there's a bloke rather than any actual tangible offence being committed or evidence, and then you compound that with the stat chase and then the pressures from the organization as well. And then the gaslighting, the bullshit gaslighting, saying that they're doing a good job.

SPEAKER_02 57:08

There's a lot to cover still, so I'm gonna talk about one more issue now before we talk about your kind of career and how you've moved into podcasting and YouTube, mate. You spoke in the book about something called a non-crime hate incident, right? And two-tier policing, and it's this is not a political podcast, but this is the only question I'm gonna sort of ask on this issue because in the book you state that an estimated 60,000 hours are dedicated to recording NCHIs a year, which equates to around£865,384. Now, when crimes like phone and bike thefts, shoplifting, burglaries are so rife in parts of the country to the point that in some parts they've essentially been decriminalized because the police are overloaded or they've just not prioritized them. The BBC even reported in October 2025 that the British Transport Police announced it will not investigate bike thefts outside stations where the bicycle has been left for more than two hours. And you spoke there about this fracturing of the social contract between the police, the courts, and the public. Where do you think this leaves us with issues like this as well?

SPEAKER_00 58:08

So, with non-crime hate incidents, they shouldn't be recorded. The reason why they were recorded was it was following the Stephen Lawrence case where he was targeted because he was black. I'm not I'm not an expert on it, so I'm not going to try and pretend to be, but that's where it started. Now, there's something called, I can't remember the specific name of it, but there's a pyramid, and it says non-crime hate incidents lead to this, then lead to that, then lead to that, and then eventually lead to fucking genocide. But just hate crimes in general, like just with non-crime hate incidents, just to stick on that for a sec. I I am quite guilty of going off on tangents, I do apologize. But when it comes to non-crime hate incidents, why the police involved in something that's not a crime? And it's recording it for recording's sake, but more sinisterly, what happens is you might not know if you have a non-crime hate incidents recording against you, but if you then go for a job, it can come up in an enhanced DBS check and say, oh, this person's been, you know, alleged for a hate crime. I mean, it'll show up a hate crime, and at the bottom it'll say non-crime hate incident. The employer might not even see that. But even still, if you've got one person here with a squeaky clean PNC, then you've got another person here with a you know otherwise squeaky clean, but they have a non-crime hate incident recorded against them, probably without them even knowing, that's going to impact that job prospect. So there's the real life implications of that as well. Um, plus, like you said, it's like£800 and a thousand pounds. That money can be much better spent elsewhere. It could be spent on welfare and officers, which is stripped all the time. It could be spent on looking after staff, it could be spent on better IT equipment because the IT equipment you work on is absolutely archaic. I think my keyboard I used to work on had more fucking service than I did. So there's just so many better uses for money. And the only way I can think of it is it's a directive from the government to bring it down. I believe that the Labour government now actually want more NCIs being recorded, which is a total waste of time. Then we look at hate crimes. A hate crime is one of those where if somebody believes a hate crime has been committed, then a hate crime has been committed. It doesn't have to be the person who's the alleged victim of it. So me and you could be in a pub, we could be having a chat. I say something derogatory to you about being a man, being a straight white man, devil, then what happens is somebody might overhear it and then they go, I believe that's a hate crime. They ring up the police, I've now potentially going to be investigated for a hate crime. Because somebody somewhere has deemed it as a hate crime. When it comes to the actually say writing off a hate crime, you know, closing it down, it requires the authority of an inspector. The only other offence that I'm aware of which requires that level of authority, which is two ranks above a constable, is a domestic violence case, a domestic assault case. So, in a way, we're saying that a hate crime carries the same gravity of offence as a potential fucking homicide, based on your authority needed when it comes to that. You mentioned on two-tier policing. Okay. Two-tier policing, from I believe, from an organizational political point of view, based on what we've seen, I think it does exist. What does it mean for listeners as well, mate?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:06

Someone might not know what it means.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:08

So two-tier policing would be that we are harder on certain groups than other groups. A classic example of this would be on the Southport instant where there was riots. People don't know Southport, I think it was last year, a couple of years ago, some young girls horrendously murdered based off a bloke who was from an immigrant family. Absolutely fucking horrendous thing. He should never see the light of day again. But as a result of that, there was massive outrage and massive upheaval in the local communities and nationally as well, because people were so upset about what had happened in relation to immigration. So then it tended to be white working class people going out protesting, which then turned violent and rioting. Even if you posted anything about it, there were people sent to prison simply for posting about it and expressing their views online about it. People saw serious jail time, many, many months, if not years, which when I've already spoken about you can strangle your partner and walk fucking scot-free, but you post about immigration, you go to jail. Ridiculous. So the courts are obviously politically captured as well. But that's a fucking that's a that's another thing completely. I'm trying to stay on track here as best I can. But then there was um, for example, there were groups of Muslims from a mosque who were walking around carrying weapons, and they were told, please go put your weapons back, we don't want any issues. So people were saying, well, you're coming hard on the white working class people, but you're not coming hard on the the Bane, the Muslim group. So that happened. You'd be a fool to say that two tea policing, to some extent, when it comes to that, doesn't exist, because it clearly does. From a boots on the ground perspective, it doesn't, not in the way what people think, and I'll get on to that. So I've spoken to loads of officers and have said, does two tea policing exist in your force? All of them said no. It said it's it's not a case of one person's black, one person's white. We lock up the white person because we don't upset racial tensions, all except one. And one person told me that they went to an incident where there was a Polish Eastern European person and then there was a British Muslim person. The British Muslims started the argument. Yeah, they had an argument, and the officer was told to arrest the white European because even though they were the victim, because they don't want to upset racial tensions. That's the only time I've ever heard of it actually happening on the front line. So politically, yes, I think it exists. Ground level, no, in most cases. However, it does exist ground level when we talk about domestic violence. Because as we've already established on this podcast and in the book, the police, well, it's violence against women, it's not violence against men. In some places, it's specifically male violence against women. So we're targeting men straight away there, even though, like we mentioned before, 40% of all domestic victims are men. So Tu Say policing exists in that way when it comes to sexist bias when it comes to domestic abuse.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:47

One of the many police officers you spoke to in the book, mate, says towards the end of it, quote, I've never seen such a demoralized workforce. Officers that used to love the job and wore their uniform with pride now look like shells of their former selves. Even when officers get off frontline response, they find that other units are in just as much trouble. Lack of staff, little training, poor morale, terrible management. I know colleagues that have left terrible jobs in the past and their dream was to become a cop. Now they've returned to their old careers. When we say that the police is at breaking point, it's a lie. We are already there. We're just trying to learn to walk on broken legs. If the British public knew this, and they are thankfully knowing it because of your amazing book, do you think there would be more empathy for officers and local bobbies, or am I being naive?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:31

I think you'll always get a subset of the population who hate the police. That will always happen. When I post a video on YouTube or on social media, there's always a bunch of comments saying, Oh, all coppers are bastards, and you know, you'll never change those people's minds. Normally those people generally have a lot of interactions with the police, so you know, take from that way you will. I think a lot of people don't actually think about it that much and you don't really understand it. I remember speaking just to somebody and they said, No, all police are double crewed at all times. There's always two officers in the police car. I'm like, no, there isn't. And like I said, we only ever hear of when the police do something bad or when there's a death in police contact, or we only ever hear the bad stuff because these people, the only reason we are able to sit here on our computers in our houses, is because there are people out there willing to stop the bad people who want to do us harm, willing to do that. And I think the majority of people, the silent majority of people, admire the police force, they respect the police, the police knock on the door, it's a big deal. I was in the police, I had a police knock on my door a few months back because my son had gotten in trouble at school, or he was like someone or nothing but someone had rang the you know, kids fucking about. And lad, I was like, oh my god, the police are at my door. I even know I was in the police. So most people have that normal reaction of going, why are the police here? Why are they across the road? To some people, it's an everyday thing because they constantly come into contact with the police. I don't know what will change, but I can guarantee that. If it carries on the way it is at the minute, there won't be anyone there when you have to ring up for help. The police are run by people, and people get sick of it. People have enough. And the police now is not the career it used to be, where you are protected and you work for 30 years, you get a nice pension, and you can live off the rest of your days doing whatever. You're not valued. There's not the experience there. The stress is too much. The people at the very top start thinking of themselves and how they make their careers look better. You are viewed now as you are there for three or four years, and then if you stay after that, then it's actually considered a bad thing for the organization. Police are being punished for swearing at a lad who had a knife and was assaulting people, as is the case with Long Castle. Long Castle got sacked because he grabbed hold of a lad and called him a little dickhead or something like that. When the lad had a knife on him, he got sacked for it. There's cops who they might have a colleague say, Oh, you weren't courteous there or don't agree with what you did there, and then they find themselves on the back of a professional standards investigation. The entire organization is crumbling from the inside out, and it's the organization that's doing it. The people on the ground, the officers on the ground, the people I used to work with, the job I used to do, the people out there doing it right now, they are everyday heroes and they will drive to your house on blue lights if you call for help. Doesn't matter how much you earn, doesn't matter what your skin colour is, your culture, whatever, and they'll go there and they'll do their very best to support you and look after you. We take that for granted because it's always there. If things carry on the way they are, one day that won't be there. So yeah, in answer to your question, Freddie, I think in an ideal world, people will hear my voice, they'll hear being able to champion for the frontline services and read the book, and people in power will go, okay, we really need to do something about it. I can't see it happening though. I'm very fucking skeptical about it. I think the ordinary member of the public wants to know that police officers are out there helping them. But I think that, not okay, so they don't care, but it's just not part of their daily life. They don't ring the police, they don't have anything to do with them, they don't might they even know any police officers. So it doesn't occupy their daily thoughts.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:21

Very briefly, before we reflect, mate, being a police officer was a massive part of your your life and your identity for the best part of nine to ten years. And now you're in YouTube, you've written an amazing book, you're doing all this public speaking work. And my favourite part of the book, and I want to finish this section before we reflect, is where you say there's a difference between a leader in uniform and a uniform of leadership. One is merely worn, the other is earned. Do you feel like you earned yours?

SPEAKER_00 1:08:52

I do. I do. I know that I was very good at what I did. I wasn't the best, I wasn't perfect. Fucked up a few times, but I did my best. And I know that there are people out there now still alive, or people out there now who got away from someone nasty, or even just somebody who was having a really, really bad day, like a family member had died, and I went and delivered the death message, and I went through all the everything you had to do with them. They might never have any other interaction with the police again, but they remember, they'll remember that into positive interaction they had at that one time with myself. So yeah, I do feel like I earned it. And even from just from like an internal point of view as well, I had a lot of colleagues who used to come to me for support, a lot of colleagues who used to ask me for questions. That's quite well respected in my force, certainly on my unit as well. Didn't get on with everybody, of course. You're not going to be busy mates with everybody, but yeah, I'd like to think I did. There was never one of these where just because I wear a uniform, you have to do what I say. I think that's what made me quite good at my job was I didn't see the uniform as I have power or authority over you. Obviously, in certain circumstances you do, but you take that uniform away. I'm just an ordinary person. And I think if you can break down those barriers between you and the person you're speaking to, even if it's somebody you have to arrest and somebody does not want to come with you for whatever reason, if you can talk to them like a human being, you can empathize and get on their level, and you break down those barriers, you will find that you are massively much more respected by the public and even by the people who don't want you there. So yeah, I'd like to think I did.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:31

And as we reflect on this topic, mate, before we move on, what has been your proudest achievement on this journey?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:39

Um in total. I don't know. I've actually not been asked. I've stamped you for the first time. Yeah, I've actually not been asked that before. The proudest moment I had in the job was when I got a message off a lady who had helped escape a serial domestic abuser saying that before meeting you and before having any dealings with you, I thought the police were awful. You've changed my opinion on that, and thank you very much. You've saved my life. So that was a lovely moment. Since leaving the job, writing the book was obviously a big thing, being able to become fully self-sufficient and run my own business, but also I'm now helping officers, not just as a bit of a mouthy bastard from the northwest of England. I'm actually setting up a community of where shift workers can join, and in there there's there's mental health support, there's fitness, there's exercise, diet, there's tools on how to, you know, if you wanted to leave, how you could do that, and how you could build your own business too. So, and also just some of the messages I get from people. Like I had a message the other day, it was a voice note, just saying that just how much my content's helping somebody who feels a bit lost in their career at the minute, and how they're finding it difficult and going through a bit of a shitty time. And a lot of people message me now saying, Thank you for saying the thing I want to say, but I'm not allowed to. So being a voice for all the people out there too, I think is uh is a massive thing. I joined the police to help people and I help people in the job, and now when I've left, I'm still helping people just in a different capacity.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:10

And finally, what has this wider journey and the book, the podcast, everything in between also taught you about yourself, mate?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:20

Um that oh again, you've stuck me with this one life's not easy, you will come up to many, many challenges in your life. Some personal, some financial, some emotional, mental, the rest of it. Ultimately, you can get help from other people, but at the end of the day, no one's coming to save you. You can only rely on yourself. And the things I dealt with in the job, I think we've dealt with before I was in the police. Things I've dealt with after the job have all taught me that life keeps throwing fucking rocks at you, but you can't let it bury, you can't get bogged down by it. And also to step into fear a little bit. I was terrified about leaving the job. It was something I'd done for 10 years. It's something I built a career around. I was good at it, I was very highly trained in what I was doing, and I enjoyed it for the most part. And I was nervous about stepping away. I wanted to leave for a while, probably about a year to 18 months. I wanted to go. But it was like, you know, I had a shit day, then I go back in, and it'll be a fine day, and then it'd be a shit day. And eventually it just compounded. And it was being able to step into fear and go, you know what, what's the worst gonna happen? I'm not going to die. If I leave the job, I'm not gonna die. I'll just get another job somewhere else. And if all this falls through, if all this goes to shit, I'll just get another job and I'll continue what I'm doing in another capacity. So there's something to be said about feeling the fear and doing it anyway. And as a result of me feeling that fear and stepping into it and taking that leap, I've been able to, like you said, go on some big podcast, come on in, speak to you. I've been able to release the book. Thanks for putting me as a big podcast, mate. I appreciate it. Oh you're awesome, you're awesome. I've absolutely loved today. I've listened to some of your other podcasts as well, man. I think you're doing a great job. I love what you do, and yeah, and be able to advocate for the people that don't have a voice, be able to be self-sufficient. My life is totally different to having looked this time last year, and that is all as a result of being terrified and being unhappy enough that you're willing to change something and stepping into it. So, yeah, that's what I'd say. I thought I was resilient, and now I'm fucking bulletproof.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:45

We've talked about your roller coaster journey in the police, mate, and how you've gone into podcasting, YouTubing, run your own business. Now let's talk about your own mental health journey. And you've covered it a little bit already, but I ask all my special guests on this topic this question first. And you very kindly said you'd listened to previous episodes, so you know what's coming. Tell me back to early life, teenagers, and looking back, were there any early mental health experiences? Who's the Jay? We meet here.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:12

Fucking hell. Hey, how long have you got? We've been here a while already. My child was chaotic. It wasn't the best. My parents would argue, otherwise, they'd say, Oh, you had a great child and everything else, but a lot of issues there. I very easily could have ended up on the other side of the law for a variety of reasons. Still affects me now. I think that's one of the reasons why I really struggle to relax. I'm always working, I'm always doing things. I go to the gym four or five times a week. I always have to challenge myself to do something difficult. As a result of things will happen when I was younger, I don't have a very good relationship with my parents. I have great relationships with siblings, not a very good relationship with parents. Sometimes happened, doesn't it, mate?

SPEAKER_02 1:15:55

When you have sort of unstable childhoods, your relationship with your siblings is so much more closer, I found, with people. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:01

But what's funny actually is when we all get together, we go, Do you remember when mum did this? Do you remember when looking this happened? Like we're all laughing about it, but in reality, we're going, fucking hell. It's one of them, mate, where it's um you only realise how bad things were when you tell other people about it.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:18

Because you get used to it and fuckery becomes normalized, innit? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:24

Exactly, exactly. Like there was one significant event that happened where I used to be a goth. I used to have long black hair. I used to be a goth, and I was confused about my sexuality a little bit. I thought it was bisexual just because everyone was bisexual back then, it was the thing. Everyone with long hair started hugging and kissing each other when they'd had a bit of cider, as you do. And anyway, my parents found out about this. They believed that it was my identity which was the problem. They believed that it was because I was involved with, you know, I was listening to rock music and stuff. It was definitely the black sheep growing up in that regard because they were, well, they were into that sort of stuff, so they saw it very alien. And anyway, this one day I come home from school, and in order for them to strip me of this affliction, because they're very homophobic as well. So the thought of having a gay son or a bisexual son was something they couldn't comprehend. So what they did was my long black hair, they sat me down and they got a clipper and they shaved my head. Oh my god, that is trauma. You throw the whole family. They even then got my sister to do it as well, my sister to take part. And a few years later, because I was thinking about it a lot, and I remember just blowing up on them and said, Why did you do that? And we didn't, you're making it up. We didn't do anything like that. We would never do anything like that. That is awful. Why would you say we've done something like that? So I rang up my sister actually and said, Did this happen? And she said, Yeah, of course it did. It was awful. I'm like, right, okay, so parents are gaslighting, they're very manipulative and gaslighting as well. So that's just page one example of things what what happened when I was younger. And then actually explains when I got into an abusive relationship in 2020. When I was speaking to a therapist about it all afterwards, I explained to them their her behavior and what she was like, and then I then went into my childhood and it just clicked. I was like, oh well, this is what I've been used to when I'm growing up. So it makes sense. Avoidance, abusive, manipulative, gaslighting. Yeah. So lots of issues, certainly growing up from a childhood perspective. I have suffered very severely with mental health in the past. I actually I probably can't say too much about it, but I made an employer, an old employer, unhappy because I expressed my own mental health issues on my personal platform in the past and they weren't too happy about it. So I've struggled with mental health quite a bit, and this is one of the reasons why I never took medication, I never went on pills or anything like that. It just wasn't for me. I always felt like, you know, okay, I can get through this and I can deal with this. But then there's aspects of the job. Like I said, you know, the compounding effects of PTSD. I've never been diagnosed, but I probably do have some element of it there. One of the big things for me though, which really helped me kind of break through and go on a very deep level of introspection was I did magic mushrooms and I had a quite high dose and lied back with the thing on. And I came out of it. I went on this crazy beautiful journey into my own mind. Uh, and at the end of it, I woke up and I was, I've never cried as much in my life and just come out absolutely sobbing my heart out. And the trauma, the inner child work, this child which was neglected when we were younger, this child that was abandoned, this child which was not looked after properly, that fragile self still lives in there, and you carry it round. There's I mentioned this a few times, it's a very powerful book. It's called The Body Keeps Score, and it talks about trauma and neuroplasticity as well. And what happens is when you go through trauma, your body remembers it. You might not consciously remember it, but it's still there. It's like a scar in your body, it's like a scar in your brain into your nervous system. So being able to use psychedelics in a controlled way, I believe, does have a lot of therapeutic advantages if done in the controlled way and supervised way, because they are powerful and you might not like what you uncover, you might not like what happens. So this is not me advocating for people to go out and do them. What I'm saying is in medical science and therapy, I think there is a place for them. So, yeah, so I've always been an advocate of just doing difficult things, challenging myself, be that career-wise, be that physically, and meditation as well. I find meditation helps a lot to quiet down the mind. Like I said before, really struggle to relax. Always got things on the go, brain's constantly going, can get quite a lot at sometimes. So meditation helps to quieten that down, and going for a long, hard run, or lifting really heavy weights, or getting into an ice bath. Things which shock the body because it shows that you're not fragile, it shows you are a lot stronger than you are, and the mental resilience that comes as a result of that. So then when you do encounter something difficult, there's also the aspect of accepting people for who they are. So when I think about my own caregivers when I was younger, accepting them for who they are, they won't change, they are who they are, and it's letting go, it's killing that version of them in your mind who you want them to be, and accepting that they are who they are and they won't ever change. And it's quite freeing when you realize they will never be what I want them to be, and that's just how it is. It's not necessarily okay, but it's easy to live with. And just relating this back to DA, when I've done a lot of research into it, is there's a cycle people go through, and there's there's um the start of the cycle where it's like you know, love bombing and it's love and it's a dormant, and everyone's trying to get back to that phase. When it's all horrendous and bad, they're trying to get back to that loving phase. And one of the things that you have to do when you're in a bad relationship or you have a bad relationship with caregivers is accepting that that's not real, that's a manipulation tactic, and accepting that that person never actually existed. You can't have that all the time. So that was quite difficult growing up to understand that you know the people that I was supposed to care for you and look after you weren't the best, and they will never change, so you shouldn't expect them to change, and you have to kind of come to peace with that, and only if you come to peace with that, can you let go of it? And can you then move on with your own life? And then you live as the person which you want to be and not repeat the cycle of how they were because a lot of trauma is taught as well, a lot of traumas are intergenerational. So, grandfather was abusive, that made dad abusive, that made me abusive, then, and there's got to be a point where that cycle breaks. And this is the case with policing, it's the case with people in prison. So many people are traumatized out there, and so many ordinary people are traumatized too. And you have to do that work, you have to figure out, you have to do the difficult work and figure out okay, what the fuck is wrong? Because I believe that if you look at like an evolutionary standpoint, I believe that if you are feeling depressed or anxious, that's a signal from your brain to say something's not right in your life. There are a lot of people I know in careers which they thought it was their dream career and they hate every second of it, but they can't leave because they're tied into a pension, for example, or the pressure of staying, what would happen if they leave, or the financial aspect, and that makes them depressed. So, what people do is they medicate instead. They go, Okay, I just won't feel anything. I won't feel sad, I won't feel happy, but I won't feel anything at all. But that keeps people in this cycle of repeating the same behavior which their body and brain is telling me is making them deeply unhappy. And this is what I mentioned before about stepping into the fear. You step into the fear of something which I can either stain what I have now, which I know is breaking me and really upsetting me and slowly killing me, or I can step into this unknown. The unknown has to be better, and you go from there. So, so yeah, in summary, I'm all kinds of fucked up, but I'm managing to deal with it.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:55

I remember reading Bessel van der Koel's The Body Keeps a Score. It was actually the first book review I ever did, and there's lots of things I agree with it. There was lots of things I'd heavily disagree with it. But one of the greatest quotes that I've had on this podcast made was actually related to the book. A very close friend of mine, Duncan Craig from We Are Survivors, said, The body keeps a score, but the mind keeps the receipts. How do you reflect on that?

SPEAKER_00 1:24:17

That's good. Yeah, so it's like the body keeps the impact of what has happened, but the brain and the mind keep the memory of it. So they know it the brain, mind keeps exactly what it makes sense. It does make sense. No, actually, I can't remember that quote from the book, but that's that's good. I like it.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:34

It's not in the book, he's it's his adage. Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:38

No, I like that. I I think that's very true. And you both have to work together. Like I've got the chakras on my arm, okay. And basically what that means is in a nutshell, it's mind, body, and spirit have to be in unison for everything to work properly. So I do take that on. So meditation for the mind, cold showers and cold plunges, difficult things for the mind, but it also makes the body work as well. They all feed into each other. If you have a sick mind, you'll have a sick body, sick environment. I always could tell when I walked into somebody's house, just of their environment, probably how mentally astute they were, how much in pain they were. Because normally what would happen is you'd walk into someone's house, and if it was disheveled, chances are the person's not very well. But equally, if everything was like sickeningly in place, chances are they're not very well either, just in a different way. It's a lack of control over your life and too much control, and both come from trauma.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:30

You mentioned control there, mate, and that brings me on to my next question, which is that when we spoke off air, control seems to be a key element in your life. So, for example, you didn't have control over what was happening to you as a child, your mum had a lot of issues, your dad was in your life and then very quickly out of your life, and your stepdad came in. How did you go about gaining control over your life as an adult in a healthy way?

SPEAKER_00 1:25:54

So, growing up, my life was very much controlled. Every aspect of finances were controlled by my stepfather. I used to, when I was a delivery driver, I would work 18 hours a day, split shifts, six days a week for about 200 pounds a week. And if I refused to go to work or I couldn't go to work for whatever reason, then they would be absolute hell to pay. All my bills and all my finances were controlled. I didn't even live with them, I lived with my sister at the time, but but I would pay my wage to him, he would then give it to my sister. So over time, I managed to break away slowly. It started with something like getting a phone bill in my own name. And then it was, you know, getting my car insurance in my own name. All these little things just slowly breaking that control away. And it's just learning boundaries. Certainly, when you say control is in like control over my life, a lot of it was because my life was so heavily controlled by other people, it was bringing in those boundaries and having those arguments and saying, no, I'm not doing that anymore. You've had enough control over me throughout my life. I'm not, I'm not willing to do that. If I hadn't have broken that, we wouldn't have been having this conversation because my life would have been completely different. Control over my own life now, it's being accountable to what I say and accountable for what I do. I now I'm under the impression now, and the method I the kind of methodology I use is even if something bad happens, I have to take accountability over it. So when I think of when I was in an abusive relationship, for example, there are elements of that relationship where I could have walked away, but I didn't. And that, of course, led to all sorts of crazy things happening in the past. I think you have to have absolute accountability over the things that happened in your life, because then you can identify where perhaps you've gone wrong to prevent them from happening again. My emotions, they are under my control. They are my responsibility to deal with. My work, that's my responsibility. My relationship with my partner, with my son. Everything in my life at the minute, I've taken the control from other people and I've gone, this is now under my control. It's now my responsibility, which is both a good thing and bad thing, as to the good and the bad what happens. So, yeah, absolute self accountability and understanding that you can change yourself. Change the way you're feeling, the way you're thinking, you can change your life's circumstances. It might just be very fucking hard to do that, but you can do it. You aren't frozen time stuck in a box.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:10

Something that we didn't get to in the first topic, and you know, I'm very happy to have you on for a part two or even part three, is depending on how I edit this podcast, is release valves, right? It's a pun on the word vent, but I'm always a big fan of helping men to find their release valves. And a big release valve for men in emergency services and women as well, but men in this particular example is unfiltered and very dark humour, right? And you obviously did a lot of that in the book. I've spoken with Dean Corney, I've spoken with Jason Reeves, all of them have this shared unfiltered dark humour aspect, right? And you did a post on Instagram, I think it was a couple weeks ago at time of recording, maybe even before Christmas, and it was about your own domestic abuse, which I found pretty brave, but also I doffed my proverbial hat to you. How much has the dark humour helped you as a release valve, not just when you were in the police, but also now in your own kind of self-awareness and recovery journey from the DA? I think I know the one you're talking about. It was something like It was about your ex-misses punching you in the face, basically, and you making a joke about that.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:12

The engagement ring flew off her finger when she was punching me in the face, silver linings, something like that. I've always used dark humour to get through shit, mate, and it's got me in trouble once or twice when I've cracked it. Yeah, same mate. Um, I had a very dark sense of humour before I joined the job, and when I joined the job, it just got ten times worse. I mean, you have to be able to laugh at bad shit because bad things happen, and certainly you have to find a way to deal with bad things because whether you're prepared for them or not, you're gonna come up with issues, you're gonna struggle with illness, people are gonna die, misfortunes are gonna happen to everybody, no matter how much you prepare yourself, it's gonna fucking happen. That's life. You have to find a way of dealing with it, and I find being able to laugh at a problem just makes it that little bit more lighter. And I remember once, actually, one of the earliest examples, I saw someone else do this. It could have gone either way, but it landed well. It landed very well. It was at a funeral, so we were all stood around. It was my granddad's funeral, and we're all stood round the grave, and everyone's feeling very sad and somber, and it's very mood's very low. And obviously the graves dug down quite deep. And this old bloke just looks over, goes down, turns around to everyone and goes, They don't want him getting out then, do they? And it just cracked everybody else, it just made the mood so much lighter. People were laughing, it was that release valve to people, but yeah, and it's like it's like when I've been to because I'm Buddhist, so like I go to the temple sometimes, and the monk there said, like, the biggest thing when people come to him for advice or they're feeling really bad is being able to make somebody laugh. And he said, You're always on the verge of happiness, you just need something sometime to tip you over. And I like that. I like that, and being able to laugh at bad things and bad situations, it can just make even the most fucking horrendous things possible just that little bit better, and it's very human as well.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:03

Well, as Miss Pat says, if you laugh about your pain, you own it. And Miss Pat's one of my favourite comedians, so that's when I got it from. Before we reflect, mate, I want to just come back to the DA a little bit because you've spoken very openly, you've joked about it, you know, there's not many men who are doing that. I've interviewed most of the men who've been open about their own domestic abuse as survivors, mate. And as you know, because you've spoken to many people and you are a survivor yourself, many men, I can't speak for the female experience, obviously, but many men often don't even realise they've been abused until they come out of the relationship. Sometimes years later, sometimes decades later. So when it comes to your self-awareness of your own DA, did it come within the relationship? Did it come afterwards? And how have you helped other men when they've come to you saying, I think something's going wrong here, but they're not? They might not know themselves.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:54

I was a police officer dealing with domestic incidents, and the exact same thing will happen to me outside, back at home. No, I didn't, I didn't understand what I was going through was abuse. Because you make excuses for people. She's angry me today because she's stressed because she's not working, or she's stressed from uni work, or she's stressed from this. Or I did say something actually the other day which might have upset her. Oh, the reason why she threw scalding cotton water in my face was because I told her to go to bed when I didn't want to talk to her because she was screaming at me. You know, shit like that. You make excuses up for people, and this is why domestic abuse can affect anybody. And like I said, I was a police officer, especially in domestic abuse, and I was fucking in a domestic abuse relationship. It can literally happen to anybody, and you don't realize it's abuse likely until afterwards, until you actually sit there and reflect and you go, Oh my fucking God. One thing I don't like is that everyone now wants to label their abusive partner as a narcissist or as this as that. And people get stuck in a cycle, I say a cycle of recovery because they're trying to heal, but they get stuck in this cycle of endless looking at different content and this following this post and this one going, yeah, that was then, that was them. Like there's a point where you've got to go. I'm not a psychologist. They may have had something wrong with them. I think my ex-partner probably had borderline personality disorder. I don't know. All I know is that she was an abusive person and I deserve better. There's got to be a time where you get peace with yourself. But as far as helping other men, I've had messages where men have gone, thank you for speaking out. I dealt with this. Some people, though, don't respect boundaries. So I've had people message me and say, you know, thank you so much. It relates to my journey. It's nice to hear another man actually talk openly about this, and certainly a guy who goes to the gym and a guy who looks after himself, you can be a victim of it too. So I like that, and I do give a bit of advice. And certainly when people are say they're not able to see the children because they have a vindictive ex-partner. I know some people in charities, I send them their contact details. Happy days. But then there's the other side of people who both men and women, not just specifically men, but both men and women, where you raise something with them where you talk about domestic abuse, and next thing you know, there was one lady who sent me, I think, 30 voice notes, one after the other, each about six minutes. Fucking hell. Yeah, I didn't follow this person, I'd never spoken to this person before, but they were just in this massive oversharing. Those people, I could tell them the biggest advice, most advice going on what to do. They need to find it out for themselves. They are still stuck in that cycle, but I'm not the person to fix that for you. You need to do that work yourself. And also, I've had some men send me, like one person emailed me and sent me a big long write-up of everything they'd done. Then there was a couple of videos attached as well as like a picture of a black eye, and I'm like, I'm not even watching them videos. I deleted the email. So some people can overset boundaries, but that's because they're in pain. The reason why they do that is they're in pain and they're trying to make sense of it. The only way that you can make sense of it is by looking after yourself. Therapy helps. I went to therapy after all the shit with my ex-partner. I had six weeks of therapy, helped a lot. Not only did it help me understand that relationship, but also helped me understand why I got into that relationship as well. And then the self-reflection and learning what I've done afterwards has been great. You have to do the work yourself, and this is why I'm saying about you have to take accountability. Now, this isn't victim blaming at all. Some people sometimes get upset when they talk about like this, but you have to understand why you didn't leave when you should have done, or you why you didn't leave at certain points, why you stayed in that relationship. Because I know why I stayed. I stayed because I was trying to give love to somebody who was using it as a weapon against me. So therefore, I didn't value myself enough. And the reason why I didn't value myself enough was because that was how I was brought up to believe that I'm not worthy. Only by doing that self-reflection and inner work can you then move forward into another happy, healthy relationship by going, I know what I expect, I know what my worth is, I will not settle for anything less. And also by understanding what you've been through, you can also recognize the signs and the symptoms of if somebody is quite abusive or maladaptive towards you. So so yeah, did I recognize that I was in it at the time? Absolutely not. Made a hundred of excuses as to why I was going through it myself. Have I helped people afterwards? Yes. Some people overset the boundaries, but the majority of people are quite respectful. And what would I recommend people do? You have to do the inner work, you have to do the self-reflection. It's difficult, it's not nice, and it's hard, but it'll prevent you from getting into something like that in the future.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:27

Let's reflect on your mental health journey now, mate. So, similar question as before. What has this mental health journey taught you about yourself?

SPEAKER_00 1:36:34

It taught me that you can be dealt a very fucking awful hand in life, and you have to implement your own boundaries with people to be able to let go of your wants and desires for how other people should act and accept them for who they are, and also to laugh at the bad shit as well. You know, yeah, it's traumatic, it's awful, but we laugh at it, and also that you're not made of glass, it is your responsibility to take care of your mental health. Granted, there are they the support services, and if you're really struggling, absolutely go seek help. But the day to day, you need to be able to look after that. I know, for example, if I'm not sleeping properly, if maybe I'm drinking a bit too much, if I'm eating shit food, I will feel worse the next day. So this is why you have to change habits, you have to change things in your life and implement it's one of them is it's choose your hard. You can sit at home all day and drink and play on video games and smoke weed and you know not exercise or anything like that. Like that's easy to do there, but you'll pay for it later on in life and you'll probably be quite unhappy as a result. Or you can choose to daily do the hard things, such as maybe a cold shower in the morning or go do some exercise, you know, each day, find something difficult to do, something you don't want to do, make sure you do it. And the more you do it, the better you get at doing it. And that is hard then, but that will help you a lot further on in life. That's what I'd say.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:59

And if you could go back and talk to that 10-year-old Jay who was feeling pretty down about himself, had a lack of control in his life and was experiencing those parental issues, the Jay who was being domestically abused in that relationship and needed some hope, or the Jay who was signed off with stress and thinking about leaving the police altogether, what would you say to him, knowing what you do now, if anything at all?

SPEAKER_00 1:38:23

Um, so I'd like to say you'd be okay. Because when I did the mushroom trip and went back to that young child who felt abandoned and it was like, you know, you're all right, everything's fine, you know, it worked out okay. So I'd like to say that, but equally, I'd also like to say absolutely nothing, because unless the exact things hadn't happened in exact same order, how they were, I wouldn't be here now and I wouldn't be the person I am today. And I'm quite happy with who I am today. I'm not perfect. I still have my odd days, I still have my bad days, but on the whole, yeah, I'm pretty happy with how I am.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:57

We've come to our final topic of conversation, Jay, and it's one I try and have with all of my special guests, if we have time. It is a general Natter and quickfire chat about a mental health. So, firstly, how is your mental health, mate?

SPEAKER_00 1:39:10

Um, quick fire. Um, you know what? Generally really good. Generally, really good now. I had a few days ago, I had a bit of a just a couple of days where I wasn't feeling great. Sports a partner about it, you know, got a little bit upset. But I have a barrier, I have like a line. So when I'm really ill and I've not been this ill in a long time, I'll self-harm. I haven't done it for a long time. For a long time, I didn't realise it was self-harm either, because I just used fucking hit myself. And I didn't realize it was self-harm until like later on down the line. I'm like, oh, actually, punching yourself repeatedly in the face is actually quite bad. So that's like my level. If I get to that level, I know I probably need to really seek help. But I'm good at stopping myself getting to that. Genuinely, a day to day, pretty good, pretty solid, pretty solid. Yeah, a bit of a dip the other day, but day to day, feeling good. Scale out of 10? Oh, definitely a nine.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:57

Wow, I'll take it. What age were you when you became self-aware of your mental health and you realized that the feelings you were having weren't physical and they were actually in your mind?

SPEAKER_00 1:40:06

Probably in my 20s. I'd say it was quite late.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:09

And was it a Eureka moment or a gradual process?

SPEAKER_00 1:40:12

Uh, definitely a gradual process. Um, being able to pull myself away from difficult people, understand and recognize my own emotions, recognize the things that had happened to me when I was younger. Yeah, definitely say early 20s.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:26

There's no right or wrong age, mate. Can you remember the first conversation you ever had with someone about your mental health? So if you can remember, who was it with? What did you say, and what impact did it have? Did it feel like the stereotypical big moment and weight have been lifted? Or on the other, something quite easy, natural, and normal to do?

SPEAKER_00 1:40:41

So we'll talk about mental health a lot. Like I have spoken to therapists about it, spoken to partners about it. Can't remember the first time. What about the most important one then? Jeff. Um, partner I've got now. I've told her things which I don't even think I ever told my therapist. And she is wonderful and supportive, and yeah, she's very good at listening and helping me to understand. Because, like I said before, you normalise things, you talk about things, you normalise it. And it's only when she goes, Whoa, well, fucking tell me that again. Like, just listen to what you've just said.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:10

It's like, oh yeah, that is a bit we love doing that as men, don't we? We love like dropping in the bombshell and go, Ah, that's all right, it's fine, isn't it? And then you have to go, actually, mate. Come on, mate, that was quite a big thing you just said.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:20

But yeah, chatting to her, chatting to friends. The more I've opened up about my own, the more other friends now speak to me about theirs. So it's good. It's it's a good thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:29

It's a great ripple effect, mate, as I say. What things do you find in life that trigger your mental health? So it could be things people say to you, sound, smell, sensation, taste, or have you not figured all of them out yet? Or have any at all?

SPEAKER_00 1:41:41

Um, I had one a while back and it was playing. My girlfriend just chucked some water on me. Just playing, playing around. Massive P like emotional flashback to when I was in a bad relationship and my girlfriend at the time threw hot water in my face. And also a lot of stuff happened when I was a kid in relationship, like water poured on me and stuff. So, yeah, I'd say I've not really understood all of it, but when I recognize something now, I'm like, okay, this is not really a lot what really triggers me, I think, other than them things where I'm I don't understand. There's nothing now that I can say I won't do that, or yeah, this upsets me. I think I've gotten a lot of like control over my own emotions, other than like I said, things which you go, fucking hell. Oh, I didn't like that. I didn't go, but yeah, other than that, absolutely fine. What about positive triggers then? Music, I think. I think music's a big one. I can't think of it at the top of my head, but every now and then I'll think of a song and go, Oh, I remember I used to listen to this woman now. No, like playing board games as well. Like, I used to do a play a lot of board games with grandparents, and that was always nice and positive. So little things like that, playing chess as well. That's another one because uh a caregiver when I was younger, we used to play chess a lot, and that was always really positive. I'll tell you one thing that drives me crazy ticking clocks. I can't fucking I don't know what it is, drives me insane. And I think what it was, I've actually done some thinking about this. Years ago when I was younger, we used to stay at a family member's house, and I was I was because I was quite young, I was always dead scared to like go sleep in like the bed on my own. So we used to sleep in the kitchen. There was a table in the middle and there was two chairs. So uh caregiver would sleep on one and I would sleep on the other. And my caregiver at the time used to snore really, really loudly, like ridiculously loud. So I really used to get very wound up and upset because I couldn't sleep because of how loud the snoring was. And in between the snores, I could hear a clock ticking. So it's like that conditioning of associating that sound with pain and discomfort. So yeah, a ticking clock, I can't stand them. Like when I go around to friends' houses or family members' houses, I take the batteries out. They fucking drive me crazy. But yeah, other than that, no, pretty good. Music, playing games, benefit my own mental health, exercise, looking after yourself, sunlight. Uh yeah, having a laugh. Music's a big thing. I love driving in my car, like drive to the gym. Gym's like 25, 30 minutes away. Love sticking on to music, just singing. Yeah, I love it.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:59

You've answered my next question there, so I'll go on to my one afterwards, which is what is the best book, or as I call it, mental health Bible you've read for your mental health. Now, it can be mental health or self-help related, doesn't have to be. And if you can't think of a book, what we just said, an album, any piece of popular culture.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:14

Best book I've read. It's not specifically a mental health book. It's a book which has a very profound effect Soviet and a very happy effect. And it's called The Five People You Meet.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:27

Oh, mate, we've gone to Mitch album. We've gone to Mitch album. Yes. Brilliant book. I've read nine of his books this year, mate.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:35

Oh wow. I've only read that one. Yeah. But I've read it like five times.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:39

And I it's amazing. Life changing so profound is that. Yeah, it really is. Just that it's a short book, and it's just that how your actions can have an effect on somebody else later on. And yeah, it makes you realise. It's it's like um reading How to Be Happy as well by the Dalai Lama. And it's how you are not in isolation, how your actions you are connected with everyone and everything at all times. It's a beautiful concept. Uh, listen to Alan Watts as well, like his lectures and stuff. He's come up as well. Absolutely beautiful.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:12

Yeah. I got recommended The Five People You Meet in Heaven by my mate Rob Grassen, and then I read that, and then from that, I literally went through like a rabbit hole. Like I read the sequel to it, which was called The Next Five People Meeting Heaven. I read The First Phone Call from Heaven, I read For One More Day, I read The Stranger in the Life Boat, I read The Little Liar. I've just finished the Magic Strings of Frankie Presto, and I've got three other more books of his left to read. I didn't know there was a sequel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a sequel. It's a direct sequel. It's not like I would say Claire, it's like a spiritual sequel, I would say. That's the best way to describe it. Yeah. But definitely read it. I mean, the spiritual is a bit of a pun there because literally all his books have got Christian allegories and stuff about God. But yeah, I love it, mate. Honestly, he's the gene, he's a literary genius. Beautiful book. Beautiful book. Oh, we've gone down a Mitch album rabbit hill. I wasn't expecting that, but I'm loving it. If there was a mantra in life that summed up your mental health, mate, what would it be and why?

SPEAKER_00 1:46:03

Oh, this is a good one. You know what? I probably do have things what I say, but I can't remember fucking shit off the bat. Shit happens, you'll be okay. But you'll be okay with a little asterisk if you work at it. What do you love about yourself? I think I have a nice smile, beautiful eyes. That's what it is. I think being able to not view the world as black and white, which certainly is a big issue in the political landscape these days, such as talking about the police. I'm not blind to say that the police doesn't have its issues and that there is corruption or there are issues in it, but I'm also happy to both talk about that and also talk about all the good shit what happens. People tend to be quite binary in the sense, no, they're either good or bad, they can't have any nuance. But if you talk about like mental health, it's like saying there has to be there's nothing you do about it, or if anything bad ever happens, you're a little bitch and you just need to fucking get on with it. Like, no, those two extremes I don't think are healthy. There's a middle ground there, and we need to explore the middle ground. I think my ability to actually dig into the weeds on certain topics and make my own mind up as well, not live in an echo chamber. And again, this goes back to Buddhism. Like the Buddha said, don't just believe something because somebody says it's true. Like, dig into it and explore it. And he said that specifically about his own teachings. Whereas a lot of religions, they say this is the word of God, you have to believe it. And if you don't go with it, then you're wrong. Buddhism says, test my theories. If you don't believe it, great. If you do, happy days. But this is how you learn, and it's always about learning and discovering things about yourself and being able to change your mind and being able to change something about yourself, what you think, you know, new information comes across, or not being the same person. And one thing I like about myself is I've gone through many iterations of who I am in my life. I'm not saying that I will be like this forever. I hope I will continue to evolve and improve. I wouldn't still want to think the same things I do now as robustly as I do in 10 years, because that means I've not done the proper learning, if you get me. So the ability to change and to adapt to the good and the bad and everything in between.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:02

That's a great answer, mate. And even something like stigma, right? If there was 100% stigma over everything, it'd be bad. But if there was 0% stigma and shame over everything, that would also be bad. We need some level of shame in life, otherwise, people will be doing absolute madnesses in life and would not be punished for it.

SPEAKER_00 1:48:17

Life's not black and white. We want to make things black and white because it makes sense if something is good or bad. It's easy. But things are rarely black and white. And being able to sit in that grey area and make your own mind up, I think can make it quite robust.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:33

And as a final question, you can answer it any way you want, mate. What more do you think we have to do to ensure men from all backgrounds, all social classes, all walks of life feel comfortable and safe in opening up about their mental health issues or just their general mental health if most importantly they want to do it?

SPEAKER_00 1:48:50

Okay, so again, this goes back to the middle ground thing. Bottling up your feelings and saying, nothing's wrong with me, I'm a man, I can fucking go through the worst things in the world if I shed a tear and weak, that's bad. Grumbling and crying, any little difficult thing what happens is also bad. Men are the ones who they have to be the strong person in the family, they have to be the strong person. You have to have strength as a man, you know, emotional strength as well. People will look to you and say, I need your help. You have to be willing to be able to do that and be robust enough to do that and to help them. So it's being robust enough that you don't crumble when something bad happens, but also being self-aware that you reflect on it. There's a time for strength, there's a time for masculinity, a time for decision making, but there's also a time for being a bit more vulnerable and saying, look, I you know, I need a lifter. And another thing, it's okay to be a dude, it's okay to be a man. You're not fucking evil by nature just because you're a bloke, as a lot of things on social media will tell you. Because men are both seen as the problem in society, and yet they're treated. Like shit, it's because they are men. So, how can you both be the problem and both be the fucking worst thing in the world? Like, how does that work? So, it's okay to be a man, it's okay to be strong, it's okay to want to lift weights and go to the gym, it's okay to give your kid a hug and tell them that you love them when they're feeling upset. It's okay to be that protected, it's okay to be a bit vulnerable. Being a man is a hard job, but you make the world a better place by being who you are.

SPEAKER_02 1:50:26

The most important thing that I think you can do as a man, and it's it's a quote that I saw on some random Guardian YouTube interview with some guy years ago, and it was something along the lines of there's the right things to cry about as a man and the wrong things to cry about as a man. And your route to being a man and becoming a good one is figuring out which ones are the right ones. And I think what you've just said there is a complete testament to that, mate. I laugh when you were talking about, you know, like what the mainstream is telling us because there's a Simpsons quote where Homer's applying to be a prison guard. I think it's a prison guard at the juvenile prison where Bart is, and he gets asked, like, what do you think about children? He goes, I believe children are the future unless we stop them now. And that is literally how I think mainstream is talking to young boys right now.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:10

Yeah. Oh, fucking hell, mate. If you want to get on to men and young boys, uh that's our next part, mate. That's our next part. Yeah, absolutely. I won't go off on a tangent. I can very easily go on the tangent.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:22

But yeah, I won't. Jay, it has been an absolute pleasure and a privilege. Thank you so much for coming on, mate, and talking to me on the Just Checking In podcast.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:30

Really, really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. And also thank you for everything you do. I think you're a very valuable voice in this space and wish you the absolute best looking future with this. It's been great.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:43

Well, that's all we've got time for in this episode of the Just Checking In Pod. A big thank you to Jay for being my special guest, for giving up so much of his time and for letting me check in with him. I'll put some links to where you can buy a copy of Jay's book, subscribe to his YouTube channel or podcast, and follow him on social media in the show notes. As always, thank you to all the vendors who've tuned into this episode. Remember, if you've liked what you've heard, give it a share on social media by tagging us at VentHelp UK. Tell your friends, family, or work colleagues about us and spread the word. If you can write us a review and give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcast, we would be extremely grateful. You can also support us at patreon.com slash venthelpuk or make a one-off donation to our PayPal. All of those links are on our link tree. That's linktr.ee slash vent helpuk. We hope to check in with you again very soon. And remember, guys, it is always okay to vent.