Courage they couldn't Crush
When PC Claire Bond tried to stop a speeding drug dealer ploughing into hundreds of fun runners, she was dragged under his car’s wheels — and left horribly maimed. Most humbling of all? She says she would do it all over again
OVER her 18-year police career, PC Claire Bond has frequently been at the sharp end of some of the worst human behaviour.
She’s been punched, bitten and spat at — a horrible litany of assaults that, sadly, she viewed as just another part of her job. As she puts it: ‘We have to face things like this so the public doesn’t.’
Indeed, 47-year-old Claire, a mother of four, prided herself on her sanguine approach to the risks of a profession she loved.
Even so, she could never have pictured the events that unfolded a year ago when she was brutally and deliberately mown down while trying to arrest a drug dealer speeding through the residential streets of Stafford.
Pinned and dragged along a fence under the wheels of 26-year-old Gurajdeep Malhi’s illegally rented BMW, it says something of her character that at the moment she was struck, all she could think of was her four children being left without their mother — and that she also had to do everything humanly possible to protect the hundreds of people on the streets that day for a 10km fun run. In that quest, both Claire’s legs were so badly damaged — one twisted round 180 degrees, the other had a shattered knee — that surgeons initially feared they would have to amputate a foot and that she would be left badly disabled for life.
It did not come to that. But a year on, the woman who loved to ski and jump into the local swimming pool with her children walks with a stick, faces more gruelling surgery and has been forced to accept she will never recover full mobility.
her injuries almost certainly mark the end of the front-line career she adored.
yet this week, in her first and only interview, PC Bond reveals she would go through all the agony again to fulfil what she sees as her duty to protect the public. She says: ‘Malhi was close to ramming into any number of those hundreds of people. I thought then — and still think now — better me than 20 runners with families like mine. I’m not angry on a personal level about what happened to me. It’s my job. But I am sad about the huge impact it’s had on my family.
‘I am also angry because this seems to be happening more and more to police officers who find it ever more difficult to do their job.
‘There is a basic lack of respect now. I don’t think we automatically earn respect by wearing a uniform but it is about what that uniform represents.
‘The laws of the country are passed by the people and we are all responsible for what happens — but the police help ensure it runs as smoothly as possible. I think people forget that. It’s one of the reasons I am speaking out. I hope it will help people think about the work we do and what we face.’
Claire’s story is another grim reminder of the mounting risks faced by those walking the thin blue line. Three weeks ago PC Andrew harper, 28, was killed when he was dragged along a road by a vehicle after responding to a burglary report. The tragedy particularly hit home in Landywood, Staffordshire, at the detached house Claire shares with husband Darren, a fellow police officer with neighbouring West Midlands Police, and their children Kenzie, 13, and eight-year-old Evie (the couple also have two sons, Ryan, 27 and Connor, 24, from Claire’s first marriage).
Both Claire and Darren were aware that in different circumstances her story might have had this grim ending. ‘It made me realise I was one of the lucky ones,’ she says. Relatively so, at least, although the vivid scars on her legs and the walking stick by her chair tell another story.
ThEy
are the visual legacy of the assault but there are plenty of others, too: sleeplessness thanks to the endless dull throbbing in her legs, nightmares and the palpable anxiety of her youngest children, who struggled to see their once apparently invincible mum in pain.
‘Kenzie started sleepwalking while Evie made some heartbreaking diary entries,’ says Claire. ‘I don’t think any of my kids had ever thought of our jobs as putting us at risk. They knew we were police officers but it was a case of we went off to do our job, then we came home and made their tea.’
For a long time Claire had ably managed to juggle the duties of her work and her children. She says: ‘I saw myself as a mum who happened to work in the police — and I was immensely proud of both things.’
She joined the force aged 28 as a young divorced mother of two, the fulfilment of a girlhood dream thwarted by an early marriage at 18.
An Army wife based in Germany, on a trip to England in the wake of her marriage breakdown, she spontaneously walked into Cannock police station in Staffordshire and asked for an application form.
‘I don’t know what made me do it,’ she reflects. ‘I had no links to the area but I was just seized by this desire to do it.’
Six months later, in November 2001, she had joined up, and loved it from the off. It was another era. Claire recalls how female and male PCs wore different coloured shirts and were steered towards separate duties. ‘Men were pushed to public order jobs, women dealt with sexual assault,’ she says.
Community policing, though, was still robust, and, as a beat officer, she enjoyed getting to know her ‘patch’. ‘you could really intermingle and find out what was going on. It gave you a chance to do a lot of pre-emptive work,’ she says. ‘It’s more difficult now to tell people they are going down the wrong path. We’re under so much more pressure.’
After marrying Darren in 2004 and giving birth to Kenzie two years later, Claire moved jobs to ‘response’, plunged into the world of ‘blue light’ call- outs to the burglaries and assaults that routinely unfold on our streets. Equally routine were the
physical attacks she and her fellow officers were subjected to.
‘I’ve been assaulted and threatened many times,’ she says. ‘One lady spat in my eye and refused to say whether she had hIV or hepatitis and I had to take medication for six months. yet a lot of the time they weren’t even registered as an offence.’
Little wonder she’s delighted by Met Commissioner Cressida Dick’s call for an automatic custodial sentence for anyone convicted twice of assaulting a police officer. ‘It shows it’s finally being taken seriously,’ she says. ‘For so long it feels like it’s not been important, that it’s just the police and part of their job. And it is — but that doesn’t mean it’s right.’
On that routine September morning last year, Claire was on the early 7am-4pm shift with fellow officer Dave Mullins, when a ‘blue light’ call came in to say someone had driven into a garage in Stafford.
The culprit was Malhi who was trying to flee police in a rented BMW, acquired by his girlfriend, mother-ofthree Lucy Bullmore, which the couple were using to sell drugs.
JuST
six months earlier, Malhi had left prison after serving half of a four- year sentence for dangerous driving. Despite being disqualified, he had still been driving erratically around Stafford’s residential roads, packed that day for the fun run.
Claire and Dave, however, knew none of this as they made their way to Stafford. Malhi’s car emerged in front of them, coming to a stop behind a bus. ‘Dave ordered him to stay put but, instead, Malhi went for it again,’ Claire recalls. ‘he was driving at 60mph through quiet streets.
‘he ploughed into a garden, narrowly missing an elderly lady, then crashed through a ‘road closed’ sign as two race stewards dived out the way, only to arrive at a dead end full of spectators. When we came round the corner, he was there with his brake lights on.
‘I leaned into his window to get his keys and told him to get out. Instead, he looked straight through me before reversing and smashing into our police car.
‘I grabbed his arms and shouted for Dave to pepper spray him but even that didn’t stop him. he whacked his car into reverse again like he was going to smash his way out whatever
it took. All I could think was if I didn’t stop him, he was going to kill a lot of runners. That’s when I leant in and punched him as hard as I could.’
The ensuing events unfolded in slow- motion clarity. ‘The next thing I know I’m slammed up against a fence and can’t move. He slammed his foot on the accelerator and dragged me along. I remember shouting stop, and this choking the fear that I couldn’t get out,’ Claire adds.
‘I remember hitting the floor. I thought I was still being dragged along, although in fact I had been thrown in the air. I remember looking up and seeing reverse lights come on. I honestly thought I was going to die.
‘In those split seconds I thought about Darren and the kids and leaving them alone, wondering how they were going to manage. I remember screaming for Dave. The car had left. What I didn’t know is Dave had gathered me up to get me out the way. I remember saying, “I’m all right, go get him.’’’
Claire was anything but all right: her right knee was horrifically fractured, her left leg facing backwards, with both her lower leg bones broken. Doctors later feared she would lose her foot.
She says: ‘I knew things were bad. I looked and my left leg was pointing towards my back.’
Road closures meant it took 25 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. She had emergency surgery to straighten her left leg and put screws in her fractured kneecap, she had further surgery five days later to insert metal plates to stabilise her shattered left leg.
After nine days, she returned home wearing a leg brace, not knowing if she would ever physically recover. She says: ‘They told me they wouldn’t know for at least 12 months. That was tough.’
She was bedridden downstairs for three months and the impact on family life was huge. Darren had to give up work to become his wife’s carer, although he has since returned to light duties, while the children struggled to see their mum in pain.
‘In some ways, that’s been the hardest part,’ she says. ‘I can cope with my own stuff. It’s Darren and the kids I worry about.’
Looming large, meanwhile, was Malhi’s court case. She says: ‘I didn’t want to set eyes on him. But in the end I did look at him. He nodded, as if to say sorry. I just looked away. I didn’t want him to feel absolved.’ Malhi was sentenced to 12 years and nine months in prison for a combination of what he did to Claire and drug possession. Bullmore was jailed for two years for conspiracy to supply cocaine and dangerous driving.
Claire says: ‘I struggled with the idea of someone going to prison because of me. I wondered whether it would help him or make him worse. But I’ve realised I had to separate myself from it. This was a selfish act by a selfish person thinking only of themselves and it required punishment.
‘Before Malhi, I had never raised my baton to anyone, never peppersprayed anyone — that’s not how I policed. I always wanted to reach out to people. I still see policing that way — that we can be hard, we can be soft and sometimes we can be both. A good police officer knows what to do when.’
Such is the passion of this brave officer she still harbours hopes of returning to police work, despite being told she will never regain her previous mobility.
‘I’ve thought a lot recently about my work. I’m not ready to give up,’ she says. ‘One way or another I will go back.’
Many would say policing would be the lesser for it if she didn’t.