Inside the real-life Line of Duty
Ex-detective John Simmonds tells Cara McGoogan how his work to expose corrupt police officers inspired the hit BBC show
On his first day in the job as a uniformed police officer for the Met in 1956, John Simmonds was offered a bribe. Then 19 and a cadet in Stoke Newington, north London, Simmonds was trying to make his first arrest – for a van theft – when the man offered him £20 to let him go. It was more than double his weekly salary, but Simmonds turned it down.
“We both ended up in hospital,” says Simmonds, now 82. “He said to me afterwards, ‘You should have taken the 20 quid, it would have been much easier’.”
The man was arrested and convicted, while Simmonds learnt a valuable lesson: “You get your hands dirty when you’re dealing with dirt.”
Simmonds went on to become one of the first detectives in the Met Police’s A10, a unit set up in 1971 by Sir Robert Mark to investigate corrupt officers. The inspiration for the fictional AC-12 in Line of Duty, A10 is also now the subject of its own BBC documentary, Bent Coppers: Crossing the Line of Duty.
“John was at the thick of it,” says Todd Austin, director of the series and co-founder at Bohemia Films. “He’s a hero for me. You can’t underestimate what he did.”
Simmonds’s voice is as one might expect of a wizened detective, and he peppers his story with words like “villain” and “crooked”. We speak over the phone because he isn’t au fait with Zoom and, anyway, his hair is too long.
“I need a haircut,” he says. “It’s the longest it’s been in 82 years. People wouldn’t recognise me,” says the man who once sent six police officers to jail together for a robbery, ry, and managed security in the City of London for Prince Charles harles and Diana’s wedding.
Simmonds worked d his way through the ranks at the Met over 25 years, joining g the Criminal Investigation on Department before moving to the Flying g Squad, a branch of the he serious organised crime command nicknamed The Sweeney.
By the early 1970s, CID had developed a reputation for taking g bribes, stitching up innocent people, and running protection rackets. Sir Robert, deciding it was time to clean things up, created A10, an independent unit in the Met to investigate its own. Simmonds got the call-up. “It wasn’t a question of if I wanted to do it,” he says. “I was directed to do it. If you wanted to go there, people would wonder what your motive was – it was a rotten job. It wasn’t something you strived for.”
Within the police, A10 was looked at with suspicion an and its officers branded inform informants or grasses. “There was an attitude of distrust,” says Simmonds. “People treate treated us with a degree of stand-offi stand-offishness. But I used to say no honest copper wou would treat you like tha that – it’s always som someone who has s something to to worry about.” There isn’t an obvious ob path to corruption, co ac according to
Sim Simmonds, who saw seem seemingly good guys take a bad turn. “The people you’re dealing with are villains,” he says. “Men I knew who were honest coppers suddenly went addled... the system allows them to be corrupted if they’re not careful.”
Money is the corruptor, he says unequivocally. In the 1970s, police would be bribed with what was called a “drink”, which was in fact a brown envelope stuffed with money.
“Quite often you find an officer would be asking more money off the villain than the courts would level against them,” says Simmonds. “The villain gains from not having a conviction and the officer feels he’s served justice.” Soho was notorious for officer corruption in the 1970s – so much so, the cops there were nicknamed the “dirty squad”.
“The greed and brazen attitudes of certain officers shocked me,” says Austin. “They felt they were above the law. And it’s much broader than ‘a few rotten apples’.”
He continues, “John realised there were a lot of young officers being coerced. If you drag everyone into the spider’s web, it’s harder to investigate.”
As in Line of Duty, there was a world of suspicion within A10, according to Simmonds, and officers were used to covering their backs. “There was an attitude that because some CID officers were crooked, all of them were,” says Simmonds. “We were all tarred with the same brush, which was quite annoying and hurtful. Some of the most straight people I ever met were detectives who wouldn’t tolerate the criminality that had developed.”
For this, the detectives in A10 were paired with uniformed officers, to prevent cross-contamination.
Reports about crooked officers would come to A10 through its hotline – from the public and internally. They would then investigate them behind the scenes, making sure they weren’t being duped. “Not every complaint is true and there were plenty of times when people knew they’d cause problems for an officer by making a false allegation,” says Simmonds.
Their methods included tailing officers who were under suspicion and using recording devices to catch them.
So did they have undercover officers working within the police? “No,” laughs Simmonds. “That’s the realms of fantasy – to a degree.” For all the similarities with Line of Duty – which he watches, and finds “exciting” – Simmonds takes umbrage with the suggestion: “there isn’t any comparison in the real world”, he is firm. “We didn’t perform and behave the way they do. This mystery business of H” – the corrupt officer whose identity remains a mystery – “is nonsense. We knew who the crooked coppers were.” For the real A10, “H” was Hugh Moore, the commander of City of London Police, on whom the fictional character could be based.
Simmonds does add that “there’s no such thing as a Mr Big organising these things. Society looks for a mastermind criminal, but they don’t exist like that”. What is true of the real and fictional versions is that very corrupt men are at the very top. “One of the reasons I left the police service is I had to work under Hugh,” Simmonds admits. “He was bent and crooked and I knew and he knew I knew and he gave me a hard time. So the day I got to 25 years’ police service, I retired,” he says of Moore, who died in 1992.
Corruption was everywhere: during his time at City of London police, where he became head of the CID, “there was a murder investigation being conducted by an officer I knew to be a crook, so I took him off the investigation.”
In the late 1970s, the UK’s biggest investigation into police corruption was under way – Operation Countryman, which spanned four years, cost £4million, and resulted in eight officers being charged. None were convicted.
At the time of the inquiry, “my wife received an anonymous parcel containing a gold watch,” recalls Simmonds. “It was an attempt to get us set up.”
As to whether there is still corruption within the police and a need for A10, Simmonds is clear: “We have a corrupt society and it’s no different in the police,” says Simmonds. “As long as we have criminals, you’ll have corruption. As fast as you clear up one rot, someone else comes up with a new idea. They think they’re clever and can beat the ow system.” Did that ever make him think it wasn’t worth the hassle? “No,” he is clear. “As fast as the criminal is on the streets, the police have got to try and catch them.”
Bent Coppers: Crossing the Line of Duty airs on BBC Two on April 14 at 9pm