This week I have a very entertaining and enjoyable chat with Neil Sinclair, who has led an incredibly active and interesting life; first as a professional rugby player, then moving into policing to work in a wide range of fascinating roles in national security and counter-terrorism. Neil then went on to a very successful career in the private sector, promoting the benefits of cyber-security to small and medium-sized businesses. Man of many talents. A truly international man of mystery!

This week I had the privilege of interviewing one of my policing heroes, Ex-Detective Chief Superintendent Hamish Campbell. Hamish spent nearly 40 years in the Met police, most of that time investigating serious crime. He came under intense media scrutiny as the Senior Investigating Officer in the Jill Dando murder enquiry in 1999, which resulted in the conviction of Barry George. George was subsequently cleared of the murder, which today remains unsolved. Hamish reviewed numerous high-profile investigations that resulted in the conviction of some very dangerous offenders, not least Delroy Grant, who was found guilty of dozens of burglaries and rapes of elderly and vulnerable victims.

This week I chat to Maggie Oliver. Maggie worked in serious crime investigations and helped to expose the serious sexual abuse of vulnerable children that had been going on for many years in Greater Manchester and most notably in Rochdale. Maggie eventually turned whistleblower in frustration that she was not being listened to, and ultimately decided to resign from the job she loved. She has become one of the most prominent campaigners against child sexual abuse in the UK, and she was the founder of the Maggie Oliver foundation. (https://www.themaggieoliverfoundation.com)

I was asked to talk to Lewis Goodall about the many current issues around policing and the shooting of Chris Kaba. This is the interview

The last week has been a true baptism of fire for the new Met Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley with the shooting of Chris Kaba in very contentious circumstances by one of his firearms officers on the 5th of September and the death of Queen Elizabeth on the 8th of September. In this additional episode of the podcast I try and take a balanced look at the issues surrounding the shooting and consider what this means for an already beleaguered Met police.

This week I chat to Phd student Mark Brown, who is studying the reasons for the crisis in policing in England and Wales since 2010, and proposing how policing could recover. We debate whether the destruction wrought by the Tories is a case of good old-fashioned stupidity and incompetence or whether it was a deliberate act of Neo-Liberal creative destruction.

This week I describe my shock at finding out that I had worked with a serial child rapist, Anthony Smith, who was sentenced to 24 years in prison last week.

I then have a brilliant chat with Jon Adams, who served in North London before moving his family lock stock and barrel out to Western Australia, where he is currently a sergeant in a town south of Perth. It was great chatting to him and fascinating hearing about his life down under.

This week I had the pleasure and privilege of chatting to Jackie Malton, the real police officer upon whom Linda La Plante based her phenomenally successfully fictional detective Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect.

Jackie is an incredible character, full of fun and fascinating stories from a very successful police career. Her new book was published yesterday and can be found here;

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Real-Prime-Suspect-screen-detective/dp/1913068978

This week was a very weird (but enjoyable) episode, because I interviewed Steve Donnelly, my brother. Steve did 15 years in the Met police doing a lot of difficult and dangerous jobs before retraining in law and becoming a successful criminal barrister.

This week I chat with a genuine one-off character that is Bob Bird, who reinvented himself as a Computer Forensics lecturer at Coventry University after a long career in policing.