A book packed with tales of policing in one of the remotest corners of the British Isles – including the time a fully-grown officer leapt on to a child’s bike to pursue a miscreant – is set to storm the bestseller charts.
The Life of a Scilly Sergeant, which describes the six years Colin Taylor has spent keeping order on the archipelago off the far south west of England (as well as carrying out other more unusual duties such as swapping his uniform and helmet for a Santa outfit to staff the islands’ Christmas grotto) is released on Thursday.
Healthy advance sales means it is already topping the Amazon list of police biographies, forcing a rather more hard-hitting description of life as a Met police marksman into second place. And a film adaptation will surely follow.
Thanks to his tweets and Facebook postings, Taylor has become something of a cult figure with fans across the globe.
Jobs Taylor has done include rushing to the aid of a stray seal pup that had found its way on to the high street and resolving a drunken row between two chefs on the relative merits of rock salt and sea salt.
In the book – tagline like Heartbeat but less frenetic – he says that only around 16-20 arrests are made on Scilly a year and is proud that he has never felt the need to use the sirens on the police Land Rover.
The book includes a description of the time he got locked into a cell with an injured baby bird he was nurturing and how he once thought he had nailed a suspected cocaine dealer only to find that the suspicious substance found on a yacht was mozzarella cheese. When a firearms amnesty was organised, a potato gun was handed in.
But there is also a serious edge to the book, which is unusual in that it is written by a still-serving officer. Taylor points out that there are challenges to policing a small community, especially when budgets are tight.
In an interview with the Guardian ahead of the book’s publication, Taylor said: “These are times of austerity. We are increasingly reliant on the community we police to work with us. We’ve got to work with them. It has to be a symbiotic relationship.�
He said the assertion by Sir Robert Peel, regarded as the father of modern policing, that “the police are the public and the public are the police� remained vital. “We have to be part of the community,� he said.
Taylor supports the idea of more officers being out and about on foot patrol. “It would be nice if we could find a way to being back on the beat. I think it does work. People respond really well to seeing a police officer on the beat.�
His popularity on Twitter and Facebook have shown the value of officers having a presence on social media.
Taylor said: “We’re in the business of communication. We have laws to enforce. It’s not about jumping out like a funnel web spider trying to catch people. It’s about saying these are the things that are important and talking to the communities we’re policing. I’ve found that using social media meant I could communicate directly with the very people I was policing. They could hear it from the horse’s mouth. The unexpected consequence was that the world could listen in as well. A fair few of them did.�
Scilly is sometimes portrayed as “the land that time forgot�. Taylor conceded there was no crime on some of the islands such as Samson. “But that’s because there are no people on Samson,� he said. Wherever there are people there is the need for police, Taylor argued. There have been real seizures of cocaine, allegations of sex crimes and instances of domestic abuse during Taylor’s time on Scilly.
After his round of interviews and media appearances to publicise his book, Taylor will spend a last few weeks on Scilly before heading to the mainland to take up a new job as a detective sergeant investigating child exploitation.
He said he wanted to move to a “meaty� and important role – not that policing Scilly was not important. Of course, it will be difficult to leave the islands. “I’m going to miss the freedom, the autonomy of policing here, the community, going out on my boat fishing.�
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