Peter Anderson’s written a fanfic homage to my story Printcrime, called “The Copper Responds” — in it, Peter retells the story from the policeman’s point of view. It’s a fascinating exercise — Peter even kept to the same number of paragraphs as Printcrime!
Coppers, they called us, at first for the color of the buttons that gleamed down the chests of our navy blue uniforms, but later for the way we always made them cop to their crimes. In time we adopted the name for ourselves. And cop they did – they always confessed. Some pleaded innocence at first, but after only a few minutes inside the interrogation room they’d confess to anything, just to make it stop. We probably could have detained most of them anyway, locked them up indefinitely, but a formal confession made their guilt official, neat and tidy and impervious to any attorney who might get involved, not that many attorneys ever did.
