First edition. When she became a trainee police officer during the late seventies, Deborah Lee Locke had the usual ideals: she would be an instrument for upholding the law, keeping the peace and serving the community. But it didn’t take her long to realise that the world she was moving into was extremely macho and that as a young woman, she was considered fair game. As the working girls at the Cross warned her: ‘You want to watch some of the blokes you’re working with, love.’

In this sometimes shocking, often hilarious account of life on the beat, Deborah Lee Locke exposes a culture with its own sometimes brilliant, sometimes suspect methods; a world in which she was forced to reassess her views of what it means to be a woman and a police officer. 040415