Brothers sentenced to seven years for machete attack

MK Citizen

Two brothers who slashed an off-duty police officer with a machete as he intervened in a robbery have been sentenced to seven years in prison.

Transcript

00:00I'm PC Atwood, I'm a street tutage tutor attached to Enfield and Haringey and I'm a survivor of a

00:12knife attack that happened whilst off duty. On that Saturday me and my wife went into town,

00:17thought just a bit of nip in, some food and nip out. There's a ramp that leads up to the mall

00:23and we were standing at the bottom of it and I noticed a chap go past on a moped. He didn't

00:28have a helmet on, didn't have VRM and I just said to my wife look just hold this I'm going to go and

00:33have a look. I think the job gives you the confidence that you can talk to people. I

00:38introduced myself as a police officer, I told them not to be so stupid and the next thing I know it

00:43will just run a little bit mad. It just happened so quickly in my head I thought I'd just sort of

00:49stop him there but he dropped the bike and then they both came towards me and I think there was

00:54like a realisation that I'd been hit. I was on call as our strategic firearms commander and I was

01:05phoned by our our on-call inspector saying there's been a off-duty officer been stabbed and the world

01:15falls away from you at that point. So I retreated a little bit so I take it to photos I wasn't sure that

01:21the CTTV would pick anything up and one of them said he's filming us or something. I thought if I

01:27can pick up one of the barriers at least stop him from driving past. In my head I thought I'd just

01:33throw it at him but I ended up sort of kind of batting him with it and then the knife was kind

01:38of coming towards me quite a few more times. One of them must have connected with my chest which

01:44left out the worst injury. None of us really know what we do in a circumstance like that until you're

01:54in it and from having spoken to PC Atwood he saw something that wasn't right and he went forward to

02:02intervene and he didn't think about whether he was on duty or off duty. He was a cop through and through

02:10and he stepped forward because it was the right thing to do. Policing's a vocation and PC Atwood's

02:18actions are in the very best tradition of that vocation. You can see that there's quite a lot of

02:24people that could have been injured and there was one really really lovely chap who went into Don

02:28Miller's and he came out with a bottle of water and he said do you want a drink mate and I was like

02:32thanks mate and he said and then another chap was like I'm on the phone to the police and he showed me

02:37his phone and it said 991 on his phone and I thought we're going to be waiting a little while

02:42for the American police to come over but it and I laugh at that because even now it's kind of a way

02:47of processing it and I kid you know it was probably less than a minute that I felt I heard all the

02:53sirens turn up and I was just so kind of relieved that help was on the way. I remember really clearly

03:01walking into the hospital and seeing PC Atwood and introducing myself he said hello Gov why are you

03:10smiling? In this horrendous situation I had such a sense of relief to see a bloke standing in front

03:23of me able to to you know move talk to function and that it wasn't as serious as it might have been

03:32I think the whole force felt proud of PC Atwood in that moment of him working in the best tradition

03:40of policing. If you put a uniform on irrespective of uniform you put on we've all got this hidden

03:47ability to want to help people. There's an old saying we're never off duty which in my case at

03:53that time was true. The chap that was robbed of his bike he didn't go into town to get robbed I

04:00didn't go into town to get stabbed we just went around our normal day-to-day jobs but I'm just kind

04:06of glad that I managed to do something special or different in a time where I was just going to get a

04:14keep up. I can't thank PC Atwood enough for making Bedfordshire safer through his action thankfully

04:23incidents like this are rare but police officers do 24 hours a day seven days a week put themselves

04:32in the line of danger. The whole the whole team have I don't know they just kept me informed of

04:37everything that's all relevant I just have to say thank you to them because they they've made some really

04:43nice comments about me and I don't think I've ever had chance to thank them back so I do thank them

04:47wholeheartedly. When an event like this takes place we pull together everybody who I spoke to on the day

04:57and subsequently as part of the investigation wanted to do their very best to to not just get justice for

05:06PC Atwood but also to to make our county safer

Category

Transcript

Recommended