Off duty police officer attacked by machete-wielding thieves as he confronts them

Off duty police officer stabbed several times in broad daylight after confronting armed men in busy town centreMetropolitan Police

Transcript

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

00:11knife attack that happened whilst off duty. On a Saturday me and my wife went into town,

00:16thought just a bit of nip in, some food and nip out. There's a ramp that leads up to the mall

00:22and we were standing at the bottom of it and I noticed a chap go past on a moped. He didn't

00:27have a helmet on, didn't have VRM and I just said to my wife look just hold this I'm going to go and

00:32have a look. I think the job gives you the confidence that you can talk to people. I

00:37introduced myself as a police officer, I told them not to be so stupid and next thing I know it will

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

00:48stop him there but he dropped the bike and then they both came towards me and I think there was

00:53like a realisation that I'd been hit. So I retreated a little bit, started taking the photos. I wasn't

00:58sure that CTTV would pick anything up and one of them said he's filming us or something. I thought

01:04if I can pick up one of the barriers at least stop him from driving past. In my head I thought I'd just

01:11throw it at him but I ended up sort of kind of batting him with it and then the knife was kind of

01:16coming towards me quite a few more times. One of them must have connected with my with my chest which

01:22left the worst injury. If you put a uniform on, irrespective of uniform you put on, we've all

01:29got this hidden ability to want to help people. There's an old saying we're never off duty which

01:34in my case at that time was true. The chap that was robbed of his bike, he didn't go into town to

01:43get robbed. I didn't go into town to get stabbed. We just went around our normal day-to-day jobs but

01:48I'm just kind of glad that I managed to do something special or different in a time where I was

01:56just going to get a kebab. The whole team have, I don't know, they've just kept me informed

02:01of everything that's all relevant. I just have to say thank you to them because they've made

02:07some really nice comments about me and I don't think I've ever had a chance to thank them back

02:10so I do thank them wholeheartedly.