April 1985: first week in
I’m sent to work as a probationary constable in 16 Division, based at the police station in Hornsby and covering a long slice of northern Sydney between Cowan and the Hawkesbury River, reaching down to Pennant Hills, Dural to the west and Turramurra on its eastern side. On my first day, I realise how the uniform changes the way others look at me when I step out to cross the road and the traffic stops. Soon, I get used to kids staring at me in the street, and adults either looking to me for help or with suspicion.
After leaving the academy, I’m paired with a ‘buddy’, Tony, who’s about five or six years ahead of me, so has already experienced everything that I’m about to and can help me understand it. I’m lucky he’s a good teacher and I try to learn.
On the night shifts, bringing in some local thug who’s shirtless, spitting, screaming and twisting in his handcuffs, I watch the reactions of the cops around me. Sometimes, if the right station sergeant is on duty, I’m inspired. These guys can talk the man in the handcuffs down with a few words. They’re battle-scarred but they still have compassion.
You’re the cop I want to be, I tell these sergeants silently.
After six weeks, I start working with whoever is on the roster, which sometimes means I’m one of two probationary constables sent out together in the police truck, both of us hoping that the other has had longer on the job, so will have a better understanding of how to handle anything that happens.
In a few months, I am the senior officer inside the truck, with another nervous newbie fresh out of the academy sitting beside me and staring through the windscreen at the darkness as we drive out to start another night shift.
* * *
The veterans who taught us at the academy said there is really no way to prepare you for what you’ll see and do when you put on the blue uniform. Instead, you have to live it.
During 1985, I live it. That means I see a lot of dying.
* * *
One rainy afternoon, we get a call over the police radio about a traffic accident where petrol is still leaking from the damaged car, meaning it might catch fire at any moment. When we arrive, we see the driver’s gone through traffic lights and crashed. His feet are trapped inside the wreckage. We go to help him but the car explodes. There’s nothing we can do to stop the fire or get him out and so we’re forced to watch the poor man burn to death. We wait there in the rain for hours before his body is recovered. We drive back and I shower, trying to wash away the smell of cooking flesh. At dinner time, an older cop fries up a steak. I cannot eat.
* * *
One Saturday, I’m looking forward to finishing a night shift when we’re called to another traffic accident and race towards it, siren wailing. This driver, too, is trapped inside his car. He looks to be about the same age I am. The paramedics ask if I can climb inside the wreckage to hold some of their equipment while they work to save him. I am centimetres from his broken body, thinking how only a few minutes ago my greatest concern was looking forward to getting some sleep. The ambos can’t stop the blood. He dies. I stare at him, realising just how fragile life is.
* * *
Another Saturday, and this time all I’m focusing on is finishing my shift in time to play soccer later. A sports car crashes and rolls at nearby Pennant Hills, and I’m told to go to the morgue and sign in the driver’s body, which means making sure his personal belongings are collected and recorded, including any jewellery and clothing. We roll him over and I recognise his face. We were mates. He was in the year below me at school. We played water polo together.
* * *
A telex arrives at the police station, saying an Australian has been killed overseas and I am told to drive out and knock on the family’s door and deliver the news. A woman answers. I’m so caught up in worrying about the process I’m supposed to follow that I don’t think about its impact. Instead, I stand there and say bluntly: ‘I’m sorry to inform you that your son is dead.’ She collapses and lies there, crumpled, screaming. I stare at her. I’ve never been this close to grief before, and it is overwhelming.
* * *
My first arrest is for ‘avail railway fare’ – someone fails to pay for their train ticket, then runs away when challenged. By luck, a witness happens to know the offender. I go to his house and, thinking I am following my training, caution him, make the arrest then call it in over the radio from the police truck, giving our callsign: ‘16-1.’
‘16-1,’ the operator answers.
‘16-1. Returning to Hornsby Police Station with someone on board.’ I feel proud.
Only, I haven’t realised such a minor offence doesn’t actuall require an arrest and should be dealt with more simply instead by issuing a written summons to attend court. The first I sense that I’ve done something wrong is when we get back to the station and the charge room officer looks at me strangely. By luck, before I can make a goose of myself, a knockabout senior constable walks past and says, ‘Well played, that bloke is a shithead. Gutsy call locking him up.’
It turns out he’s a local hoodlum, who’s caused us no end of problems. My ignorance turns out to be a positive because, as the story grows, people start to look at me like I’m a serious policeman.
Soon after, I see my first murder. I work the tape, meaning it’s my job to stand in the driveway just outside the blue and white plastic ribbon strung around the crime scene and check who enters and leaves it. I stand there for hours, sweating inside my uniform, watching the detectives walk in and out in their sharp suits and sports jackets.
They have a swagger to them. There’s an idea, I think. They’re older, and to a rookie seem to inhabit a different world – loud-mouthed, tough guys who make their own decisions. I’m still a probationary constable, the lowest rank in the police force, meaning I do what I’m told each day when I turn up at work. For me, being a cop is simple. We chase crooks. We run towards danger. It gives me a sense of purpose when I wake up in the morning but I do not overthink it.
As part of my year-long probation, I get to spend a week with the detectives. Unlike the bare muster room we uniformed police file into at the start of every shift, the detectives’ office is crowded with typewriters and stacks of paper. They seem to come and go when they want to. On the few times I’ve been in there before, to talk about a job, they’re always sitting around, playing cards and smoking. Then someone would look at me and make some smartarse comment, and I’d stand there mute, feeling inadequate.
This morning, two detectives, Mick and Glen, ask me if I want to go for a drive. Glen is a solid, muscular unit with a bald head and a face that’s been busted up from boxing. He’s just arrived at Hornsby on a transfer and Mick wants to show him around.
We’re driving near Berowra, where the Pacific Highway leaves the city, when a call comes over the radio about a stolen car full of known offenders. These are bad guys, heading our way, and it’s obvious even to me, listening wide-eyed from the back seat, that we’re going to get caught up in what’s about to happen.
We see the car come gunning it towards us. Mick, who used to be a highway patrol officer and knows how to drive, swings our car through a handbrake turn and comes up right behind them.
It’s the type of chase you see on television. We race south through Mount Colah, Asquith and Hornsby, as I try not to flinch at the near-misses with other cars.
At Waitara, a highway patrol car pulls out in front of the stolen car. The bad guys try to swerve but do not make it, the two cars collide and our car smashes into the back of both.
Police arrive from everywhere with guns. One cop uses his baton to break the stolen car’s window and drag out the driver.
The men inside are arrested, at gunpoint. They’re driven off. Standing amid the chaos, feeling the fear and excitement wash out of my stomach, leaving only an empty, sickened feeling, I think about how we chased that car for 13 kilometres and risked our lives and got a result.
If this is what detectives do at work, then I want to be part of it.
* * *
But there are other things I want to be sure of first. If breaking up with Debbie during my time at the police academy changed the way I looked at her, then the months since have only brought us closer.
Some of our friends have got engaged. It feels like this is how life is lived in Sydney’s suburbs; you find a girl, go out, get engaged, then get married. I don’t think to ask if there are any other options. Debbie and I have been together almost five years now.
As 1985 draws to an end, I ask her to marry me. She says yes.
I love her. I’m so happy.
Debbie’s parents throw us an engagement party at their house in Epping, on the night a freak storm hits the suburb. Her family have lived there for 20 years and the house has never flooded before but now it’s raining so hard the ceiling fills up with water. Dad, along with some of my tradie mates, say it might bring the roof down, so we set about making holes in the Gyprock to drain out the rainwater.
It’s fun. We laugh. We’re in our early twenties, too young to care that it might be an omen.
Too young to know anything about the responsibility I’ll need for married life.
On my buck’s night, there’s around 30 of us drinking in a pub in the city centre, who walk outside and find ourselves facing the Sydney headquarters of the Church of Scientology. A close mate joined the Church six months before and disappeared. He should be here on my buck’s night, I think, so we stand there, spilling across the footpath, chanting for the Church to free him.
Other people join in and the shouting gets louder. I think it’s a good idea to use some of my police training and form the crowd into an arrowhead formation, then lead them as we burst through the front doors of the building.
I’m standing inside, directing traffic with a schooner in my hand when I first hear the sirens. Then I’m in a wrist lock, then in the back of a paddy wagon.
This isn’t good.
I see a sergeant and say, ‘Hi mate, this is my buck’s night,’ thinking that will be enough for him to let us go.
He doesn’t answer.
I try again. ‘Sorry, mate, I’m in the job.’ I’m a policeman.
‘I’m not your mate,’ he says, pointing to the stripes on his uniform. ‘And you’re a fucking idiot.’ He looks at me in silence for a moment, while I realise he is right. I’d treated this like harmless fun, the kind of wild times I used to have in my old life.
The sergeant says, ‘If I let you out of here, you and your idiot mates better be gone within five minutes or you’re all getting locked up.’
‘Perfect,’ I say, scrambling out of the truck.
I could have lost my career for this, I think, sobering up. As Debbie and I plan our wedding over the following months, I realise that old life is gone. I’m not a young man any longer.