Leviathan (52 page)

We were nearby and there was something in the report which tugged at Doyen's memory so he took it, pulling up a few minutes later at a small house on a corner block across from a park. The whole family was waiting outside in the well-tended garden where plaster gnomes, frogs, donkeys and a swan hid amongst the flower-beds. A young, heavily pregnant blonde woman with a broken nose and a baby on her hip was fairly bursting out of her skin to tell us about her ex-boyfriend who had been ringing through death threats to her family. He had, she said, just killed her current boyfriend, making it look like a suicide, and was promising that she would be next. She stood in the failing twilight, thin knock-kneed shins and enormous thighs in black tights, wearing sandals with white socks and a grey shapeless top. She was defiantly controlled until Doyen, who had listened patiently to her story, said, ‘I know you. You laid charges against your boyfriend before, then left me hanging at the courthouse when they came up.'

There was no real colour to drain from the girl's sallow face, but the nervous energy which had been coursing through her suddenly seemed to run out of the holes in her socks.

‘No,' she said. ‘That's not right. I never done that. I never took any charges against him before.'

‘You did,' he insisted. ‘I grabbed him for assaulting you before and we took him to court and you didn't turn up. You left me hanging. I remember it.'

She suddenly burst into tears, bawling and sucking air and protesting her innocence for about two minutes. Nobody said anything. None of her family moved to support her and the two cops just stared, waiting out the performance. It was a hard, grinding passage of time, excruciating to watch as she died on the stage of her one act psychodrama. When at last she realised it was going nowhere, she stopped almost instantly and said, ‘This has been going on for eight years. When are youse gonna done something about it? If you don't fuckin' do something soon, I'm gonna have to neck him meself.'

‘No you're not,' said Doyen firmly. ‘But I want to know that if we get a warrant this time you'll follow through. He's a slippery bastard, your boyfriend. The only reason we got him last time was because he got stoned and fell asleep on your patio. I'm not going to waste my time again if you won't follow through.'

Her father, a broken, middle-aged man with grey stubble and a sort of grey-green ducktail hairdo, pulled his brown windcheater tighter about him and said, ‘Yeah, you done wrong on that one, luv. You gotta get the prick this time.'

‘But I didn't get no warrant! I didn't!' she screeched.

Her mother, who looked more redoubtable by several orders of magnitude, weighed in by saying eight years was long enough and she had to do something this time. Doyen extracted a promise that if he located the boyfriend they would see any charges through, and with that we left.

‘You gonna look for him?' I asked in the truck.

‘Oh yeah. He is a slippery little prick, but he's a coward too. If we find him, he'll fold again.'

‘Reckon she'll follow through?' I asked.

‘Not a chance,' Doyen said.

The stresses which operate on the street patrol are more immediate and intimately threatening than the bureaucratic pressures which bedevil the senior command. ‘We can't get people to come here,' complained Dave Shorrocks. ‘Because they listen to the radio and all they hear is Mac Fields, Mac Fields, Mac Fields, domestics, domestics, domestics. Our detectives haven't been burdened with any murders for eighteen months but they're consistently overworked because the uniforms are so busy they farm everything upstairs. I've only got twelve detectives and they have ten constables on each shift dumping work on them every day. I continually send it back down again saying, “No, we can't do everything.” But of course they say, “How can I do this this, this and this?” While they're doing one job another two others are backing up. They feel they're being burned out. They cannot cope with the volume of work.'

Every job creates paper, even false alarms – such as the regular visits to one service station where the attendant is notorious for hitting the armed robbery panic button every time a customer complains about the quality of their prefabricated microwave nachos. It doesn't matter how frivolous the call, as soon as a constable takes it they have to come back and write it up. In a simple domestic, which is the core business of uniformed police, they have to drive to the scene and assess the situation. A back-up crew will often be sent because of previous violence at the same premises.

‘So then,' says Shorrocks, ‘you got two crews tied up. They speak to the victim and take a statement. They may arrest the person who has assaulted the victim. They bring him back here, interview him, process him, ring up and get an interim court order for an apprehended violence order. If the offence took place at his house they have to find a suitable refuge for the woman and any children. They must take the victim there. A friend can't do it because the police cannot disclose the identity or the address to anyone.' After all that, chances are when the perpetrator arrives in court, the victim will not turn up to press the charges.

If, on the same shift, they take a call to a dog dispute, the officers must return to the station, put an entry on the computer, take out a summons application against the owner, take the papers to court, get them signed and stamped and then serve the summons. If on the way back from the canine dispute they snatch a tagger decorating the walls of Glenfield Railway Station, the same cops have to organise to photograph the area for the station's digital database. They have to interview the kid, but if he is under fourteen they must first contact the parents for approval. ‘Most times,' says Shorrocks, ‘the parents refuse to attend, forcing us to find an independent observer, say from the Salvation Army. If the tagger is Aboriginal the officers must contact the Aboriginal Legal Service and fax any documents to them. The ALS can and will demand that nobody speak to their client until one of their solicitors is present.' Three seemingly simple jobs thus develop their own complex, bureaucratic existence. If the tagger, dog owner or angry boyfriend have had any past experience with the police, or are simply obstreperous, perverse or hip to the system, they can further complicate the process by lodging an official complaint against the officer concerned.

These pressures, which would tell in a normal work environment, are accentuated by the unnatural conditions of police work. On night shift, a constable will pull twelve hours, three or four days in a row, for up to three weeks at a stretch. Shorrocks, who has a background in sports medicine, is only too aware of the dire effects on the human body of having its circadian rhythms constantly jerked in and out of sync.

‘Me personally, I don't like them,' he said of the long shifts. ‘I don't think they're healthy. I see my own daughter, she's in the job, and on the twelve hour shifts her whole life changes. She comes home from a shift, assuming she hasn't had to work back on anything. She has something to eat, she goes to bed, she goes back to work, she comes home, eats, goes to bed, back to work. For three days all she does is work and sleep. She has no social life. No relaxation. No exercise. Nothing. She hasn't got time. She's too tired. She takes food which my wife cooks, but a lot of kids here don't. They eat KFC or McDonalds which has no nutritional value whatsoever. I don't think it's normal. But as a manager it's great because our overtime is down.'

This chronic abuse of the constables' bodies is regularly augmented by acute mistreatment at the hands of suspects. ‘Some of the younger constables,' said Shorrocks, ‘don't cope well with being spat on or bitten. When it happens I sit down and explain what they'll be going through because I can relate to it. I've been through the AIDS business, the non-support of the service. I provided mouth-mouth to a drug addict and he regurgitated. I copped a mouthful of fluids and got very sick. The service wrote it off until I produced medical evidence to show I was telling the truth. That was six months later, with no support for my family, no support for my wife.'

There sometimes seems to be a split in the minds of many police between the loyalty and trust they invest in fellow officers and their distrust of the service, which remains a remote and potentially hostile foreign power. The lack of resources, the trimming and cutting, the making-do and putting off and one hundred other improvised tactics of a hungry outfit are, however, only partly to blame for the sense of powerlessness and abandonment which periodically engulfs them. Royal Commissioner James Wood's comprehensive negation of the old ways and means may have swept hundreds of corrupt officers out of the system and demolished the structures which harboured them, but it also decapitated the service. New paradigms have had little time to evolve. The 13 000 cops who survived had to forget decades of institutional memory. For the older hands the attack on police culture, although understandable, was particularly galling because that culture, with its many ugly faults, was often the only thing standing between them and the abyss, as Greg, one of Shorrocks's detectives, put it to me.

‘There are some positive sides of police culture,' he said. ‘I know they're trying to get rid of blokes sticking up for each other, lying for each other, covering for each other and that's good. But it seems to me they're going too far, trying to stop us just being mates too. If you have to put your life on the line with someone, you want to know you can trust them. And a lot of the time, too, going down the pub and having a beer and a chat with your mates does help.'

Greg's eyes were red-rimmed and tired. He looked a bit lumpy, overworked and stale, as you would expect of a man trying to solve a possible murder, a heap of frauds, a couple of heavy armed robberies and a mixed bag of sex crimes. He nodded after another plain-clothes man who had just left the room. ‘That detective who just walked out there did a job where a lady had killed her baby,' he said quietly. ‘And when they did the autopsy it had no inners. There was nothing inside. So they sent him back to the house and under the griller was all the insides of the kid.' He paused and stared at the mess of papers on the desk in front of him, oblivious to my tape recorder for the first time. ‘I don't know …' he shrugged, biting his lip. ‘How do you react to something like that? It's got to freak you out, and going to the pub and talking about it
does
help. I can't go home and tell my wife about that,' he said, looking up and shaking his head. ‘Even though she's supportive she doesn't want to hear that because it's gonna freak her out too. So you talk to your mates who have been through it with you'.

Is it possible to maintain the faith in the face of experience which can only coarsen the soul? He insisted it is. Everyone has their way, he said. For him it was a retreat into professionalism. You get to a homicide and you turn off your emotions. You focus solely on what you need to make the case. Even so, the raw reality is sometimes strong enough to subvert these defences, if not breach them. ‘I did a matter at Claymore where a lady killed her two kids,' Greg recalled. ‘I had to go back and interview her and … at the end of it … it really freaked me out. I came back and had a blue with the boss, had a shit of a day and when I sat back and thought about it, it was that interview.'

On a run over to Campbelltown at four the next morning Wayne Hack, an old sergeant with a giant gravy-barrel stomach, reflected on the ruin police work can wreak on family and friends. ‘No man is in a fit state to deal with his wife and daughters when he has spent half the night walking along a mile of train track picking up bits and pieces of body and brain,' he said. ‘As soon as you put the uniform on you have to shift into a different way of thinking.'

An aggressive, mistrustful, sharply reactive frame of mind in which you cannot show weakness, in which there are few shades of grey, in which people are reduced to threats, perps, victims or witnesses.

‘We don't see the nice mums and dads,' said Mick Donovan. ‘We only deal with the shits.'

When I arrived at Campbelltown Station with Hack in the cold hours before dawn, he asked if I fancied a peek at ‘a mad Irishman' we'd been hearing about on the radio for a few hours. This guy had been head-butting and punching the Catholic Club because they wouldn't serve him any more booze. It had taken three cops and a blast of capsicum spray to put him down. A Campbelltown sergeant named Errol – who would be played by Bryan Brown as laconic, slow-moving and amused by it all in the made-for-TV mini-series – told us the guy was simply ‘mad on the piss'. That had always been just a phrase until they took me through to see him. I could hear his screams from the other end of the building. He stopped for half a second as we entered the room but on seeing Errol redoubled his efforts. He was a tall, well-built young man with a rat's tail haircut and no shirt. Tattoos, including an Irish flag, covered his torso and a lot of blood had soaked through his blue jeans. Errol was right. He was mad on the piss. They had locked him inside a plexiglass cube, a little bigger than a telephone booth, and he was jerking about, howling and throwing himself against the walls, raging to get out. Punching the brick walls of the Catholic Club had pushed his knuckles right back up his hand. A weary-looking custody officer and a very sorry-looking curly-haired drunk were the only other occupants of the room. The Irishman lit into Errol and ‘his fat friend' with a ferocious torrent of abuse, stopping only when his eyes locked in on my own.

‘Who's this tough-looking cunt think he is?' he sneered. ‘Serpico?'

He pulled a face at me but then lost interest, preferring to bounce off the bulging plastic walls and roar like a bear.

‘How often would you get something like that in the cage?' I asked Errol.

‘Most nights,' he shrugged. ‘Sometimes we get a whole bunch of them.'