‘I’d probably have shot them’: Why training with the cops is harder than it looks

This story is part of the June 28 edition of Good Weekend.See all 14 stories.

If I were a police officer, I would be dead. I discover this early on in my two-day familiarisation experience with NSW Police, and it plays on my mind. The Behind the Blue program is intended to help community leaders work more comfortably with police officers. I go along as a crime writer, to try to understand the world from the point of view of the cops.

We are told by police that nobody goes to work in the morning wanting to kill somebody, but when weapons are drawn, it’s the police officer who’ll return home alive.

Unless they’re me.

Our scenario training takes place at the NSW Police Academy in the regional city of Goulburn, where we are led across the campus to the “practice village” of Rossiville, a movie-set settlement of façades and cabins where nothing good ever happens. There are forever robberies at the Rossiville bank and stabbings on the train at Rossiville Station. Unhappy people always linger on the bench outside the cafe in Rossiville, waiting to frustrate trainee police officers with their obstinate refusal to move on.

I volunteer to play a police officer in the first scenario, in which a partner and I are called to deal with a heavyset man sitting on the bench in front of the cafe with his head in his hands. We are informed that his name is Sean and he “seems dangerous”. He is known to police and the Goulburn mental-health team.

I approach Sean in a friendly, non-threatening manner. I am patient and reasonable and generously empathic. I assume that he is in trouble, rather than out to make trouble. I ask if he has taken his meds, and he says he hasn’t.

Meanwhile, another course participant has agreed to be an annoying onlooker with a camera phone, a role he plays with great aplomb. While I’m trying to help Sean, the onlooker demands to know what I’m doing and why I won’t just leave Sean alone.

Sean won’t co-operate, and the bystander who’s filming me won’t back off, asking stupid questions and pushing his phone in my face. I desperately want to punch him in the mouth.

Attendees try to deal with “Sean”, who refuses to be moved on, while the rest of the class watches.

A woman appears and challenges us, but I’m too preoccupied with Sean and distracted by the Oscar-chasing iPhone paparazzo to take in what she is saying. Our instructor calls an end to the chaos.

“Can you see how difficult it becomes to deal with the main job here when you’ve got all of these other distractions?” he asks. “Imagine being a 19-year-old and having to do that.”

It was difficult and frustrating – and I knew that it was just an exercise. But I hadn’t imagined it would be so … exhilarating.

Later, we are fitted with goggles and holsters and lined up and shown how to draw and fire pistols and pepper sprays – although our blue pistols discharge blank pellets, and the pepper-spray canisters are filled with water. I am reprimanded by a colleague for spraying when I’m only supposed to be shadow-spraying and for experimentally squirting into my own mouth.

The exercise takes place in a closed room. My partner and I are faced with an angry woman trying to withdraw money from an object shaped vaguely like an ATM. I do nothing to protect myself from her. Instead, rather heroically, I position my body squarely between her and my boss, while I speak softly and slowly in an attempt to calm her down.

I feel a soft jab in my belly and look down at the tip of a bendy blade. She has stabbed me with a rubber knife.

“I guess I’m dead,” I say, moronically.

I feel a soft jab in my belly and look down at the tip of a bendy blade. She has stabbed me with a rubber knife.

I had misunderstood the point of the exercise. I thought the idea was to suppress my ego, maintain my cool and de-escalate. But the moral seemed to be that all that nice stuff gets you nowhere when a stranger wants to kill you. While I doubt that a NSW Police officer has been stabbed to death by a woman in my lifetime, I take the point (as it were).

Learning how to fire (unloaded) pistols and (water-filled) pepper sprays.

But my biggest failure is the driving exercise. The police hope to teach us how to skid a police van. When I tell the instructor I can’t drive, he assumes I can’t drive very well, or I’m a bit rusty – but you don’t fail your driving test seven times, as I have, without seven very good reasons. The instructor assures me that I will be allowed three turns at skidding his van, but I’m sent back to the sidelines without explanation immediately after my first attempt.

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Our climactic exercise is a four-hour “ride-along” with a real police patrol. I’m given a hi-vis vest, two bearded partners and a patrol car. Police are reluctant to take the spotlight, so I’ll call my partners Starsky and Hutch and hope those nicknames don’t follow them throughout their careers.

Our patrol covers western Sydney’s Merrylands, where a caller reports an assault and a description of the suspect comes over the radio: gloriously, we are on the trail of a villain wearing a black hoodie and a black mask. Unfortunately, we never find him as we are continually thwarted in our attempts at law enforcement by peak-hour traffic on Parramatta Road.

There is strong smell of weed along one stretch of road in Merrylands, with no obvious source. We speak to a couple of people parked in the street. Hutch asks an elderly van driver if he has been drinking alcohol. He replies that he hasn’t had a drink for 55 years, since he was 19. His son is 19 and he has never had a drink. His wife doesn’t drink, either. He doesn’t like drinking as it’s “bad for your system”. He has firm ideas about physical fitness, although he doesn’t forbid his family from …

“Why doesn’t he answer the question ‘yes’ or ‘no’?” asks Hutch, later.

We cruise past a big guy in a hoodie, who is walking a dangerous-looking dog. He glances downwards and disappears into a square of dilapidated housing commission units. We turn back to follow him, climb out of our car and step past a chicken parading along the footpath. Inside the square, the dog is already tethered to railings near a boarded-up flat.

Two geese waddle past.

We knock on the apartment door, which is answered by a dull-eyed man with a comb-over, who coils himself into an obsequious obstacle, intent on keeping us from looking into his living room. He swears that the dog is his dog, and the apartment is his apartment and there’s nobody else inside. We have no due cause to enter the unit, so we leave him to his lies.

The author with three actual police officers: “I’ve got more empathy with street cops than I had before the course.”

Hutch tells me he’s an ice dealer, but I suspect he’s just trying to make the night more exciting – until we stop off at Merrylands police station and I see his face on a poster with a caption noting “58 intels for supply of ice and one FPO” (Firearm Prohibition Order).

I ask if I’m the only person to find it strange that ice dealers live among free-range geese and have the perimeter of their building patrolled by a chicken. I’m told many residents of Merrylands keep sheep and goats. Three goats recently escaped, and one was hit by a car. Starsky had had to file a report about it. I ask how the goat death was classified. “Traffic incident,” Starsky says.

Sometimes people phone the police to report spiders in their home. “But then there’ll be a job that’s been on the list for a few days – ‘Oh, there’s a guy sleeping in his car’ – and you get there, and he’s been shot,” says Hutch.

Recently, a father phoned to say his seven-year-old daughter had stolen $100 while at a sleepover, and he felt the “least confronting” way to teach his little girl right from wrong might be for armed officers to pay her a visit and have a word. “I said, ‘Is there a parental figure around that she could speak to?’ ” says Hutch.

We hear that a man has fallen asleep on the median strip. By the time we reach him, he has woken up, but he seems to live in wasteland behind an abandoned warehouse. An abandoned warehouse! Just like in a crime show! Fantastic.

Starsky and Hutch lead me through the warehouse by torchlight. All the copper has been stripped from the ceilings and there are crumpled nests of foil and used syringes scattered on the broken floor, where addicts have been smoking and injecting ice.

The building is ominous but empty. If somebody had jumped out at me and I had been armed with a blue plastic pellet gun, I would probably have shot them. I’m not going to get killed twice in two days.

Policing is a tougher job than I imagined, and I’ve got more empathy with street cops than I had before the course; they never know what to expect. But I learnt something else: the attraction is in the action. I had no idea day-to-day policing would be so exciting.

When I return home that night, I feel hurt that my partner doesn’t make more of a fuss of me. “You’ve only been gone one night,” she says.

I thought I’d been away for a week.

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