Officer in charge: Ian Park, Fortitude Valley police station
Cops like Ian Park have ways to deal with the horror they see. But what happens when the person dead under the sheet is someone close?
This is how he keeps working. He remembers that work is not his normal. Home is his normal. His wife, Kerry, reading her Kindle on the back deck. His daughter, Ellie, studying for her maths exam. Work is human error, human evil. Work is roadside deaths, shotgun robberies and shaken babies. Work must not be his normal.
There are some days at work when Senior Sergeant Ian Park, Officer in Charge, Fortitude Valley Police Station, thinks deeply on the motivations of criminals. He sometimes wonders if there’s a moment in the lives of some offenders when criminal behaviour — theft, random violence, drug-dealing, sexual assault, child abuse — becomes their normal.
When Ian was a boy growing up in Toowoomba, west of Brisbane, his parents had an exercise bike in their house that he would sit on pretending he was one of the highway patrol officers from the TV show CHiPs, and the exercise bike became a police motorcycle from which he would fire his toy pistol at an endless gallery of imaginary criminals. He never imagined then the complexities of real-life police work. He never imagined that call he received when he was 26 and assigned to working-class Inala, outer south-west Brisbane. A resident phoned police to say they’d heard screaming from a neighbour’s home. It was 10pm and dark in the suburbs when Ian and his partner arrived at the address to find a man lying on his back, his torso riddled with bloody stab wounds.
The imaginary men Ian aimed at from his boyhood exercise bike always died quickly from a precise pistol shot. That man in that Inala front yard died with enough time to reach his hand up to Ian and utter the most primal and human plea. “Help me,” he said. “Help… me.” He died before the ambulance arrived.
Work must not be his normal.
Ian was one of 72,680 Australians employed by police agencies in 2016-17. In the annual National Survey of Community Satisfaction with Policing, 73.4 per cent of the adult population were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the services police provided that year. There were 6.6 road deaths per 100,000 registered vehicles; per 100,000 people there were two homicide victims, 95 sexual assault victims and 21 armed robbery victims.
Ian is 46 years old. He is the father of Erin, 20, Ellie, 17, and Isabel, 13. He was in Year 11 at Harristown High School, Toowoomba, when he told his parents, Noel and Lyn, that he wanted to be a police officer. Noel Park worked as a director for Lifeline Australia and was friends with several seasoned police officers, one of whom sat down with a wide-eyed 16-year-old Ian to convey the realities of lifelong police work.
“Sergeant Hooper was his name,” Ian says. “He laid it out. He said some days are great and some days are rubbish, and there will be plenty of things you will see that you will wish you hadn’t. I just remember thinking, ‘If you’re trying to put me off this job then it’s not working’. All the realities he spelt out for me, I felt like I could handle them.”
His first posting out of police academy was Brisbane City station. His age played on his mind in the early years. He was only 18 when he first had to pull his gun. There was an armed robbery at a service station. The suspect was tracked to the riverbanks of Brisbane’s West End. That night was so black and silent that Ian wondered if his more seasoned partner might hear the sound of his pounding heart as they stepped low along the muddy banks. Then his partner stopped on the spot. “I’m sure I just heard someone cock a shotgun,” his partner whispered. The two officers drew their weapons and continued along the riverbank, and Ian was a million miles from the young man he was on weekends having regular dates at an ice-skating rink with the girl of his dreams.
He was only 18, lanky and green, when he was attending domestic violence callouts in which he would have to advise adults twice his age on how they might choose to work on their relationships for the sake of their children. He knew nothing about relationships. He’d only just met Kerry. They still wrote soppy teenage love letters to each other. “You’re giving people advice on marriage and you’re thinking, ‘I’m 18, what do I know?’ ” So much of the work, he realised in those early DV callouts, is about sound judgment in unsound conditions. So much of it is walking into hostile environments beyond closed doors in the Australian suburbs.
Two officers at a door. The door opens. The officers enter. Their calm has been learnt. Their pacing — slow, deliberate, steady, reassuring — has been learnt. They hope their calm is contagious. They are hyper-alert, but only on the inside. They are rapidly processing information, but it doesn’t show. The focal point is a man and a woman arguing in the living room. But all that information around them: the crack in the window, the whisky bottle on the floor, the kitchen beyond the living room, the knife block on the kitchen bench, the veins in the man’s temple, the fear in the woman’s voice, the baby in the corner. Infinite angles. Infinite ways for events to unfold. And the officers slowly building a plan for the single outcome that ends in zero harm.
“With the calm comes clear thinking,” Ian says. “You’re looking for the opportunity to make a reasoned decision on what is going to happen next. You need to act decisively. If you don’t, things will go south fast. Then you need to be comfortable with every decision, and yes, maybe there was a better one to be made, but that was the decision you made and you must be happy you made it and resolved the situation.”
Recently, one of his colleagues took her own life. His team at Fortitude Valley station knew her well. A total of 62 Australian police officers took their own lives between 2000 and 2012. As officer in charge of his station, it’s Ian’s job to be aware of the mental health of his team.
He keeps asking himself the same question: Where’s the intervention point? “What am I looking for in my staff to try to pick that up before it gets to that point? The last time I saw her there was nothing that showed me any signs,” he says. “Plenty of people saw her the week before and no one suspected anything. No one had any reason to believe they needed to do anything for her. Until it was too late.”
A colleague once told Ian that every mentally harrowing case in every police officer’s life is another book that officers open and close. These books are rarely revisited, but they can’t be discarded. Every officer has their own towering bookcase, the colleague said, with their own cluttered shelves filled with all the books of their short or long careers. Trouble is there’s no fixed number of books any one bookcase can hold without toppling over. Most officers only find out how much their bookcase can hold at the precise moment the bookcase has fallen on them.
All those books Ian has placed on the shelves. The girl who took her life at 12 years of age. The stepfather who killed his toddler stepson by striking his head on the edge of a bathtub. “Been to a couple baby-shake jobs,” he says softly.
He worked six-and-a-half years in Inala, largely in the area of child protection. Kerry says to this day that if he stayed any longer in that posting it would have meant the end of their marriage. They loved Inala. They didn’t love what happened behind its closed doors. The overtime didn’t help. When children are at the centre of brutal crimes, one can’t simply leave those crimes at work. They followed Ian home. They followed him into his sleep. Sometimes, today, he finds himself being overprotective, even paranoid, with his own three daughters and he knows that’s a legacy of the 17 years he spent working in juvenile aid.
Work for long enough as a cop and you come to know a very particular sadness that comes from witnessing intergenerational crime. Save the kid from hell in 1992; put him behind bars in 2002. “Some kids tell you their surname and you realise they look exactly like their parents did at the same age,” he says. “That hurts. You tried to explain to their parents back then, ‘This is what is going to happen to your kids’. Unfortunately, you were right. But there are some families you know are not going to go any other way because that’s their normal.”
On January 4, 2016, Ian was working in Brisbane’s Inner West Patrol Group when he posted a story on the MyPolice Queensland Police News website. It was about an old friend, Sarah, who had recently married the man of her dreams, David, a 34-year-old father of four.
It was a wonderful wedding. I met Dave briefly at the bar and we chatted, as you do. But I didn’t have time to get to know him. I figured there was plenty of time for that down the track. So there were lots of things I didn’t know about Dave. I didn’t realise he had a love for motorcycling. I didn’t know exactly how old he was or where he lived. I didn’t know when his birthday was. But I did know that he and Sarah were in love. And that was enough for me.
I had to work right across the Christmas long weekend. It was now Boxing Day — my dad’s birthday. I was pretty much heading back to my office to finish off my duty log for the day and go home to my family when I heard the call over the radio about a motorcyclist who had gone over the edge of Mt Nebo. I turned around to make the drive up the mountain. About five minutes before I got to the scene, the message went out that the ambos had done all they could and had discontinued their efforts to revive the rider and he had now passed away.
I went into “police supervisor mode”, assuming, like the other three road fatalities I had attended this year and the numerous others in my career, that the rider would be someone I didn’t know. By the time I got there he had already been covered by a sheet and was left where he had passed away, awaiting the arrival of our forensic crash investigators. I had no reason to climb down the embankment to see his face. I’ve seen plenty before. I asked if anyone had the rider’s name. An ambo showed me a page from his notebook where he had copied his details from the licence in his pocket. Look at that. He had the same name as Dave, but not an uncommon name. And today was his birthday — just like my dad…
It wasn’t until I got back to my office that I did some more checks. My heart sank. I knew now there was no coincidence. The rider was Dave.
I dropped in to see Sarah on my way home. My colleagues who had delivered what we call “the death message” were just leaving.
The death message. Ian’s lost count of how many times he’s delivered it. All those unsuspecting faces behind all those knocked doors. Parents, siblings, sons, daughters. There is only way to deliver that message. You gently say the words and stand still as the person at the door or in the living room or on the back deck takes 10 seconds to realise this is all real and you try not to weep as you watch another human being’s world fall apart.
Ian sat beside Sarah that Boxing Day, held her hand. And then she spoke. “I’m pregnant,” she said.
David’s death is the hardest book to open on Ian’s bookshelf. In 28 years of policing, that was the worst day of his career. He keeps asking himself the same question relating to that bookshelf: “When does the bookshelf fall over?”
Ian’s post was shared 10,000 times on Facebook. It was liked 22,000 times on social media with a hashtag plea that spread across the country: #ridesafely4me. Ian posted that story because he was starting to feel that all the stories behind those road toll numbers were being lost in the count.
Not long before David’s death, Ian attended a double fatality in Anstead in Brisbane’s outer west. “Two girls, 16 and 17, had been at a party and stole someone’s car and wrapped themselves around a telephone pole,” he says. “They hit it so hard they snapped the pole. The whole process got to me, watching for a number of hours while the firies tried to cut their bodies out of the car. One of those girls had been someone I had dealt with earlier, while I was still in child protection. She’d started going off the rails and I tried to straighten her out. So to see her in that state — that was as bad as it gets. This was exactly what I tried to warn her about and there she was.”
Sometimes Ian has to bite his tongue when he’sat a barbecue and someone is detailing the reasons they’ve had the week from hell. Cluttered diaries. Pushy bosses. Shocking traffic. A bad week for a police officer is holding a five-month-old baby who has turned blue. Ian usually sticks to the feelgood stuff. The stints he’s done at schools as an adopt-a-cop. The letters he receives from parents about the kids he saved in the early 1990s who are now flourishing in 2018. The kids who broke the cycle. The kids who somehow built a new life for themselves, who built a new normal.
There are two halves to the job, he says, two sides. On one side is a black and white unchangeable thing called law. On the other side is a fallible, complex, warm-blooded thing called a human. “The law side of it is fairly easy,” Ian says. “That becomes second nature to apply. The tougher part is people. How are you treating them as people? What’s the best way to help someone who needs a hand to get out of the situation they’re in?”
Help. Strip it all back and the whole job could be reduced to those two words that man said in that night-time yard in Inala. “Help … me.”
His eldest daughter, Erin, is in the final stages of a human services degree at university. Like her old man, she wants to help people. “How’s this for the full circle of life,” he says. “She’s currently doing a placement at the Inala Youth Service. There was a little part of me that was apprehensive about her doing that, but I feel it’s important for her to go somewhere like that. You try to shelter your kids from the bad stuff of the world but there comes a time when they need to see exactly what is there.”
It made perfect sense that Ian sat Erin down and told her some of the darker things she might expect to see in the suburbs. He laid it out. He said some days will be great and some days will be rubbish, and there will be plenty of things she will see that she will wish she hadn’t. But he knew exactly what was going through his daughter’s mind. If he was trying to put her off the job, it wasn’t working.
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