Bevilacqua: I was bullied by rotten cops

Policing is a tough gig that can require a hero’s courage, but Simon Bevilacqua learned a harsh lesson at the age of 19

STANDARDS: Police are normal people with flaws and failings, just like you and me.

YEARS ago, aged about 19, I was threatened, abused, humiliated and harassed by police.

It was back in the day when phones had dials and cars had carbies. I was among five poverty-stricken students living in a share-house in the Launceston suburb of Invermay. One evening, we had a whip around and scraped up enough loose change for some beer.

I volunteered to ride the pushbike to the nearest bottle shop and a mate said he’d join me on foot.

We set off on one of those sodden evenings when low-hanging cloud over the Tamar River mudflats turn the city into a swamp. Everything was saturated. It was hard to tell whether it was raining. The drops hung in the air rather than falling. We were actually in the cloud, not under it.

We bought two longnecks of Boag’s and a packet of tailor-made cigarettes (a filthy and deadly habit with not one redeeming feature that I’ve long since quit).

As we made our way home, a car hurtled past. We watched the speeding vehicle slide spectacularly into a screeching U-turn and head towards us at speed. My friend jumped from the footpath into a yard as the driver violently slammed on the brakes and stopped within touching distance of me, causing me to topple over with my bike in the gutter.

Bewildered, I got to my feet as three men leapt from the car. They were cops brandishing heavy black torches menacingly like batons. A uniformed officer stayed in the back seat.

One huge officer stood in front of me. The top of my head came to his shoulder. The other two, almost as big, stood either side, all three within inches, crowding and dwarfing me.

They yelled. What’s your name? Have you been drinking? What’s your phone number? Have you ever been arrested on drug charges? Where do you live? Who with? Why are you here?

I tried to answer that, no, I hadn’t been drinking or taking drugs and told them my address and name, but they didn’t wait for answers. The bombardment of questions continued — rapid, aggressive and unrelenting but not seemingly about answers.

My friend spoke up from the shadows: “We’re just on our way home.” “F… off,” he was told, and he fled in terror.

“What’s in your pockets?” one cop interrogated. I took the unopened cigarettes and showed them to him. “Open them,” he yelled. I took the plastic off. “Give me one,” he demanded. I did. He threw it on the ground. “Pick it up,” he insisted. “I don’t want it, it’s wet,” I replied. “Give me the packet,” he continued. I did, and he emptied all the cigarettes on the footpath.

“Take off your jacket and give it to me.” I complied. He threw it on the ground. “Take off your jumper,” I did. He tossed it on the ground. “Take off your boots and socks,” he said. He searched them and threw them on the ground.

In sopping wet T-shirt, jeans and bare feet, I was freezing as the interrogation continued. I didn’t stand a chance fighting these big buggers. I could outrun them, but where do I run?

I came from a sheltered middle-class childhood where police were friends you asked for the time and directions. If bullied or wronged, you called them. They were guardians to whom you ran for justice.

Where do you go when it’s the cops you’re running from?

For the first time in my life, I felt unsafe. Until you feel that powerlessness and vulnerability, I don’t think you can grasp its psychological impact.

“It’s an offence to ride a bike drunk,” one cop said. “But I’m not drunk,” I replied.

“You don’t get it. It’s not what you think or say, it’s what we tell the magistrate that matters,” he fired back, without any charade of honesty or truth or justice.

My next decision was as instinctive as it was desperate. Looking back, it was foolhardy and I was lucky, but I sat at the feet of the bullies and started pulling on my socks.

“Get up,” one growled imposingly, as if to a disobedient dog. “I’m putting on my socks,” I said quietly, head bowed, avoiding eyes while dragging soggy socks over numb damp feet.

I braced for the beating, hoping I could tuck myself into a tight ball, hard enough to protect my head and other vulnerable areas.

But the bashing didn’t arrive. I heard the cops return to their car. Doors slammed and I glanced up to catch the eye of one climbing in the driver’s seat. “Sorry mate,” he said, out of earshot of the others and with a look of genuine remorse.

A housemate at the time had a friend who was a junior cop and regular visitor. He was a nice bloke. I cared for his dog while he looked for a place to live that had a fence. He reckoned I was probably a random target for a task force practising interrogation.

Those thugs changed my world view. Their behaviour that night made me question what I had been raised to believe. Perhaps it was a necessary coming of age. I lost any middle-class ignorance or doubt about police brutality. It’s a fact, not all cops are good.

In the decades since that unwarranted and demeaning harassment I have met many good, honest officers and as a journalist I got to see at close range the threatening and difficult situations they have to deal with daily. It’s a tough gig that can at times require a hero’s courage.

As a father, I taught respect for the boys in blue, dismissing what happened to me as an aberration by rotten eggs.

But it would be detrimental and wrong to the continued progress of police standards to believe all officers are heroic and good, because they’re not, as some true heroes in the force know all too well.

Policing techniques, styles and attitudes should be under continual review, with the presumption that police are normal people with flaws and failings, just like you and me, and should be treated as such.