Gary Jubelin I Catch Killers podcast: Jarin Baigent explains the frustrations of being an Indigenous cop
When police failed to properly investigate a break and enter, Jarin Baigent decided she wanted to change the force from within to help her Indigenous community. But things didn’t work out as planned. Don’t miss the latest I Catch Killers podcast.
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A broken window. Possessions all over the floor. Missing goods. As a kid growing up in Waterloo, this was just part of life for Jarin Baigent: coming home to find the family home had been robbed, again.
Ultimately, the experience drove her to become a police officer - but not for the reason you might think. In fact, it was what she perceived as the uncaring, unprofessional response of the local police that made her, as a young Wiradjuri woman, feel it was her duty to try and change the force from within.
“You just felt so disempowered as a kid,” Baigent reveals in a new episode of hit podcast I Catch Killers with Gary Jubelin, available to subscribers on icatchkillers.com.au.
“We didn’t have much to start off with. So when your house is ransacked time and time again, you know, it happened just before Christmas at one point.
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“We were lucky we had a home and a good house and everything, but we just didn’t have much. So it was kind of destroying. I remember the last time it happened. I remember I started cleaning up the house because, you know, a big, tough kid, my job was to look after the family,” she said.
Baigent was eight years old.
“I started tidying up just to try and make my mum feel better. And I remember the police were in my bedroom because that was the point of entry. And I had a jewellery box and I had picked up the jewellery box on the floor and put it back on the shelf.
“The police are saying to my mum: ‘This where they got in’ and my Mum (asked): ‘What happens next? Will you take fingerprints?’
“And they said: ‘No, we can’t take fingerprints because your daughter’s basically contaminated the crime scene by cleaning up.’ And I remember he took his thumbprint and he put it on this jewellery box and he said: ‘See how easy that is? That basically ruins everything. Your daughter’s touched it so we can’t do anything.’
“And I was devastated. I thought it was my fault that we weren’t going to be able to find a person that did it.”
After years of her own policing experience, Baigent now knows this is untrue: the whole house was a crime scene, and police could very easily have begun a proper investigation.
“(It was) absolute rubbish,” Baigent says.
“They just didn’t want to help us. Every time that we had contact with police, I did feel like it was always a ‘no, we can’t help you because …’
“You just felt really helpless and worthless, to be honest. I definitely felt that emotion as a kid; we’re not important.
“You just don’t understand why you’re not important. You see things on telly all the time, like houses getting robbed and the police come in and help and they catch the baddie and that’s the end of it. That didn’t happen for us.”
In her early 20s, Baigent joined the police and went on to work as a general duties cop and in a specialist unit in the city, often finding herself caught between her duties as a police officer, her deep drive to help her community and the need to navigate misunderstandings and suspicion from both sides.
Baigent was seconded to the Northern Territory to work on the Royal Commission into the Detention and Protection of Children before returning to NSW to try and implement what she’d learned about reducing high incarceration rates of young Aboriginal people, only to feel her experience wasn’t valued.
“People knew that I worked on the commission but no one even asked me: ‘How was it?’ There was no: ‘What did you learn and how can we do it better here?’
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“I found that really frustrating. I’ve got a lived experience as an Aboriginal kid interacting with police. I’ve got years of experience working the truck. On top of that I’ve got years of experience as a youth officer and I’ve worked on a royal commission and still I couldn’t be heard. Disempowered. That’s how I felt. Lots to contribute and nowhere to put it.”
Baigent now works in her local community of Redfern-Waterloo and collaborates with Aboriginal artists to create ethically-produced products including yoga mats, and looks back wistfully on her police career.
“I’ve had some of the best times. The friends I made in the police, I consider them like family. And I still have such deep respect for good cops in the job that I know. It’s not a regular job. It’s not cut out for everybody. It takes a lot to be a police officer, but the good times, the camaraderie — I loved all that about the job.”
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Originally published as Gary Jubelin I Catch Killers podcast: Jarin Baigent explains the frustrations of being an Indigenous cop
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