Gary Jubelin’s I Catch Killers podcast: Jarin Baigent faced her fears of working in Redfern

Jarin Baigent always wanted to become a cop in Sydney’s Redfern after seeing her home being robbed. She tells Gary Jubelin’s I Catch Killers podcast how she overcame her fears of policing a community close to her.

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Standing on a crowded train, Jarin Baigent was “sweating bullets”.

She was wearing her NSW Police uniform for the first day in several years after working in covert surveillance roles, and simply wanted to disappear.

Baigent wasn’t just self-conscious: it was her first day as a uniformed cop policing her own community of Redfern, and she was nervously anticipating the reaction of her Aboriginal family and friends to seeing her in blue.

“I was just super paranoid. Harrowing day for me. Sweating bullets and who’s looking at me, and what’s going on – you certainly stand out in uniform.”

Baigent had vowed to become a cop in Redfern as a young girl, seeing the family home being frequently burgled and witnessing the uninspiring reaction of local police. “They just didn’t want to help us,” she said of that time.

She joined the force and worked for several years in suburban Sydney and specialist commands before returning home to Redfern, where she’d grown up in a politically and socially active Wiradjuri family in an environment of deep mutual mistrust between police and locals.

Former police officer Jarin Baigent. Picture: Supplied

On her first day back in Redfern, well-respected Commander Luke Freudenstein, who had spent years working to rebuild the relationship, instructed Baigent to accompany him to Parliament House in central Sydney for a meeting – on the train.

Baigent had become used to being invisible, not just as a plainclothes cop but also as a resident of her community. Everyone knew she was a policewoman, but she’d never had to engage directly on policing matters with her own family and friends.

“I didn’t give too much warning to community that I was going to come back, and in uniform too. So I had to really earn respect in that space. You know, it’s easy for community to say: ‘Jarin’s a police officer somewhere else,’ but (then) ‘OK, she’s here now’. It took a long time for me to get comfortable,” she reveals in a fascinating new episode of podcast I Catch Killers with Gary Jubelin.

LISTEN TO THE NEW PODCAST EPISODE BELOW:

Baigent already had plenty of experience of some police officers displaying hostility or lack of care towards indigenous people, but now she was about to experience the same sentiment in reverse.

Suddenly, she was the face of a justice system about which Aboriginal people were deeply suspicious.

“I’ve got a cousin who’s really big – a massive guy, and he was doing something. And I was with a group of police officers; we had to do high-visibility policing. We were walking through a space one day and one of the cops is like: ‘Oh, he’s massive.’

“And I just said: ‘Leave it to me. All of you are gonna stand over there and let me handle this.’

Gary Jubelin with Jarin Baigent, a former Aboriginal Police Officer. Picture: Tim Hunter.

“They’re really kind of worried, because he was quite aggressive at the time.”

The officers wanted Baigent’s cousin to move on, which is a contentious police power to ask someone to leave an area even if they are not doing anything wrong. A move-on direction can often escalate into an open confrontation, when civilians are aggrieved at being targeted and police aren’t able to keep things under control.

“He wasn’t a happy customer at that point. Pretty upset. And I called out his name and he didn’t see me. He literally just saw a uniform. And it took probably half a dozen times for him to see me. I had to yell at him, take my hat off and use a different voice and say: ‘Hey, look at me’.”

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He responded: ‘Oh, Cuz. How you going? I didn’t realise it was you. Sorry,’ and the pair hugged.

Baigent said to him: ‘Can you go over there?’ to which he replied: ‘Yeah yeah, all right, I’ll catch ya.’

“And that was the end of it,” Baigent says. “And I hadn’t told the other cops that I knew him or anything.

“Oh, didn’t realise it. Oh, sorry. No hugs. And that was nothing. Can you go over there. Yeah. Yeah you’re right. OK I’ll catch ya. And that was the end of it. And I hadn’t told the other cops that I knew him or anything. They were just staring.”

“I think some police forget that you’ve just got to talk to people as humans, just connect on that level. But it was poignant because it showed that some people also don’t see the person in uniform either.”

HEAR MORE OF JARIN BAIGENT’S THOUGHTFUL INTERVIEW ON I CATCH KILLERS WITH GARY JUBELIN. SUBSCRIBERS GET EARLY ACCESS TO THE PODCAST PLUS VIDEO AND PHOTO SPECIALS.

Originally published as Gary Jubelin’s I Catch Killers podcast: Jarin Baigent faced her fears of working in Redfern