Public Service

Early this morning I stopped for a young woman in the City. Aged in the mid to late twenties she was well dressed and smoking furiously as I approached. She was also drunk, though not that drunk she couldn’t hold a decent conversation.

‘Been working or socialising ?’, I asked. ‘Having a few drinks with some old workmates...friends’, she replied. ‘They’re down here for a conference’. ‘Where from..?’. ‘The North Coast’, she said. ‘Your company have offices in the bush ?’. ‘Yeah, we’re cops’.

She’d grown up in the country and had served in various towns on the North Coast. ‘Where’s the best place you’ve worked ?’, I asked. ‘Sydney’, she replied. This surprised me. ‘Sydney ? Wouldn’t you rather work up the Coast, near your home ?’. ‘Yeah, but the work’s too hard, it’s under-staffed’.

Whilst posted in one of the largest towns she was often the only overnight duty officer. ‘Usually call-outs involved domestic disputes, with slow back-up’, she explained. ‘At least in Sydney if you arrive at a job and it’s a bit dirty, you can always get back-up within minutes. In the country the back-up may be twenty minutes or more, so you get plenty of experience trying to handle dangerous situations until they arrive'.

‘Often I had to attend road accidents. The district was so big it could take twenty minutes of high-speed driving just to get there. And all the time you’re hoping the ambulance or rescue service arrives first cause there’s nothing like arriving on an accident scene to find bodies everywhere. One seven year old girl died after I tried to resuscitate her. Another time I was talking to a woman trapped in a car for ten minutes...then it caught fire. There was nothing I could do’. She related this in a matter-of-fact manner, totally dispassionate.

It was obvious that exposure to workplace trauma must have a huge personal impact. ‘With all the stuff you have to deal with, is that why cop's partners and friends are usually from the force ?’. ‘Exactly’, she said, ‘cops, firies, ambos all hang out together. It’s hard for outsiders to understand what goes on at work’.

A perfect reason for a cop blog.

Comments

[Jessie]

Interesting. People with no insight would probably thing that it would be easier to be a cop in a more rural setting then Sydney. Always interesting to get the behind the drapes views.