by Gary Jubelin
‘You won’t harm him?’ she asks.
It isn’t a dumb question. The New South Wales Police Force are not famous for being caring, sharing types.
‘Please treat him with respect,’ she asks. ‘He’s my brother, I love him.’
I ask her where he’s living.
She tells me and repeats her request, ‘Don’t hurt him.’
I look her in the eyes, and tell her, ‘Don’t worry, you can trust me. We won’t hurt him.’
Before we leave, I try to reassure her, ‘You’ve done the right thing.’
* * *
We ask a magistrate to sign the warrant authorising us to do a search of Isaac’s unit, and to use force to get inside it if we have to.
‘Make sure no one gets killed,’ he says, handing over the thin sheaf of papers.
I laugh. I’ve been in the cops long enough to know how to execute a search warrant.
‘What could possibly go wrong?’ I joke, but he’s already turned away to deal with something else.
* * *
We form up beside a nearby cricket oval to go over my plan for the operation. I’ve seen what can happen when you don’t plan for a job properly; a year ago, during a covert search for a marijuana plantation in remote bushland to the north of Sydney, I’d heard someone call my name, then gunshots. Sprinting over, I saw another cop, white-faced, with blood smeared across his shirt.
A guard dog had attacked him and he’d pulled his gun but shot his own fingers off while wrestling with the animal. He collapsed and I kneeled there, with my shirt wrapped around his hand, trying to stop the bleeding.
It felt like hours before anybody came to help us.
Standing beside the oval, I recognise the familiar mix of fear, adrenaline and excitement I always feel before a big job. The other cops are waiting for instructions, among them Jon, the plain clothes constable who came with me to meet Sharon, and a couple of detectives from the Armed Hold-Up Squad, which is known in the force as the Stick-Ups.
One of these guys I know, a tough unit who played reserve grade footy but still has a boyish face, earning him the nickname Strongboy.
The others I haven’t worked with, although I know the sergeant leading the surveillance team; he served in Vietnam before joining the cops and has the nickname Agent Orange.
Despite the twisting in my stomach, I’m not going to show weakness. The plan is simple, I say, ‘We’ll go straight from here. It’s a minute-, two-minute drive. It’s a housing commission place, so we won’t hang around because we’ll stand out like dogs’ balls. I’ll go in with Jon and you blokes from the Stick-Ups. We’ll knock on the door while the surveillance team covers the back in case he throws something out or tries to bolt.’
They nod. They understand their roles. We roll out and drive to the brown-brick, 1970s apartment building, three or four storeys tall where Isaac has his apartment. Pulling up, we quickly move across the ground and into the shade inside the building. Climbing to the first floor, I put my ear to the door of his unit and, hearing somebody moving about inside, signal to Strongboy for us to take up our positions on either side of the doorway with our backs to the brickwork, in case whoever is in there starts shooting.
Jon and the second cop from the Stick-Ups shelter in the stairwell, ready to follow us when Isaac opens the door.
* * *
‘Get fucked!’ he shouts again from inside the unit.
‘Drop the knife!’ Another voice.
What’s going on?
The quick sound of a gunshot.
Silence.
A woman screams.
We start kicking the door – only it doesn’t buckle.
With Strongboy, I shoulder-charge the door, one at a time at first, then both of us together, until it breaks off its hinges and falls down flat, sending the two of us crashing into the apartment.
Inside, the woman is still screaming. We’re in the living room. The woman’s on my left, bent over, hands clawing at her face. A knife is lying on the carpet, beside an outstretched hand.
Facing me, is Agent Orange, with his gun still pointing at the body.
Fuck, I think.
It can’t have been more than a minute or two since I knocked on the apartment door. No more than 10 since I was standing on the footpath beside the oval.
A stream of unlikely thoughts flows through my mind: How do we make this go away? Remove the body. There’s a rug, wrap it up in the rug. Cover it up. This hasn’t happened.
I come back to my senses, and Strongboy and I drop to our knees on the carpet, examining the man lying on the floor. There is no pulse. The bullet has gone into Isaac’s chest – right through his nipple, I think. That looks strange – but when we roll him over there’s no exit wound, so there isn’t much blood.
How can he be dead when there is so little blood?
I hear the other cops we’d left outside in the stairwell come crowding through the doorway. ‘Jon, get out of here and use the radio,’ I shout. ‘Let them know someone’s been shot during a police operation.’
Looking up at Agent Orange, I ask him, ‘What happened?’
He says that while we were at the door, he heard the shouting, climbed up to the balcony and got inside the unit. He says Isaac came at him with a knife.
The knife is lying on the floor, reflecting the sunlight coming through the window. A long blade. A kitchen knife, perhaps. I can see specks of dust sparkle in the air above it. My mind’s in chaos.
I didn’t plan this.
The woman, Isaac’s girlfriend, is led into another room, still screaming. An ambulance arrives, as do the uniformed police, who string blue and white tape across the stairwell, trapping us inside the crime scene. Soon, my sergeant, John, arrives as does Doodles, the sergeant at the Stick-Ups. They speak in low, serious voices, ‘What’s gone on?’ ‘Are we good on this?’
A police shooting means the commissioner is notified. There’ll be an investigation. The press will be all over it.
I was talking to Isaac when we shot him, I think.
* * *
We’re driven to the headquarters of the Major Crime Squad in Parramatta, as the shooting took place in that part of Sydney covered by the police force’s Northwest Region, not my own North Region, which means everything there is alien to me. When we walk into their offices, it isn’t what people say but what they don’t say that I notice.
‘What happened?’ someone asks.
‘We shot a bad guy,’ I tell him.
‘No worries. How you going?’
‘Good.’ It is a stupid, macho, self-protective answer.
He looks at me and nods.
Each of us who was on the raid is kept separate from the others, in different corners of the office. Everyone else is busy; on the phone to the coroner, the magistrate, the morgue, or following some hurried order from the ranks above us. I sit at an empty desk and no one speaks to me, until a female detective notices I am alone and comes over to ask how I am coping.
‘Good,’ I say, but this time grateful for the question.
I call my wife, Debbie, at home and can hardly get the words out, ‘This job I’ve done, you’ve probably seen it on the news. Just wanted to let you know that I’m OK. The crook I was going after, he’s been shot. He’s dead.’
‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ asks Debbie.
‘Yeah. Fine.’ I want to keep the conversation short from fear that, if I speak to her for longer, I might break down, so I hang up, saying, ‘I don’t know what time I’ll be home.’
It’s hard to know how quickly the time passes. I am numb. As I’m being questioned by the blank faces of the detectives leading the internal investigation, someone interrupts us: ‘The psychologist is here. You need to go into the briefing room.’
Inside, there is a ring of chairs. Each of us who was on the raid takes a seat facing the shrink, who looks at us in silence before speaking.
‘This is probably traumatic, what’s happened,’ he says. ‘You’
ve been processing a lot. Has anyone got any problems?’
Like I am going to put my hand up in front of the group and tell him what I’m feeling. Yeah, I’ve got a problem, because the target’s sister told me not to hurt him, and I was talking to him when we shot him, and right now I don’t feel good about it.
Instead, I say, ‘No problems.’
‘Your instinct is going to be to get on the drink,’ the shrink continues. ‘But right now that’s the worst thing you could do. The best thing you could do is something physical. Go to the gym.’
We nod. No one makes eye contact.
Then we go out drinking.
Once drunk, I am a tough guy again. I’m a detective, a hardarse, 10 feet tall, I work hard and play hard and laugh off tragedies that would swallow a civilian.
As the hours pass, we start back-slapping, watched by the barman, barmaids and the tradies crowding the front bar, many of whom are regulars and recognise our faces. Many of them must know about what happened from watching the TV news.
A police car drops me home around midnight and Debbie meets me at the front door, sleepy-eyed.
‘Are you OK?’ she asks again.
‘Yeah, it’s all good. It happened.’
It isn’t true. I’m sick. The alcohol was medicine. I want to sleep, but not with Debbie and the baby. Not now. I feel dirty. When I get sick, I’m like a dog. I want to crawl under the house.
‘I’ll sleep on the lounge,’ I tell her. She goes back to the bedroom, where our daughter, who is just a few months old, is sleeping.
When I lie down, I cannot sleep. My thoughts chase each other through the early hours of the morning: I was talking to him when we shot him.
I picture Isaac lying on the ground, with just a little blood flowing from where the bullet entered. I promised not to hurt him.
I tell myself that I will leave the cops.
* * *
The next day I go to work and write up what happened. I’m counting on seeing Jon. He and I went through this job together. We both met Sharon. We were both there when she asked us not to harm her brother.
Jon calls in sick.
Days later, when he does make it in to work, I take him into one of the interview rooms and lose control of my anger.
‘You didn’t fucking turn up!’ I tell him. ‘I really needed you. If you come out on a job like that, you’ve got to see it through.’
‘I phoned up, I was sick,’ he says.
‘I don’t give a fuck! You could have called me if you were sick, if you were genuinely sick. You could have found me, but you just didn’t turn up.’
‘It mucked me up.’
‘It mucked me up too.’ The sound of my voice is harsh inside the bare walls of the tiny room. ‘I needed to speak to you. I needed help with this and you just left me on my own.’
I can see that he’s upset, and that I am not helping, but I can’t stop myself. I like Jon and respect him but I can’t stop the anger coming out.
‘If you want to do this type of work, you’ve got to be prepared to front up and to fucking turn up,’ I lecture him.
But who am I to talk? I’m going to leave the cops, I promised myself that.
* * *
I call Sharon. To say I am sorry. To ask her for her forgiveness.
I barely get my first words out before she interrupts.
‘I don’t want to speak to you. I told you not to hurt him and you killed him.’
‘But –’
‘You killed him. I don’t want to hear anything you’ve got to say.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You killed him.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
Saying sorry just feels lame, it turns out. It doesn’t explain what happened, nor make it right, nor even describe how I’m really feeling.
I don’t know what I’m feeling. I don’t know who I am. I’m a detective, but am I a good person? Am I helping people, or just playing cops and robbers? I can’t make sense of anything right now.
Later, walking back from the courthouse where I was filling out more paperwork about the operation, I meet Agent Orange, who asks me: ‘How you going?’
‘Not real good, actually. I feel pretty bad about what happened.’ Speaking to Sharon stripped away my bravado, I don’t feel like pretending I’m a hero. For the first time, I can be honest with another cop.
‘You get used to it after the first few,’ he says.
I nod.
For a moment, I resent him. Shooting Isaac wasn’t following the plan. But I know he made a split-second decision under pressure. It was my operation, which makes me responsible for what happened.
The narrow pathway from the courthouse leads to the red-brick, single-storey Hornsby Police Station.
At the front door, I realise I don’t have to go back through it. I look at the run-down building, picturing the over-crowded, poky little rooms inside it, the concrete walls, the way that it is always hard to get away from other people in the corridors and offices. I could keep on walking. This could be the moment that I leave the force.
I could go home to Debbie.
Debbie doesn’t know what I am feeling.
I push open the door and a bell rings. The station sergeant at the front counter looks up. I walk past, into the offices behind him. This is all part of being a cop, I tell myself. Other cops, like Agent Orange, know this. It’s tough, but I can do it.
This is the price to pay. I’ve paid it.
I walk back into the detectives’ office, with its ringing phones and desks piled high with paperwork and occupied by other cops who kick down doors and carry guns, who lock up crooks, get on the drink and never talk about their feelings. But who at least know what it takes to be a policeman.
I’m one of you, I think.
For the first time, sitting down at my desk, I am a cop, completely.
You Don’t Go Straight to Homicide
1994: nine years in
The regional boss of the Major Crime Squad, Ron Smith, walks into the Hornsby detectives’ office on a Friday afternoon, as I’m finishing my shift. Soon to mark my ninth year in the force, which means I will attain the rank of detective senior constable, I’m still a junior cop and so I keep my head down. It’s not unusual to see Ron here as our office is on his way home from his headquarters in Chatswood. He might be here for work or for a catch-up with one of the senior detectives, like calling into the pub with mates before the weekend starts.
‘Have a drink,’ he says to me.
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ I tell him. There’s a fridge in the office full of beer. Although the rules around drinking have tightened up since I was first in uniform, when station cops might have a schooner standing behind the front counter, the detectives are still seen as responsible enough to manage our drinking. We won’t get on the drink at 10am but if it’s 4pm and we’ve just done a lock-up, we might shut the office door and open the fridge.
I fetch two beers and hand one over, wondering what he’s here for. Major Crime includes the Armed Hold-Up Squad as well as other elite squads, including Homicide. That’s where I want to get to, but I don’t know how, particularly after walking away from the Stick-Ups.
Other detectives join us. The fridge empties but someone goes out to buy another carton.
‘When are you coming back?’ Ron asks me.
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ I say again. I’m feeling cautious. Ron and the others keep drinking. I do the same. We get through four or five beers each. I’m not legless but on the way, and well aware that Debbie must now be sitting outside, waiting, thinking that I am up here finishing off my work.
‘I think we can find you a spot,’ Ron says, and my heart leaps. ‘Come and see me next week in the office.’
When I make it outside to see Debbie, I know I’ve been a cockhead, leaving her sitting with the kids while I was furthering my career. I throw my hands up to apologise and she is shitty with me for a while on the drive home, but she can see I am excited.
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‘Look, Ron Smith was there and he’s offered me a place in Major Crime again and I just had to speak to him and have a drink,’ I tell her.
‘Well, if that’s what you really want to do, I understand,’ she says.
I think she’s happy for me. She’s known me long enough to know it’s what I want, that one day I hope to be a Homicide detective. We both know going back to the long hours and high-stress jobs will impact her, but I tell her that it won’t be like the Stick-Ups. I’ll make it clear to Ron that I don’t want to go back into that squad. She nods and looks at the road in front of us. I guess she thinks if I’m happy at work then the family will benefit or, if she is uncertain, she won’t stop me from moving forward.
A week later, in his office, Ron asks me, ‘Where do you want to go?’
‘Homicide,’ I tell him.
Ron smiles. ‘You don’t go straight to Homicide.’
Instead, he offers me a place on the Organised Crime Squad, responsible for extortions, large-scale thefts and fraud cases. Their jobs are mostly property offences, not the offences of violence, like armed robberies, sexual assaults or murders, I get satisfaction out of. It’s hard for me to cry tears for a company that’s been defrauded, but if I’m going after a crook who’s assaulted somebody inside their home, then however much of myself I put into catching that offender, it’s going to be worth it.
It needn’t be forever, I tell myself. If I want a place in Homicide, then maybe I can earn it.
* * *
This time, I work harder to find the balance. Instead of beers on Friday afternoons, I’ll be at home, mowing the lawns, fixing up the yard, washing the car, getting all my chores done so I can spend the weekend focusing on Debbie and the children.
But, as the weeks pass, I get bored as shit working Organised Crime. We do work some good jobs. One gang target the blocks of newly built units being built across the city. When the building is ready for people to move into, with new stoves, ovens, fridges and water heaters fixed in place, these guys come in the middle of the night to strip out all the whitegoods and take them away to sell them.