The Laughing Policeman: My Brilliant Career in the New Zealand Police

by Glenn Wood

  Tuesday evening rolled around with the speed of that snail with the groin injury, who had now pulled a muscle in his lower back and was on accident compensation. All day I’d practiced being humble and remorseful and had it down pat. Mum did her bit as well and bought some nice biscuits for the detective. By the time the he arrived we were the picture of a good, honest, hard working, family. My sister (a bit of a tomboy) was even wearing a dress.

  The detective was a young guy who treated the situation with the right balance of gravity and humour. He started by impressing on me the potentially disastrous situation I had placed myself in. However, it was felt that I had played the lesser role in the activities of the night. I thought this was a bit unfair on Geoff but a look from Dad told me this wasn’t the time to argue.

  Apparently the initial complaint was laid by a driver who was convinced that Geoff was trying to hit his car with a bit of wood. I explained that my friend’s only weapon had been a blade of grass and that he was just waving it in the air. My explanation was accepted but I was told that as a complaint had been laid and because there was property damage involved (the fountain); charges would have to be made. I held my breath as he finished the sentence. The prosecution was being brought against Geoff.

  I was relieved and horrified at the same time. I said that neither of us had set out to hurt anyone or damage anything. The detective realised this and told me not to worry. Geoff was being bought up on a minor drunk and disorderly offence and would probably just get a small fine and a few hours community service. He said if they had believed the damage had been intentional then the charges would have been much more serious. He added that I was extremely lucky not to have been apprehended on the night because I would have been arrested and court proceedings put in motion. As it was, he now had the power of discretion and after discussing it with his colleagues he had decided to let me off with a warning.

  It was all I could do to keep from hugging him. I felt like the large boulder that had been crushing the life out of me for the last few days had just rolled off.

  Having finished telling me off the detective relaxed back in his chair, took a biscuit (pleasing my mother) and said, “So you want to join the Police eh.”

  He then spent the next hour telling me what a great job it was and how he’d had a look at my results and the general feeling around the station was that I had a very good chance of getting in. He said the top brass was prepared to look on this incident as youthful exuberance and as long as a lesson was learnt then no harm was done. He gave a long smile and I’m sure he winked at my father.

  ‘Actually,’ he said ‘we’ve decided that anyone who can outrun two cops and a dog is better off on our side of the law.’

  I was astounded. Far from blowing my chances it seemed I’d enhanced them. The net effect of this conversation was that I now considered police officers to be the coolest guys and gals on the planet and was prepared to work my butt off to join them. The detective gave me firm handshake and a reminder to stay out of trouble as he left. The warning was quite unnecessary because I planned to shut myself in my room and study for the rest of the year. Well, for a couple of weeks anyway.

  Naturally my parents were thrilled, though I was left in no doubt that my disobedience hadn’t been forgotten and a lot of work was required to fill the hole I’d dug myself.

  And of course there was Geoff, who had copped an unfair amount of the blame. He went to court the following Monday and, after pleading guilty to a drunk and disorderly charge, was given a smack on the wrist and 20 hours community service, which he spent playing table tennis at an old folks home.

  Geoff’s parents didn’t stay mad with me for long but the incident didn’t endear him to my parents who were still somewhat blinkered when it came to recognising my ability to get into trouble without assistance. The most galling part of the whole incident was that once again Quentin came out of it smelling of roses. It was well known he’d been with us for the first part of the evening but had shown the good sense to leave before things got out of hand. Good sense my arse! It was just pure dumb luck that he wasn’t with us when we discovered the saki. Geoff and I knew that if he’d stuck around for another five minutes then he’d have been first up the fountain and into the Police van, but as usual he’d dodged the bullet.

  My letter of acceptance into the New Zealand Police came several weeks later. I was one of 78 Cadets who had been selected from over 350 applicants. Goose received his letter of acceptance on the same day and we were both to become part of the 24th General Poananga Cadet Wing, beginning training on the 22nd of January 1980. I had just turned eighteen.

  The Book

  The last thing I did before leaving for Trentham was fall in love. It was inevitable really. I’d been involved with several girls over the past few years but had been unable to find anyone I could connect with (metaphorically speaking of course).

  I met this girl the week before I left New Plymouth.

  Quentin and I had been camp counsellors at a YMCA camp over the summer. Not through any Christian need to help the youth in our community but because female counsellors also worked there and we thought it would be a good way to meet girls. It turned out that quite a few of the girls had joined up just to meet boys, so everyone was happy.

  Anyway, we were having a farewell bash at the Devon Motor Lodge (heavy irony) before I left town and the camp leaders from all the different YMCA camps were there, including some I hadn’t met before.

  The girl who caught my eye was called Carey and she was a leader for the young explorers troop. I was young and quite fancied exploring her, so I got a friend to introduce us and we hit it off extremely well. She admitted having seen me riding my motorbike past Girls High on my way to school and I admitted that Girls High wasn’t actually on my way to school.

  I soon discovered that she was leaving New Plymouth as well. She was going to Palmerston North to attend teacher’s training college. This was good news as I already had several friends in Palmerston North and it gave me an excuse to visit her on any free weekends I had.

  Later that night we both professed our undying love for each other (based on several hours of snogging) and promised to write and visit whenever possible.

  So the next week, love sick, car sick and hung over, I prepared to bid New Plymouth and Carey a fond farewell and set sail for pastures new. Except I wouldn’t actually be sailing, I’d be spending eight hours on a smelly old bus, sitting next to Goose and listening to Bob Marley music.

  Still, it was the end of an era, my childhood and young adulthood were over and I was about to enter a new, more sober time, where I would prove my worth through hard work, restraint and self denial. Possibly.

  My parents and friends waved me off at the bus stop. My friends looked sad, my parents looked relieved.

  Goose and I confirmed on the bus trip that we had very little in common besides the police and rugby. Despite this we got along well and it was a relief to discover he was as nervous as I about our new career. We both found it difficult to explain why we had joined up.

  There is an old Police saying which states that the real reason for being a police officer is because you want to be one. This mind numbingly obvious statement is actually quite an insightful one. If you don’t look too closely it is a very appealing job for a young guy. Fancy threads, fast cars, guns, fighting bad guys, status and power. All this and they pay you as well! What could be better?

  It had never occurred to me that all this came at a price. I knew how badly I had misjudged the situation when I got my first glimpse of the Trentham police training college. It was like a scene from an old war movie: Colditz minus the searchlights and guard towers. This turned out to be an apt description as the official classification of the police training facilities at Trentham was ‘First World War Barracks’ and the title of our leader was ‘The Commandant’.

  In fact, let me quote directly from The Commandant’s Message in my police year book. ‘Most of the memories [o
f Trentham] will revolve around the decay, the austerity and the bleakness of Trentham on a rainy day.’ The only surprise was that it didn’t end with the words – ‘Welcome to Hell’.

  Our barracks were long, cold, wooden huts with rusty corrugated iron walls, no insulation, bad plumbing and hard plank beds. This was in the years before sleeping on wooden slats became popular, courtesy of the clever marketing of the futon. I take my hat off to anyone who can convince people that lying on planks is comfortable and good for you. My experience was completely the opposite.

  The cadet barracks sat side by side in a large concrete and gravel compound. We were to occupy two of the huts. The rest were filled with recruits (older police trainees or ‘Gumbies’ as we called them, for reasons I have never been able to work out), Ministry of Transport trainees (snakes), our instructors (sir, madam or God), our classrooms, the sick bay and the mess hall.

  Whoever designed the compound must have had a great sense of humour because our sterile, barn like, miserable, grotty barracks were surrounded by cute, white picket fences. The type of fences that doomed prostitutes in bad movies dream of having around their country cottages, just before they are blown away by their pimps. Only Hollywood or the New Zealand police could come up with juxtaposition like that.

  Our neighbours were the army (who we rarely saw because they were too busy killing things) and the CIT which was a training institute for postal workers, the majority of whom were female. As there were no females in our wing (women were only allowed to join as recruits, I’m not sure why) this was a much-visited institution and many of the cadets came to be on first-name terms with the security guards who were hired to keep us out.

  Once we’d had a chance to have a look around and convince ourselves that perhaps it wasn’t as bad as it appeared, we were called into the camp hall to meet our instructors and the other cadets.

  The instructors’ jobs was to convince us that, yes, it was as bad as it appeared. The first thing they told us was that we had the honour of being the last wing to go through Trentham, as the barracks were scheduled for demolition and a brand new (luxury) college was being built in Porirua. Lucky, lucky us. As we knew no better, even this sadistic snippet of information didn’t dampen our spirits. Because basically we were too young and stupid to realise what we’d got ourselves into.

  Once the instructors had introduced themselves we were told that we’d be given our room numbers and course instructions in alphabetical order.

  I hated that. Being called Wood meant I was always one of the last to find out what was going on. I muttered about this to the guy next to me and instantly found a soul mate. His name was Phil Wooding and he was the only cadet further down the alphabetical ladder than I was. We instantly declared a loathing for all people with the surname Anderson and sat impatiently waiting our turn.

  Eventually we found out our room numbers and sped off to see who we were going to share our lives with for the next year. This factor had a large bearing on how much you enjoyed your time at Trentham. There were two cadets in every room and you were separated by only about three metres of wooden floor. It was a bit like prison in some respects. If you got the big smelly psycho killer who wanted to be your ‘special friend,’ then your stay wouldn’t be a pleasant one.

  Fortunately my room-mate was okay. He was an even tempered, quiet guy called Rob who laughed at my jokes. I liked him instantly.

  Phil wasn’t so lucky; his room-mate’s only outstanding feature was that he had no elbows. He also had overactive sweat glands. The guy produced more salt than Siberia. Not an attractive quality in a room-mate.

  However, things could have been worse. Smelly and annoying as Phil’s room- mate was, at least he didn’t have any major psychological problems. A cadet just up the hall from us had a room-mate who was a right nutter. The first sign that a cuckoo had escaped from the clock came when the room-mate began walking up and down the hallway making sounds like a motor car, complete with the occasional missed gear change.

  Rumour had it that eventually some of the instructors noticed this particular cadet was one truncheon short of a riot squad and sent him in for psychological evaluation. He failed. Unfortunately, not before he had pulled a knife on his room-mate. When the incident was reported, the loony was then whisked away by the chief inspector and was immediately promoted to district commander. Just kidding.

  After the knife incident he disappeared, never to be seen at Trentham again, though sometimes, late at night I swear I could hear the sound of a Ferrari being badly driven up and down the hall.

  The truly frightening thing about the whole incident was that it had taken a term and a half for our instructors to notice they’d employed a wacko. The police were a bit like that, they were always so concerned with detail that sometimes they would miss the bigger picture.

  Phil’s room was right next door to mine and, as our beds were only separated by only 10 centimetres of wall, we were able to develop a sophisticated communication system by tapping messages on the wood. Having an early warning code was vital at Trentham. There were a whole host of dangers that required careful negotiation and forewarned was forearmed.

  In the first term our instructors took particular pleasure in springing instant inspections on us, often at some ungodly hour in the morning. This meant that at a moment’s notice there would be a cry of “Stand by your beds!” and we would be required to do just that as our instructors came through and examined our rooms. An extremely high standard of neatness and organisation was expected of us, which was particularly unfair given that we were all teenage lads alone for the first time without our mums. Our apron strings weren’t just cut - they were fed into a threshing machine.

  No posters were allowed on the walls and all our belongings had to be stored as per draconian police regulations. Our clothes were to be neatly folded and stored in a chest of drawers that stood beside our beds. The drawer on the right was to contain socks (balled up one inside the other) whilst the drawer on the left contained underpants (ironed and folded as per underwear regulation 54 subsection b). A sock being discovered in the underpants drawer was punishable by decapitation. Punishment was equally harsh for any breaches of the following tidiness proclamations:

  - Beds were to contain one under sheet, one over sheet and one blanket. Any other blankets were to be folded (without wrinkles) and placed on top of your wardrobe. The curve of the fold had to face the front of the room and the edge of the blankets had to be flush with the top of the wardrobe.

  - Your bed was to be made the instant you left it and hospital corners were mandatory. The sheet had to be folded over the blanket exactly twelve inches from the head of the bed and the fold itself had to be exactly twelve inches long. Our instructors carried rulers with them and measured the folds during inspections.

  - Pillows were to be placed above the fold, with the crease of the pillow facing towards the wall. The remainder of the bed had to be completely flat and wrinkle free. (As we were constantly reminded, wrinkles were the enemy of an ordered bed.)

  - Uniforms had to be hung up in the wardrobe, shirts on the left and trousers on the right. Only your uniform could hang in the wardrobe and every garment had to be in inspection order. This meant knife edge creases on the sleeves of the shirts and the front of the trousers. If a double line appeared on any garment you were in breach of regulations and were shot at dawn.

  - Two pairs of regulation black shoes were to be placed at the bottom of the wardrobe directly under the trousers. The toe of the shoes was not to protrude in front of an imaginary line drawn along the front of the frame of the wardrobe.

  - Shoes had to be highly polished (by the rather unsavoury spit method) to such a degree that the inspector must be able to clearly make out his face in the shine on the toe.

  - Finally your room had to be clear from dust (a white glove was used to detect any rogue particles) and your windows smear free.

  Failure to comply with these and about a billion other anally re
tentive rules was instantly punished by an instructor requiring you to put your name in “The Book”. The Book was a cruel and unusual punishment as it had the potential to rob a cadet of what he prized most: his weekends.

  The system was simple and effective. As soon as a cadet accrued three entries on his booking card he was confined to barracks for the weekend. This meant the cadet was only allowed in his room and the gymnasium. He was also required to report to the duty sergeant in full dress uniform every two hours, from 7am til 9pm. If the duty sergeant was having a bad day (which they inevitably were, having drawn weekend duty) he could inspect you, and if your uniform wasn’t up to scratch - you guessed it - name in The Book again. Avoiding this repeat booking generally meant spending most of the two hours between inspections ironing your shirts and gobbing on your shoes. It was not a good way to spend your precious time off.

  Inspections could occur without warning at any time, day or night, and were particularly harsh during the first term. Often we would be called out of our beds at 5 am and made to form three-bleary eyed ranks outside the barracks as our instructors went through the building like a tornado. We would return to our rooms 10 minutes later to find them trashed. Our drawers would be tipped out, blankets strewn all over the bed, uniforms thrown in a crumpled pile on the floor and shoes tossed around the room. We were then expected to get everything back in tip top shape for our daily inspection at 8am.

  Advance notice of these smash and grab raids was very hard to come by but great if you could get it. Which is where the tapping system came in handy. Three rapid taps meant a snap inspection looked imminent. This gave you time to smooth down your bed and hide contraband, such as Penthouse magazines, satanic rock music or liquor. Being caught with said items was risky, if not fatal. A double booking was the least you could expect, with the ultimate punishment, instant dismissal from training, also a possibility. Though, to be fair, dismissal was generally reserved for more heinous crimes, like trying to stab your room-mate or being seen within a 10km radius of the commandant’s daughter.