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

by Glenn Wood

  Drink and you end up in trouble; don’t drink and end up in exile, not much of a choice. The problem with the former was that your fitness, health and marriage could go as quickly as your liver.

  Sergeant Edwards did try and finish his rant on a positive note saying if we used our common sense we should be okay. Easy for him to say. I haven’t got any.

  It had been a revealing morning and one we would all remember. We felt more than ever that Jacko was on our side. He treated us like colleagues rather than students and gave us valuable insights into the attitudes and feelings of the average beat cop. He took time to explain things rather than have us blindly following orders. This was his strength and his weakness. He had our friendship and respect, but by dealing with us on our own level he lost some of the absolute power the other instructors had.

  A few days later we had our third RFL, I was feeling off colour due to having drunk a large amount of Cossack shampoo. I had made the fatal error of nagging a passing cadet for a swig of Coke from the can he was holding in his hand. Amazingly, he agreed and I took a greedy gulp. It wasn’t Coke, it was hair shampoo. His Cossack container had sprung a leak and the nearest empty receptacle had been a Coke can.

  I intercepted him on his way to the shower and he later claimed he misinterpreted ‘Giz a swig’ to mean ‘Mmmm, please poison me with that mass of red chemicals you have in your hand, cunningly disguised as Coca-Cola.’ After spitting a mouthful of sticky red liquid down the front of his bathrobe (served him right), I ran to the bathroom and washed my mouth out. It was too late, I’d swallowed a large quantity of the vile stuff and it made me burp up soap bubbles for days.

  Needless to say, I wasn’t feeling in top form for the RFL. I thought of calling in sick but you needed at least a compound fracture or evidence of recent heart surgery to get out of a fitness assessment. Shampoo ingestion would not cut it. So I pushed up, pulled up, sat up and threw up. When I explained that the pool of red vomit at my feet wasn’t blood but shampoo, the instructor looked relieved and made me complete the assessment as punishment for giving him a nasty fright. I felt better for throwing up and ran my best time. It’s a funny old world isn’t it?

  Life continued along as normal (or as normal as it got at Trentham), for the next few days then on the afternoon of the 29 May we learnt that Sergeant Edwards had collapsed and been taken to hospital. He had suffered a brain haemorrhage and was unconscious.

  We couldn’t believe it: he’d been teaching us that morning and had taken my team for rugby practice the night before. The police played down the illness, saying the hospital needed to do tests before they knew what they were dealing with. We were upset and worried but thought Jacko would be fine, he was fit and healthy and, well, he was Jacko.

  During gym the next day one of the cadets from our section suddenly cried out and ran from the gymnasium yelling “He’s dead, he’s dead.” We didn’t know what was going on; we thought the guy had flipped out. Ten minutes later the chief inspector came into the room and announced that Sergeant Edwards had just died.

  We were stunned. Jacko, dead, just like that. It was unthinkable. He was only 29 years old and had a wife and two children.

  Jacko’s death affected me deeply, I’m not claiming to have been closer to him than the other cadets, but without his particular brand of teaching I’m not sure I would have survived the first term at Trentham. He had a knack for putting things in perspective and stories of his time on the beat (though probably wildly exaggerated), made an extremely tough course seem worthwhile. He loved the job and he made us love it too. More than that, he was a friend, he taught me how to turn the right way in a tackle, he laughed at my car, he made me feel better about being a crap typist, he pushed me to learn when I needed it, he made me laugh and he invited the whole section to his home to relax and tell a few jokes of dubious quality. How dare he die.

  We walked across the courtyard in complete silence then sat in our classroom in shock as we were told Sergeant Edwards had not regained consciousness from the coma he fell into the day before. A blood clot had formed in his brain causing a massive haemorrhage and if he had recovered he would have been a vegetable. It was better he died.

  The doctors couldn’t say what caused the clot but the police had a pretty good idea. Several years before taking the teaching job at Trentham, Sergeant Edwards had been seriously assaulted while on the beat in Levin. He had been on the beat one evening, checking doors, when someone stepped out of the shadows and smashed him over the head with a block of 4x2. He was knocked unconscious and left on the ground. The person who did it was never found.

  The cadet who had the death premonition was the same guy who was later to pull a knife on his room-mate. Yes, he was still there, even into the second term, though he was under psychological evaluation and would soon be dismissed from training. The creepiest thing was there was no way he could have known about the death when he ran from the gym, as the chief inspector had come straight off the phone to inform us. We timed the cadet’s exit from the gym back to almost the exact moment Sergeant Edwards died.

  Sergeant Edward’s funeral on the coming Friday would be a full police funeral with a strict Catholic service. This came as a surprise. Jacko must have been a practicing Catholic, though from what we’d seen, he had lapsed somewhat.

  Once the details of the funeral had been explained we were given the option of staying in class to talk about what had happened or leaving to deal with his death in our own way. I stood up immediately and walked from the classroom in silence. It wasn’t an act of rebellion: I just had to get out of there. The last thing I felt like doing was talking about the great times we had.

  I wanted to be alone and I wanted to be miserable. This is how I deal with the death. I go off, have a good cry, mope around feeling sorry for myself, work up a heap of self-pity and immerse myself in misery.

  I am a selfish mourner: I utterly refuse to believe anyone is suffering more than me. This makes me a pain in the arse at funerals but I get away with it because no one is going to say ‘Snap out of it, you self-indulgent bastard’ while I am grieving so obviously and publicly.

  I went for a walk by the river, and I heard later that after I’d walked out everyone else followed. The whole section was suffering badly (though none as much as me). We hadn’t lost an instructor; we’d lost one of our own. I stayed at the river until it was dark. I cried a lot and got angry, but nothing helped so in the end I went back to the barracks. No one said anything when I returned. There was nothing to say.

  I hated the funeral. The priest spent the whole time talking about God. I didn’t want to hear about God - it wasn’t his funeral, it was Jacko’s. The service was too long and the mood wasn’t sad enough for me. Several of the cadets from our section formed a guard of honour and when they took the coffin away it finally dawned on me that he was gone.

  There would be no more parties in Jacko’s room.

  The Worst Car In The World

  Our new section sergeant was a priest. In fact, he was the first ordained minister ever to teach at Trentham. Talk about from one extreme to the other. His name was Senior Sergeant Hanley and he had a big job ahead of him.

  We were expecting the worst, but Senior Hanley took over an extremely hard job very well indeed. He didn’t try and be a mate like Jacko. That would have been doomed to failure. Instead he taught the class with a no-nonsense attitude that gained him our respect early and he showed a very dry sense of humour, which we were quick to appreciate.

  What endeared him most to me was that his car was even crappier than Floyd. He drove a Skoda: the only car lower on the food chain than a pink Mini. Even better, he was proud of his car and took a considerable amount of ribbing with dignity, refusing to respond to our criticisms.

  Senior Hanley’s approach was exactly what we needed. Sergeant Edwards’s death had turned our world upside down and if we hadn’t been handled properly we could have had a great deal of difficulty with the rest of our training. If
our new instructor had treated us too softly he wouldn’t have gained our respect and if he’d come in too hard we may have rebelled.

  Senior Hanley treated Jacko’s memory with deference but he didn’t let us dwell on the past. If anything, he drove us harder then Jacko had done but was fair in his comments and criticisms and helped those who needed it. His catch-phrase was ‘There is more in you’ meaning we could always do better if we pushed ourselves.

  The religious thing worried us at the start. Most of us were heathens who believed the only higher power was the chief inspector.

  Cadets from the other sections immediately named us the God Squad, in that sensitive way 18-year-old boys have. We followed suit and nicknamed Senior Hanley “The Godfather”. He was chuffed, I think but he was so inscrutable it was hard to tell.

  The tone of our lessons certainly changed. With Jacko every second word had been a swear word and almost every story made even the most worldly of us blush. Senior Hanley never swore in class or in his private life. In fact the only time he ever swore was when he was playing an offender in a practical exercise and boy, did he throw himself into the part! Jacko would have been proud of him. We reckoned playing the baddy was a cathartic release for him.

  Senior Hanley didn’t share Jacko’s interest in the outdoors but that didn’t worry us as our PT instructors were keeping us busy. We had started learning self-defence and the emphasis was shifting from fitness based activities to more practical skills.

  Map-reading was first and I expected to excel. I had proven myself quite adept at finding my way home in all sorts of sorry states, so I was confident my sense of direction was better than average. I had even thought up an acronym for my homing instinct. I called it WASOD, the Wood Amazing Sense Of Direction. Plus, I’d crapped out at typing, pistol-shooting and spelling, so I was due a win. Yes indeedy, bring on the map reading exercises: I was ready.

  When our instructors announced we were going on an orienteering exercise I almost scoffed. Orienteering, pah! Poncing around after little bits of paper over a few farmer’s fields - piece of piss. Of course I’d forgotten where I was. When the police said orienteering what they actually meant was poncing around after little bits of paper while scaling treacherous cliffs, fording freezing flooded rivers, climbing mountains that goats took one look at and flagged away, and traversing foul-smelling boggy swamps.

  The appointed day was bitterly cold and there was a howling gale. Our instructors thought the conditions perfect. My map kept blowing away, the lead in my pencil snapped, my boots filled with mud and small sharp stones and, just to be tricky, our instructors had purposefully given us the wrong coordinates for one of the locations. They wanted to see how long we would blunder about looking for something that obviously wasn’t there. The answer was a bloody long time, and by the end of the day WASOD’s credibility had taken a battering. We got back to the bus cold, wet, smelly, totally disheartened and completely knackered. Our instructors proclaimed the exercise a roaring success.

  Other skill-based activities we undertook half way through the second term included wrestling, athletics, and baton and handcuff training.

  We were disappointed when we finally got our batons as they turned out to be much smaller then we’d imagined. They had the same size and consistency as a large sausage, which made me wonder how much use they would be in an emergency. I didn’t think offenders would tremble with fear when confronted by a policeman brandishing a wooden bratwurst. I doubted our new toys had much real offensive or defensive power. I was wrong. Those little pieces of wood could be very effective when used correctly. It came down to where you hit the person. Smack them in the forearm and it only served to enrage, but if you gave them a sharp rap on the elbow then you could take their whole arm out of play. The same high-pain factors applied to the fingers, the wrist, the shins, the kneecaps and the bridge of the nose, though the last one is normally reserved for Bruce Willis movies.

  Handcuffs were another matter entirely. Simple to use and hours of fun for the whole family. We knew they’d be cool right from the start and we wasted no time practicing. They were made of really solid metal and once applied, the only way to release them was the owner’s key, although there was a general-release key that all police officers carried.

  This key came in very useful at Trentham as once the handcuffs had been issued there was an inevitable spate of cadet cuffing. Our instructors had pre-empted the arrival of our batons and handcuffs with a series of lectures on the correct application of said weapons and we were left in no doubt that improper use would lead to instant and terrible retribution. But, boys will be boys, and until the novelty wore off our handcuffs were used on a wide variety of things - family members, household pets, chair legs, steering wheels, girlfriends - in an equally wide variety of creative locations.

  We had to be careful, when it came to applying the cuffs in jest. Put on too tightly and the handcuffs could cut off a person’s circulation and cause severe pain. In police work this was often desirable, because if you’ve gone to the trouble of cuffing someone they must have either been very naughty or really annoyed you.

  To make it easier to get the cuffs on a struggling offender, our instructor’s taught us a nifty trick. If we pushed the arms of our handcuffs right up to the very last click on the ratchet, then bashed the cuffs against the offender’s wrist, the force would push through the last click and the handcuffs would spin in a quick loop, snapping tightly around the wrist. This was not only extremely effective but it looked cool. The only problem was it was hard to judge where the final ratchet click was. If you set the handcuffs two or three clicks back from the end of the ratchet, not only would the cuffs fail to open when you hit them against the wrist, but it bloody hurt. This would have been fine if we had been practicing on offenders but as the only guinea pigs available were family members, friends or each other, it was less than ideal. Fortunately our minds were taken off handcuff and baton practice by the next activity our instructors had planned. Boxing.

  They decided the best way to foster harmony in our section was to have us beat the crap out of one another. I was looking forward to it. I fancied myself as a boxer. I’m pretty solid and can throw a good punch, the only problem being that my blows take a while to arrive; you could stop and read a newspaper and still not get caught with one. I don’t just telegraph punches I send them by Morse code. Despite this glaring chink in my armour I was confident I’d do well.

  The rules of the fights were simple. We were to stand toe to toe on a mat and hit each other until one or both fell over. Head protectors and boxing gloves were provided so it’s not as bad as it could have been, but a solid blow to the head will still send your brain bouncing around your skull no matter how well encased it is. After a few weeks of practice we were ready for the ‘real’ fights.

  Unsurprisingly, I had a reputation as a slow and predictable puncher, although it was acknowledged that if I did manage to catch you, it hurt.

  Phil was one of the worst boxers in the section and he was also my best mate, so it seemed unfair when we were paired off to fight each other. I was much bigger than he was and should have been able to thump him easily. I had every intention of doing so, too - not through malice, but because it was what the exercise demanded and I was a competitive bastard.

  For the first minute of the bout I caught Phil with a couple of heavy blows and things looked bad for him. Then the PT instructor began giving my opponent hints as we fought. I could hear him telling Phil to watch my boxing pattern. Every time I came forward I led with two left jabs then swung a big right hook. He told Phil to step outside the hook and hit me as I swung through. I could hear these instructions clearly but it never occurred to me to change my style. Duh! So in I went, left, left, big right, big miss, Phil clipped me behind the ear as I swung and the next thing I know I’m eating canvas. He hadn’t hurt or dazed me but had caught me off balance and tipped me over. A huge cheer went up, as the underdog had won.

  When we g
ot back to the barracks a couple of the other cadets came into my room and had a predictable laugh at my expense. As they were leaving one said the fight had done Phil’s confidence a world of good. Didn’t do much for mine though.

  Wrestling was a different story. I was brilliant, holding off four opponents at the same time and not being floored until they got five on me. Modesty forbids a blow-by-blow description; suffice to say I was possibly the best wrestler Trentham – nay, the world - has ever seen.

  I found self-defence training fascinating. Amongst all the neat tricks we learned, we were also shown how to remove protesters from protest sites. This is actually really tricky because protesters normally employ a non-violent stance and it is much easier to throw someone in the paddy wagon if they are expending all their energy waving their arms about. If they just go all saggy and flop on the ground it is like moving a dead weight and can tie up a couple of officers. I suggested tickling them to get them moving them but my proposal was rather pointedly ignored by the instructors.

  We were also taught effective ways to restrain violent people (several of which I’ve employed successfully to impress girls at parties) and a couple of dynamite throws.

  One of the most impressive demonstrations occurred when we were being shown how to disarm a person with a knife. Instead of just showing us how to do it our P.T instructors (who could teach the Sadists Society a trick or two) set one cadet, armed with a wooden knife, against an unarmed one. The first couple of guys got stabbed in disturbingly quick and nasty fashions by their assailants, with one cadet showing worrying familiarity with a knife. He claimed it was due to many years in the catering industry but I have my doubts.