The best police force money can buy
Generally the wallopers and I don't get on. During my many activities of daily living I want nothing to do with them. Their thin blue line, mustered to hold barbarism at bay day in and day out, fails to impress me. I'd feel safer if they stuck to directing traffic. Every time you cross a busy road there's never one around when you need them. While you are stuck on the median strip what is the flower of the nation's cophood doing? They're on the take somewhere. Police are bent — B.E.N.T. It comes with the job. Forget your fears about the communist menace, the moonies, long-haired pack-raping bikies, snakes, sharks, red backs on the toilet seat and tinea — that's benign stuff. To taste real fear offer yourself to a copper: "Take me, constable, for I have sinned, or might sin (given half the chance) and thereby transgress the law". Clutching you to his breast — via a restraining headlock — you're in for it. If you aren't verballed, roughened up or fitted with someone else's criminal escapade, your custodian can facilitate your early death by ensuring that your night in the back cells is without disturbance in order for you to, should you decide, hang yourself or quietly drown in your own vomit. Yell and scream, gurgle and gasp, as much as you want, but let it not be said that the Australian police constable doesn't respect a person's right to privacy while dying in custody. Perhaps you think I am unkind. Maybe all the police force needs is an occasional good clean out — purge the department of the bad eggs so that the good guys can get a look in. Sounds like a great idea. But for every one or two caught with their hands in a brown paper bag, next day it's business as usual for the rest. Having been warned, it's quiet for a time. However police are the same the world over. It's in the nature of the business — unlike any other — for such professionals to bend: to take bribes, harass, lie or shoot people. So as the good citizens of New South Wales take their bad coppers to task for murder and mayhem, they should spare a thought for the troopers stationed in the north. Queensland too is no stranger to bent coppers. Our bagmen in blue embarrassed a whole government, and when we got another one no one was embarrassed any more. So much for change, so much for Goss-nost. To clean up your run-of-the-mill, normal, everyday policing type gendarmerie is a daunting task. The relentless chore of protecting free enterprise can get to the most saintly — and even the most forgiving — of souls. Find it in your heart to pity them: forgive them, citizens, for they know not what they do. Your average copper is just a passive servant of the state. If we get uppity and hit out on occasion, or blame society for our despair, the police are there to ensure that harm is contained. They don't make the rules. They're just following orders. To obtain the best police force money can buy, therefore calls for drastic measures. But hey, isn't it worth it!? If you want to do your best by the boys and girls in blue, don't skimp. Let's all have jobs, good pay, shorter working weeks, job satisfaction, equal pay, free education and that sort of thing ... and we'd all keep our noses clean. Sure we will. In the meantime, never turn your back on one of them.
Dave Riley