Back in early April, I was riding to work when a carload of teenagers went past and one of them yelled something out the window at me - probably with the aim of startling me and giving them a case of the jollies. "We scared him - ha ha ha".
Sydney traffic being what it is, I caught up with them at the next set of lights as they went green. I was in the left lane, and had the whole lane to myself. The idiot behind the wheel decided to demonstrate how tough he was to his mates and so he swerved at me from the right hand lane as I went past. He missed, but he annoyed me sufficiently for me to take down his rego number. I decided I was going to teach the little bugger a lesson.
The plod have this wonderful call centre called the Police Assistance Line (PAL - what a catchy TLA - three letter acronym), which was setup for people to report minor offences etc - it's supposed to free up those in uniform and allow them to get out from behind their donut ladened desks in order to fight crime etc etc. When I got to work, I rang the PAL, only to be told that they couldn't take an incident report over the phone - I'd have to front up at a copshop and make a statement in person.
On the way home that afternoon, I dropped in on the local plod. Finding the entrance to the copshop was something of a challenge, and getting in even more so. In the old days, you could actually see into a Police station and see plod at work. These days, the windows are covered in reflective stuff. Either they are worried about drive by shootings, or the Terminator driving a car in through the front entrance, or they don't want the public to see that there is no one at the station half the time. I had to press a buzzer and talk to an intercom before I could get in - as if the cops are afraid of the public outside!
Once inside, I was afforded an insight into the professionalism of a young copper. Or lack thereof. I don't know what they teach them at the Police Academy these days, but it appears that they have dropped station procedures and the taking of statements from the curriculum. Station Procedures 101 has probably been replaced by a unit of instruction called "How to maintain good relations with the gay community", and statements and evidence has been superceded by "The importance of not talking to the media, or doing anything else that will make the Minister look bad".
After a few minutes, I had the feeling that I was dealing with a primary school child - or perhaps someone that failed primary school. Instead of finding the appropriate form to take my statement, he just grabbed a bit of paper and started writing on the back of it. I had to spell my name twice, as he kept getting it wrong. He couldn't get the spelling of my street right. He got the licence plate number wrong when I read it to him - thankfully, I had saved it into my mobile phone - and even then he copied it out wrongly. He didn't know the set of traffic lights that I was talking about, even though they are about 300 metres down the hill from his station, and I was talking about one of the major intersections in the area. I had to get him to pull out his map book so that I could show him the street that I was talking about.
In short, he was bloody hopeless.
After taking my details, he went to his PC and typed in the rego number of the car. He looked at the screen, and then announced that the car was stolen and there was no point in following up my complaint, as the car was no longer at the registered address.
The only thing he got right was that he described the driver as a "dickhead". He also stated that the area was full of dickheads, which seemed to imply that there was no point in taking any action as removing one dickhead from the road would not make a lick of difference.
That weekend, I went for a pedal around the suburb and after about 10 minutes, located the car in question - parked on a quiet suburban street. I figured that as the suburb in question is a peninsular, and there is only one road in and out, and the kids in the car looked like they were going to school, so they probably lived in the suburb and finding them was just a matter of trawling up and down a dozen side streets.
When I got home, I called the coppers again, told them that I had been informed that the car was stolen, and told them the address where they could find it. I was told that a patrol car was going to be sent around immediately.
Since then, I have written to the station commander asking for the COPS event number (COPS is the computer system where they are supposed to record all incidents and offences etc) and prodding them as to what follow up action they've taken about the swerving incident. It's been three weeks, and the lazy sod has not responded.
I have a very strong feeling that I was told the car was stolen as a brush off. I bet it was not stolen - the lazy sod simply didn't want to do any paperwork. It makes me wonder how trustworthy our crime statistics are. The latest crime report stated that lots of crimes were trending down, but is that because there is less crime, or because people can't be shagged reporting it (because nothing is done), or because lazy plods are not putting incidents into the computer system?
The local paper has been running stories lately about hoons hooning up and down a street nearby and when the cops were asked about it, they replied, "We have no records of any complaints about this matter". Ha! There might have been complaints, but none of them made it into the records.
The government has announced that lots more cops are to be recruited. If they recruit and train more clowns like the bloke I dealt with, then more cops will not be an improvement. If anything, the goons will get in the way of the more experienced cops who actually have some idea of what they are doing. In any workplace, you probably have 20% who do most of the work, 70% who glide by doing as little as possible, and 10% who get in the way of those that are trying to get things done. Adding more of the 10% types is not going to help anyone.
The station commander is probably hoping that I am not going to bother following up on my letter. If he ignores me for long enough, the whole problem will go away. I don't think that he has figured out that if I could muster the energy to front up at his station to make a report, and then got annoyed enough to write a follow up letter, then I am probably not going to stop there. I believe in the chain of command, so my next missive is going to the Local Area Commander. I wonder how far up the chain I'll have to go before I get some sense out of these sods.
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