Leviathan (50 page)

Viviani reviewed Patricia Easteal's work on conviction rates for young Vietnamese in the 1980s when the media's ‘Asian youth crime' monster had just slipped the leash. She came to the depressing conclusion that Easteal's positive assumptions were no longer justified. By the mid-1990s young Indochinese were increasingly being jailed for serious offences, taking up ten per cent of the beds in the State's detention centres even though their parent community comprised only two per cent of the State's population. Describing the increased conviction rates as alarming, Viviani said the 1990s had also seen a shift towards organised criminality, with Chinese triads, Yugoslavs and Romanians all becoming involved. Even so, she cautioned, the young street bandits were not the kings of the drug trade, only its pawns. Like their larrikin forebears, however, they had evolved from ordinary street crime to more sophisticated forms of business. The larrikins graduated from mugging and random predation to organised joint ventures with Chinese opium dealers and the illegal gambling trade, just as the 5T progressed from shoplifting and minor assault to increasingly violent robberies and, of course, retailing heroin.

The larrikins were just as politically sensitive as the 5T (or whichever felafel-eating posse the
Telegraph
's editor anoints as the
gamin du jour
). Ambrose Pratt, who claimed to have acted as a lawyer for one of the pushes in the 1890s, said that at their height they had cowed both the police force and the judiciary. The small wooden truncheons carried by police were of no consequence to men who were inured to violence of much greater savagery than anything one or two constables might deal out. And no witness would lightly testify against criminals ‘whose hearts were strangers to remorse, and whose vengeance was known to be implacable'. Pratt alleged that by voting en bloc in the city's minuscule electorates, and by terrorising candidates who stood without their approval, the pushes even built up a reservoir of tacit support on the floor of Parliament itself. This influence was supposedly brought to bear against legislation which armed the police with guns in 1894. Cabinet pushed a number of legal reforms through with ‘the greatest difficulty', wrote Pratt. ‘The pushes bestirred themselves, and it was soon made manifest that they possessed astonishing political influence, for the Bill was bitterly contested.'

Pratt claimed that the police were first armed after a pitched battle between a number of pushes at Leichhardt. Like some of the clashes of the 1980s ‘race war' this showdown was supposed to have been prearranged and the police, on gaining knowledge of the fight, set out to disrupt it. The former push lawyer described the ensuing humiliation as the police arrived late. They rushed the brawlers and took eleven prisoners in the first moments. The larrikins, however, then combined against the common foe and a desperate struggle followed with three constables being seriously wounded. The rest, wrote Pratt, finding themselves outmatched, fled for their lives, taking two prisoners with them.

In contrast, Peter Grabosky's
Sydney in Ferment
, the definitive survey of the city's criminal history, cites the Bridge Street sensation in February 1894 as the catalyst for the decision to arm the city's police. Grabosky, who is sceptical of the wilder claims about the pushes' influence and power, puts parliamentary opposition to harsher laws down to the simple mechanism of the newly elected Labor Party representing the interests of its working-class constituents. Grabosky argues that the Labor men did not share the property-owning classes' hysterical fear of the larrikins and simply resisted repressive legislation which would have fallen most heavily against their own people. Parliament did allow the police to go armed, however, after three burglars suspected of turning over the Union Steamship Company's offices were nabbed by the police in Bridge Street. The burglars defended themselves with iron bars and took down five unarmed police in the melee. The cops strapped on their sidearms shortly after, although the idea had been mooted much earlier.

 

Just over 100 years later, constables saddle up for patrol with equipment remarkably similar to that of their turn of the century peers. Most refinements have been a matter of increasing, rather than radically altering, the potential force an officer can call on. The modern baton, for instance, is much longer and heavier and could easily shatter a man's arm if swung with sufficient intent. Handcuffs are still made of steel, but the old service revolver has been replaced by a fifteen-shot semi-automatic Glock. The only two items of kit a nineteenth-century constable might not recognise immediately are the can of capsicum spray and the rubber gloves. A quick squirt in the eyes of a rambunctious larrikin would quickly demonstrate the effectiveness of the former. It might take some time, however, to explain why contact with the bodily fluids of a modern offender can be as fatal as a knife slash or pistol shot; hence the need to carry gloves.

It is a moot point whether Sydney is more violent now than in 1900. Technical advances have certainly improved the weaponry available on both sides of the thin blue line. At the same time there isn't a cop alive who won't tell you that drugs, especially heroin, have introduced a level of viciousness to the criminal milieu that was unthinkable a generation ago. Before smack, one Mac Fields detective complained, there was a healthy respect for law enforcement. But not now. A junkie might kill a cop just to avoid arrest on a minor possession charge. Almost on a whim. ‘The junkies, they don't care about themselves,' said the detective. ‘They don't care about each other or their friends or their family and certainly not the police.' Another detective, fourteen years on the job, said simply, ‘They're not scared of us now. We really have lost control of the streets.'

What is beyond dispute is the significance of the city's treacherous and ambivalent politics in shaping the perceptions of crime and the cops' response, especially to the drug trade. Few of the artefacts of postmodern life have the capacity to inspire the new deadly sins of fear, loathing and cluelessness – as well as the older ones of envy, gluttony, lust, anger and sloth – as do drugs. Their ubiquity, their omnipotence, their amorality make them symbolically powerful and thus objects of fierce political contention. AsP. Manning wrote in 1980,

When you punch through the static of PR and bullshit surrounding the war on drugs, however, ‘it is quite clear that they rarely achieve success, even defined in their own terms, that they often produce unanticipated negative effects', and that much of what is achieved happens through the ad hoc efforts of poorly resourced and over-extended men and women whose working reality is almost completely disconnected from the rhetorical fantasies of their political masters. The extent of that gulf came home to me when I sat in on the morning briefing at Macquarie Fields where I was spending a few days trying to understand the workaday concerns of a suburban police station.

At least a dozen or more of the station's senior officers wandered into the briefing room just before nine a.m. Apart from the mug shots and records of sixty-two repeat offenders Blu-tacked to the rear wall, there was very little to distinguish the room from a small lecture theatre in a suburban TAFE college. Cheap plastic chairs were scattered around an overhead projector which had eaten a big slice of the station's annual budget for capital works. Everyone looked washed out under the fluorescent lighting and nobody rushed to claim the seats at the front. One of the sergeants sitting down the back deadpanned, ‘At least the boss can't kick my arse from here.'

The station boss, Superintendent Les Wales, arrived looking slightly incongruous, more like the old accountant he used to be than the area commander he is. Wales's professional background had equipped him for the demands of the new police service, however, which runs on business plans, mission statements and corporate strategies, unlike the old force which got along famously on meat pies and Toohey's Old. Wales had spent the previous day at a meeting of regional commanders which had endlessly repeated the Gregorian chant of modern management: do more with less.

‘This is the message from yesterday,' said Wales as he placed a transparency of a simple hand-drawn dollar sign on the overhead projector. The command had been praised at the meeting, he said, but he had also been told they could do better. Wales ticked off a number of cost-saving measures before revealing that another region was under-strength by eighty officers. ‘So,' he said somewhat apologetically to Jude, his human resources chief, ‘we're being ordered to give up eighty because we're apparently over-strength.' Jude, a civilian not constrained by the chains of rank and discipline, left nobody in any doubt as to her opinion of this audacious raid, demanding to know why they should put up with it. Les Wales smiled a gentle knowing smile. ‘Don't ask the hard questions, Jude.'

Having swallowed the medicine from Regional, discussion moved onto crime levels and station management. A local hardware supplier had been spoken to by the Chamber of Commerce about selling cans of spray paint to teenagers with mischief on their minds. Assaults at automatic teller machines were up. The coroner was about to tear strips off another command for allowing untrained officers to supervise prisoners in custody, and consequently all relevant Mac Fields personnel were going to be put through a training course. The new raincoats had arrived, as had some new computers, although they could not be installed because of millennium bug problems. Finally, said Wales, it was possible all of the chooks in the State were about to be slaughtered because of Newcastle disease, so they'd have to work up a plan for dealing with a possible truck crash involving thousands of contaminated poultry corpses. A groan escaped the lips of a sergeant sitting next to me. ‘There goes me Thai cooking,' he said softly.

As the conference wrapped up and middle management, sergeants and senior constables filed out, Wales hung back with his two lieutenants, Dave Shorrocks, the crime manager, and Mick Donovan, the station's duty officer and Wales's second-in-command. Shorrocks was a small, tightly wrapped sort of guy who would be played by Lee Van Cleef with hawkish intensity in the made-for-TV movie of
Mac Fields
. He'd started his working life as a bank clerk and had always wanted to join the old force but failed on his first attempt. He was too small. After a couple of years of pumping iron and scarfing up banana milkshakes they let him in and he set his course for the drug squad. He still had something of an evangelical air about him when discussing drugs, an intensity which went way beyond the average cop's standard issue blank, humourless stare, and it made me wonder if he'd lined up twice to get that dose of severity. Donovan by way of contrast was a large man, with a stealthy sort of grace and a relaxed, almost furtive grin which threatened to break loose and run all over his face. He grew up in Gymea and served most of his cadetship around Cronulla where he'd rowed a rescue boat in the 1960s. I thought I recognised his passive, long-distance focus from the faces of old long-boarders out the back at Bondi.

Les briefly explained what I was doing in Mac Fields, how I wanted to watch an average station go through its paces, and I filled in the blanks for them as best I could. I'd have some hard things to say about the old force and to balance that, for myself as much as anyone, I wanted to see the conditions under which beat cops worked and try to understand the stresses on a command with such ‘a difficult demographic'. We spoke frankly about the politics of my visit, about how nobody wanted another ‘Cop It Sweet' and about how quickly the hammer could come down on them depending on what I wrote. Les was quite open about the political nature of his position. A good deal of his twelve-hour working day was spent handling community relations, the local establishment, the media and of course the government. ‘We have dealt with the stresses and pressures coming from the executive team, from the Commissioner,' he said, ‘and we all know they are responding to what comes out of Macquarie Street.' But what is Macquarie Street responding to, I wondered to myself. Mostly talkback radio, Newspoll and the obsessions of Col Allen, editor at the
Telegraph
.

Wales, who was working his way through the final semester of an MBA, was not an unthinking policeman. He despaired of the world into which he sent his officers every day, saying, ‘I view some of those estates as the Third World. Some of the public housing in and around Minto, it's like Soweto in South Africa.' The unemployed on the estates have very little hope and public understanding of the symptoms and causes of crime in such areas are not, shall we say, encyclopaedic. Consequently much police work is reactive and crude. ‘It's bandaid stuff,' Wales once told me. ‘It's okay raiding drug houses and so on. But where mum's got no job, dad's disappeared and you have an education system which may not be competitive in twenty years' time … Well, kids in twenty years' time, you can't imagine what the demands on them will be. What a job will look like. And the kids we're dealing now will be thirty, forty years old. They will be totally, absolutely hopeless, just bits of human flesh.'