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View Full Version : The Sharp End



Neil Hawkins
21st July 2001, 06:13
I thought this might be of interest, firstly the book should be a good read (available through www.dymocks.com.au or any good Australian reseller), but the commentary makes some very good points that should be familiar to you LEOs out there.



Armed and Dangerous

by Rebecca Ross
The West Australian (21/07/01)

In a police service career spanning 14 years, Bill Dodson has had a hole blown in his leg, seen a mate shot dead, popped a disk in his back and suffered from numerous broken bones and wounds.

And that was just training.

It is no surprise then that Dodson – a veteran of some of Australia’s most high-profile siege, hostage and terrorist operations – has little sympathy for those who complain of the brutality meted out during that training.

Like the time a female police officer was handcuffed, gagged and sprayed with mace on her face, chest and thigh by a male colleague, prompting strong critism of the realism used in counter-terrorist exercises.

“I mean, big deal,” Dodson says of the incident. “Every tactical operator’s been exposed to that sort of training on a regular basis. If women want to be involved in this sort of thing and put their hand up to volunteer – which this girl did – then it comes with the territory. The guys do it.

“It’s pretty naive to volunteer to do it then be offended by the fact you get sprayed with mace.”

In the wave of political correctness which washed over Australia during the 90s, the hard men of tactical law enforcement were like shags on a rock.

You don’t get too many sensitive new age guys applying for a job in which the workforce spends most of its time preparing to kill or be killed. Tactical law enforcers have to be tougher and harder than the people they go after or we could not count on their protection.

But because of their often un-palatable work – gung-ho policemen armed to the teeth, breaking down doors and crashing through windows – the men of the nation’s high-risk tactical units receive little public sympathy for their efforts.

Dodson bemoans a soft society that wants to be protected from the ugliness of crime but shies away from being confronted with the methods by which they are kept safe. “It is not just the police force – it’s a trend in Australian society across the board. It’s just becoming softer and softer. It’s an attitude and it’s a flow-off that runs off into the political field.

“Politicians don’t want to see people running around with guns drawn out,” he says.

“It’s difficult for police because they have to go out and deal with all these ugly incidents and usually there’s no short-cut around it.”

Visions of police breaking down doors to bust up sieges, terrorist and hostage dramas prompt few of the outpourings of community support attracted by the similarly aggressive and macho Australian Defence Force.

But then, the defence force has pulled a public relations coup in recent times, sensing the shift in public sentiment and putting the spotlight on its commendable work in humanitarian and peacekeeping missions. For tactical operations police there is little role other than bringing offenders to book, often in the most extreme and violent circumstances.

(Dodson’s attitude toward women in these tactical units is uncompromising: “I just don’t buy the idea… It is well documented worldwide that men have a far greater propensity toward violence than women. The ability to use violence is a crucial quality in any tactical operator,” he writes.)

The legacy of this “high-octane” existence for Dodson, 42, is post-traumatic stress disorder, a broken marriage and a list of injuries so severe he was pensioned out of his beloved job last year – leaving the adrenaline, camaraderie and responsibility of having lives in his hands for the uncomfortable serenity of retirement.

It has been a tough transition, similar he says to the “returning soldier” syndrome.

His response: to break the traditional code of silence surrounding tactical operations and write about the side which exists beyond the dramatic television footage. The Sharp End lifts the lid on the training and mentality of the officers, the nerve-jangling lead up to “going in” and the adrenaline which courses through the veins, sustaining officers in those desperate minutes when they don’t know what awaits them behind the barricade.

“The public perception is that they see us on a news flash and they think we are big strong boneheads who crash in doors and shoot people and bash people if we have to. There’s a lot more that goes on in our minds and in our jobs than that,” he said.

Dodson claims the community wants the kind of protection these units provide so long as it does its unsavoury work out of the public eye.

“There’s nothing politically correct about someone who has wigged out and slit someone’s throat and shot someone. There is no nice way to deal with that and that’s why they have people like us – they don’t like us and they don’t want us but they know they have to have us.”

Dodson has been at close quarters with some of Australia’s most notorious criminals - first as a maximum security prison officer in Long Bay jail and then throughout his career in the New South Wales Police Service where he specialised in the high-risk tactical operations of hostage rescue, armed sieges and counter-terrorism. “It’s the most dangerous work you can do, it’s basic combat. It’s just like what soldiers do but they do it in war zones overseas and we do it here in our own backyard.”

He rates the 1993 Cangai siege as both the best and worst of his job. The siege was fought out in the eye of a media storm, with journalists gaining telephone access to the farmhouse in regional NSW where three gunmen – who had already killed five people – held two children hostage.

After the children were released and two of the gunmen surrendered, Dodson’s team got the green light to take the farmhouse. He led the charge – only to find the remaining gunman had used his own shotgun to kill himself in a grisly scene which still haunts Dodson. While he is critical of the media role in the siege – which he says unnecessarily endangered the lives of the two young hostages and police – the most scathing commentary in the book is reserved for the politicians and senior police who administer policing in Australia.

“Crooks (are) no longer referred to as crooks or criminals and certainly not shitheads. Instead, they were customers of the New South Wales Police Service,” Dodson writes. “Given that the Collins English Dictionary defines customer as ‘an accustomed buyer at a shop’ or ‘one who buys goods’, I found it difficult to comprehend exactly what it was that the hierarchy thought we were selling.”

He believes that policing is at a critical juncture in all jurisdictions – the money spent on theory, psychology and learning in the classroom compared with on-the-field training to prepare officers for the street is a good illustration of priorities out of kilter.

“General duties police have two hours light (weapon) fire training a year and it’s totally inadequate when you consider how many hours they work on the street. In Los Angeles they have to qualify once a month and if they don’t qualify they have their weapons taken off them until they do.

“(In Australia) everything is about budgets. Operational police don’t want to hear about the budget – their job is to go out and deal with crime, bring offenders before the courts and look after the good people out there.

“The last thing they want is to get called out to a domestic and find out there’s no car because they can’t afford to put petrol in it or tyres on it. And that does happen; it’s no exaggeration.

“You have to fight against the system, but then you get blacklisted. When I was in the same boat – on call, without a car – I’d say to the boss ‘I just want you to know if there is a job then I’ll be getting a taxi there and you will be getting a bill for it’. This is how they are expecting police to work.”

The Sharp End, by William Dodson. Pan Macmillan, Australia 2001 (ISBN: 0732910862).

Comments?

Neil

Kit LeBlanc
21st July 2001, 16:14
I HAVE to get this book.

Sounds like he is speaking the unvarnished truth, though a lot of people won't want to hear it. I am particulary struck by his comments on the public, police administrators, politicians, and "customers." EXACTLY the same conversations going on in our patrol rooms and at our SWAT team meetings. I think it is a worldwide phenomenon (or at least Western world) rather than limited to the US and Australia.

I would point out that some women, albeit very rarely, have been successful in tactical law enforcement, at places like LASO's SEB of all places.

Kit
Virtute et Armis

Walker
22nd July 2001, 08:24
Gosh, and here I thought the police were being phased out in Australia now that they were rid of the armed element.