September 2000 Volume 81 Number 9
"serving the protectors"
| September 2000 Volume 81 Number 9 "serving the protectors" |
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| Master Communicator with Simple Formula | |
| By
Brett Williams |
Sergeant Jeff Oats once made a crude paper hat to cover the smashed skull of a dead teenaged boy in the West Tce mortuary. It was 1966, and the boy - an only child - had been run down by a car in suburban Adelaide. His grieving parents had to identify him.
Oats was just 22 and working in the mortuary only as a volunteer relief. A stint in coronial work, he thought, would be a stepping stone to a detective career with the CIB.
But for now, he wanted to spare the parents the agonizing sight of their son’s gruesome, fatal injury.
“The father came in and he broke down and cried,” Oats remembers. “The mother was so 'out of it’ that she showed no emotion whatsoever. It knocked her about that much.”
Oats saw hundreds suffer in exactly the same way during his 40 years’ operational policing. He always felt great sympathy for them, but it was the time he had to spend with grieving strangers that he most disliked about police work.
Oats understood, however, that day-to-day encounters with tragedy was, for all operational cops, a reality. And as his career unfolded, different tragedies sparked emotions in him other than sympathy.
He was intensely angered by the plight of neglected baby girl in the early 1970s. Discovered in her parents’ Magill home, she had been left with her nappy unchanged for a period so long it had stuck to her skin.
She was taken to hospital where the nappy was “peeled away” from her tiny body but, in the process, much of her skin tore away as well.
And Oats remembers a one-year-old girl whose hands and abdomen were shockingly burnt in a Payneham house fire in the late 1980s. He poured water over her potentially fatal wounds, as ambulance officers rushed her to hospital. She later died.
The child’s mother had left candles burning while she showered, and Oats was struck by the 666 job number with which a radio operator had broadcast the incident.
But connotations of evil aside, two ambulance officers and a fireman were so disturbed by the tragedy they took stress leave. In a quiet, reflective moment, Oats wondered who would be left.
To many other encounters he faced, however, Oats brought successful outcomes - despite great personal risk. A Regency Road car crash in the 1960s thrust him into a scenario more often seen in TV cop shows.
A young mother and her child were trapped by live power lines, which were brought down in the crash and hanging dangerously close to their car. Neither could emerge safely until the lines’ power was cut.
While her child screamed, the mother - with her knee broken and bone protruding from her leg - panicked and wept.
Oats positioned himself life-threateningly deep among the live wires and spent 30 minutes “pacifying” the mother and child. His effort paid off when, after what “seemed like 10 hours”, authorities arrived and cut the power. The mother and child survived.
Oats, 56, retired early last month believing the police occupation to be “a younger man’s job these days”. He left with a hint of sadness, but no regrets about his 40 years’ service. “You think back on everything that’s gone by,” he says, “and all the friends you’ve made over the years.”
When he joined SAPOL as a 16-year-old in 1960, he was looking for a career with “a bit of adventure to it”. He felt slightly intimidated as he walked into Thebarton police barracks one lunchtime to apply for the then four-year junior constable course.
But some of his friends - who had already joined - told him of the job’s great camaraderie, and that cops “operated like a unit”. “That,” says Oats, “appealed to me.”
To his delight, the former Woodville High School boy was accepted. And, even today, he insists that his best years in the job were the four he spent in junior constable training.
“Those early days at Thebarton barracks were a laugh a minute,” he says, “very strict and very paramilitary, but a lot of fun. You were a close-knit unit.”
Oats came to enjoy the unwavering strictness of the boot-camp lifestyle, but much of his fun came from working his way around some of the rules. In search of city nightlife, he jumped back fences late at night, “ripped the town up”, and sneaked back into the barracks - all, of course, without a pass.
Nonetheless, he graduated as a 20-year-old and was soon policing Adelaide streets and suburbs as a member of City Division. In 1966, he joined Minor Patrol where, with the use of cage cars, officers were to keep city streets free of drunks and the disorderly.
Says Oats of his instructions: “I remember an old superintendent saying: 'Consider yourself a street sweeper - go out and keep the streets clean’. And that’s virtually what you did. You’d never see too many drunks around (because) they were just scooped up and 'put in’.
“And I think in doing that, we saved a lot of people’s lives - or kept them living for a long time.”
In 1968, Oats won a position with the CIB, where he was assigned to its Second-hand Dealers Squad. Later that year, he joined the high-profile Anti-Larrikin Squad, which had been formed by former commissioner, the late Brigadier John McKinna, in 1958.
The squad was made up of gargantuan officers, whose purpose was to rid Adelaide streets of trouble-making youths. The officers made no compromises and stood for no nonsense.
In a 1995 interview, Oats told the Police Journal the squad had been “a good, positive operation” and had made the streets “clean and safe”. He said nothing had ever been “as effective as the Anti-Larrikin Squad” (Learning From the Past, May 1995).
“You had more respect as a policeman in those days,” he says, “your powers were a lot better and you didn’t have a complaints authority. So when your senior officers said: 'Go and clean it up’, that’s exactly what you did - no questions asked.”
Oats concedes that the squad was feared. But of allegations that it employed heavy-handed tactics, he says: “If you were experiencing a frontal assault from somebody, you retaliated with similar (force), and to the effect that the policeman always won.
“In any sort of discipline like that, a very minor percentage might be harshly dealt with, but the end result far outweighs that 1 or 2 per cent.”
Oats later spent time with the Breaking and Drug Squads before leaving the CIB in 1976. In that year, he returned to front-line uniformed duty, first in the city and, from 1981, at Holden Hill, Payneham and Norwood, from where he retired as a patrol sergeant.
Police Association president, Peter Alexander, says Oats has been “one of the characters of the job”. “He’s a typical operational police officer with a dry smile and wonderful wit,” says Alexander. “He’s always fun to be around; a bloke who’s been good for morale.
“It (policing) has been a big part of his life, and the amount of experience we lose when people like Jeff go just can’t be replaced.”
Of the many changes Oats saw policing undergo in 40 years, he rates the 1973 introduction of women officers to operational work as one of the most significant. And of today’s women police, he says many are “mighty fine” officers.
But to Oats, the most memorable change was the one which allowed harsh uniform rules to be relaxed in the mid-’60s. Before then, operational cops had to wear full winter uniform in SA’s searing summer heat.
“It was the whole deal!” Oats exclaims with a chuckle. “You had to wear the winter tunic - and the hat - sitting in the car in 106-degree (Fahrenheit) heat. Unbelievable! You’d have sweat running down your head and no air conditioning, and if you got caught without your hat on... bloody hell!”
Oats clearly welcomed much of the past 40 years’ change. But he sees management’s relations with rank-and-file street cops as overdue for improvement. “Senior managers don’t get down with their people enough,” he insists, “and I think that contact is missed.”
By contrast, Oats commanded across-the-board respect from the countless patrol officers he supervised throughout his career.
Says his long-time friend and colleague, Sgt Peter Wilum: “He (Oats) has a friendliness about him, and he supported his people. He was a good communicator, with everyone from the very new to the very experienced.
“When people speak about him, it’s always complimentary. I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word about him.”
And Oats, in his gracious style, doesn’t hold managers accountable for their failure to interact. “I don’t think they have time to engender rapport,” he says. “They’re getting enormous pressure from above to perform, and they’re just burning out.”
Oats says he won his subordinates’ respect by simply “giving them the time of day”, and using plenty of workplace humour. “Always look for the good in a person,” he says. “You shouldn’t pick them up for stupid little things all the time, as sergeants did in my day.
“Someone once said to me: 'If you can’t say a good thing about a bloke, don’t say anything’. I took that on board a long time ago.”
Now, as Oats reflects from his retiree perspective, he still sees policing as a good occupation; one he would happily recommend to young job-seekers. He warns, however, that those who seek police careers should first understand issues such as the impact of shiftwork, and the ever-increasing dangers of life on the street.
Oats’ initial retirement plan is simply to “have a spell”, and then attend to his wife’s growing list of jobs for him. Later, he hopes to travel, both around Australia and overseas.
He suspects that, for a short time, he will miss police work, especially its camaraderie. He has always felt “the people make the job”.
“Each and every phase has had its good times,” he says, “and in the main the people have been terrific. I wouldn’t change anything.”
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