August 2001 Volume 82 Number 8 "serving the protectors"
Mother and Daughter in Blue
By Brett Williams

Parents naturally worry about their children when they work in dangerous fields. But when one woman joined her daughter in the police force, did life become easier or more difficult for both of them?

When Janine Kucharzewski followed her daughter, Leisa Aitken, into a police career, neither of them saw the move as any big deal. Not even the prospect of working as junior partner to her child fazed Kucharzewski. And Aitken never thought of facing street crime with her mother for a partner as any problem.

A mother-daughter patrol crew on the mean streets might be unlikely. But Kucharzewski, 45, is set to join her recently graduated daughter as a sworn police officer. From early March, the pair spent two months together at Fort Largs, as Aitken’s six-month course wound up and her mother’s began.

Aitken remembers her colleagues’ shocked reaction to the news that her mother was soon to join her at the academy.

Says 21-year-old Aitken: “A lot of the blokes said: ‘What? Your mum’s coming in!’ They thought it was a bit strange. It didn’t bother me. More than anything, I was protective of her. If anyone said anything about her, I said: ‘She’s my mother’.

“Most people would come up and say: ‘There’s this woman in course 34 who looks exactly like you, but she has some real long, weird name’.”

Kucharzewski found the reactions “quite funny”. She felt that, to the academy population, her and Aitken’s joint presence was a novelty. And, to add some perspective, she says many other recruits joined relations in SAPOL long before she and Aitken appeared.

Neither mother nor daughter had spurred the other on to pursue a police career. Each had considered the option separately. Aitken had inquired about joining SAPOL as a 17-year-old in 1997. Her mother had tried to win recruitment in Britain while living there during the mid-’90s.

In these attempts, each was unsuccessful. But, after talks with serving officers a few years later, both felt encouraged to apply again in 2000.

“Most of them (serving officers),” says Aitken, “said their days were never the same and that they really enjoyed it.”

Another officer assured Kucharzewski that her age and imperfect eyesight - which precluded her from a police career in Britain - were no basis on which SAPOL could reject her.

The strong-willed mother and daughter also used the negative comments of detractors for inspiration. One of Kucharzewski’s former work colleagues told her that, because of her age and gender, she would never succeed in her application. To the colleague she responded defiantly: “Is that right?”

Many of Aitken’s family - her mother excluded - and friends suggested she was too tiny, too short and “not going to get there”. “It made me more determined than anything,” she says, “just to prove that I could do it.”

The two women also sought frank advice from one another, and each told the other her character was well suited to police work.

In the end, Kucharzewski formerly applied to SAPOL before her daughter, but Aitken was first to join in November 2000. Had Kucharzewski not deferred her entry for three months, both might have descended on Fort Largs at the same time.

Aitken won the Police Association’s Walter Wissell trophy for graduating dux of course 30 in May. But, even as a former swimming and fitness instructor, she found academy life fast-paced. “They had high expectations of us,” she says, “and it was full-on all the time.”

To her friends and fiancé, Lincoln Doherty, who sought her company out of academy hours, her usual response was: “No, I’m studying tonight.” Aitken enjoyed her training, but is now “glad it’s finished”.

Kucharzewski - who then saw her daughter more often than she had in civilian life - now rates her academy experience as “good”. She felt so fulfilled at the outset that she could not stop smiling.

“The first couple of weeks was like the first day at school,” she recalls. “Just going through the gates and seeing the parade ground... it felt good. I thought: ‘This is it’.”

Kucharzewski has found physical training somewhat tough. She runs and lifts weights out of hours, however, for greater upper-body strength and extra stamina. She does not rate herself as Aitken’s academic equal, and so does not expect to add another Walter Wissell award to the family.

Today, she sympathizes with children pressured to live up to their parents’ achievements. “I felt like I was the child and she was the parent,” she says. “I’m expected to be like Leisa, and I’m nothing like Leisa. She’s always been academic. I’ve always been average (academically).”

But, to help her mother out, Aitken handed over all her dux-winning study notes to her. Occasionally, she even tested her on subjects she had herself already passed. And Kurcharzewski has sometimes called her daughter for help when she has found herself “stuck on something”.

Says Kucharzewski: “There have been times when I get off the phone and think: ‘I’m supposed to be the mum’.”

Posted to Holden Hill police station after her May graduation, Aitken has already worked on the front line of policing. On patrol recently, she and a senior partner pursued and caught a credit card fraudster; and society’s volume of drug use, she says, has truly opened her eyes. And the need to learn quickly on the streets came as “a bit of a shock” to her.

“I had to learn to be a bit tougher,” she says. “I learnt that I just can’t let people walk all over me.” That lesson reinforced her academy training, through which instructors advised her to “be more assertive”.

But, after Kucharzewski graduates next month, will each worry about the other as she faces up to the job’s ever-present dangers?

“Yes,” says Aitken, “she’s my mum. Of course, I’m going to worry about her. But she’s pretty tough and, in some respects, tougher than me. She doesn’t take any crap.”

Kucharzewski concedes she already worries about her daughter. She describes Aitken as “very capable”, but says it would be stupid to think she can “handle herself” in every situation.

“She knows her stuff,” says Kucharzewski, “and she won’t let anybody put one over her.”

Beyond patrol work, Kucharzewski hopes to work in a criminal investigation field. She feels that, at 45, she might only have five years’ operational work left in her. Nonetheless, she plans no more career changes and hopes to remain a cop to the age of 60.

Aitken sees her future in criminal investigation work, too. But she also harbours interest in the domestic violence field and the Child and Family Investigation Unit.

“I don’t have massive aspirations at the moment,” she says. “I like patrol work and, when I get sick of that, I’ll try something else.”

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