The commuters’ guardians

Policing the public transport system is no easy ride for the SA cops dedicated to the task. But as they go about protecting Adelaide bus and train travellers, just how dangerous does the job become?

David “Bully” Reynolds took countless solid blows to his head and body as he tried to subdue a brawling street criminal. His adrenaline surged as the violent arrest played out over several minutes in the early hours of a Saturday morning on the Adelaide Railway Station concourse.

The vicious, drunken offender – of whom Reynolds, 41, had asked only a name – knew no surrender. At one point during the struggle, he speared his fingers into the seasoned officer’s mouth, and began to gouge.

Reynolds, too closely entangled with the offender to draw his baton or spray, felt some concern that the struggle was “going on for so long”. “It was non-stop,” he says. “He was just relentless and ruthless and, at the time, it (the struggle) was pretty hairy.”

Reynolds, however, felt sure he would prevail – and he was right. With the help of a fellow officer, he finally cuffed the recalcitrant young man and led him away. Reynolds escaped with only a sore arm but, the next day, “knew I’d been in a stoush”.

The next night, Reynolds faced another out-of-control, drunken young man on a station platform. Of sizeable build, this offender – who seemed under the influence of drugs as well as alcohol – came complete with rapid mood swings. His manner would, in one moment, be apologetic and compliant, and, in the next, wildly aggressive.

In what must have seemed a rerun of the night before, Reynolds managed, with the same colleague’s help, to cuff the offender and lead him away. But then came some action never played out the previous night.

“Out of nowhere,” explains Reynolds, “he jumped up in the air, launched himself at the sergeant and head-butted him.”

As Reynolds later searched the SAPOL computer network, he found the man’s name. Next to it appeared a warning that he “may assault police”.

Sergeant Steve Allen confronted some frightening aggression in the railway station after this year’s Skyshow. As young families milled around the platforms and boarded trains, one drunken man yelled obscenities and sought a fight.

Allen, by his good grace, allowed the man the benefit of a hint to quieten down and leave the area. The man would hear none of that and, instead, took on Allen, 41, and his probationer partner.

The pair subdued him quickly, but the probationer emerged with a deep gash to his wrist, from which blood poured. Allen, this time, escaped unharmed.

For Constable Ben Maddern, last year’s Skyshow brought an equally dangerous task. With a handful of his colleagues, he responded to a disturbance on a bus at St Marys. A drunken 16-year-old, accompanied by 10 of his mates, had hung out of the bus windows, used abusive language and become “a nuisance”.

Maddern, 30, boarded the bus to escort him out to the footpath. But, egged on by his mates, the 100kg boy, who stood 188cms tall, refused to leave. In such a confined space, Maddern could not use his spray. So, with no alternative, he began to drag the giant teenager out. Determined to resist, however, he grabbed hold of some railing in the bus.

Says Maddern: “I wrenched both his hands off and virtually carried him past two of his mates to get him out of the bus. (Outside), he fought about five coppers on the ground.”

That skirmish worked its way into a nearby rose bush, from which some officers emerged with cuts and scrapes. But such encounters are common, at least for the 70-plus officers attached to SAPOL’s Transit Services Branch. These cops, trained in riot control, protect bus, rail and tram commuters across the whole of metropolitan Adelaide.

To that end, transit police patrol the Adelaide Railway Station – in which they are based – Skycity Casino and the River Torrens precinct. Out of town, they patrol major bus interchanges, where robbers, assailants, car thieves and graffiti vandals mostly beset the transit system and its commuters.

Another aspect of their work takes them directly into the gruesome aftermath of suicides by train. At such scenes, transit officers have to face and, indeed, move among bloody dismembered body parts that lie strewn across railway lines.

“They’re not pretty sights,” says Reynolds, “and you know who cleans up. The last one was down off Brighton Rd. It was at night, and this lad lay down on the track, crossed his arms and just put his head on the rail line. There was nothing the driver could do: he just ran over the top of him.

“I remember one of our young fellas – who’d only been out six months – picking up bloody bits of brain and putting them in a bag. I thought to myself: ‘Poor bugger’, but he did a great job.”

Transit police also act as a support to local service areas. “We help out when patrols are tied up in certain areas,” says Reynolds. “Over summer, for example, we performed fire patrols.”

In reality, the list of tasks for which transit cops provide support is near endless. They might one day walk the beat at a one-day cricket match, and another day deal with protesters at Baxter or Woomera detention centres.

And Maddern insists that transit officers are not, by virtue of their post, restricted in their work. He and his colleagues inquire into all the same types of offences their LSA counterparts investigate.

“We’ve had ‘intel’ from offenders we’ve locked up and ended up doing houses over for drugs,” he says. “We had Operation Omar early last year and did 12 houses over – all had cannabis crops. We had about 25 arrests and a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of drug seizures. So we’re not limited.”

Still, in a typical workday, transit officers deal most commonly – whether on a bus or a train-station platform – with street and ticketing offences, and robberies. But that does not mean their job comes with any less danger.

Few outside the branch ever consider that criminals, and the mentally unstable, are frequent users of public transport. Usually barred from the right to hold drivers’ licences, they come to favour bus and train travel. But, sometimes armed, they can pose risks to all around them.

Maddern says that, from time to time, all transit officers come up against offenders with weapons. And Reynolds says he and his older colleagues often think of the stabbing murder of Senior Constable David Barr at Salisbury Interchange in 1991.

As well, all three officers highlight the difficulty of confrontation in confined spaces. Says Allen: “The danger is, when you go onto a bus or train, you’ve got other people in close proximity who could get hurt. So you’ve got to be careful about the way you get people off.

“Talk first, but, if that doesn’t work, it becomes physical. You have to use force.”

Typically, transit cops play down the dangers of their work and say it is no more risky than that of any other operational post within SAPOL. Reynolds will only concede that Transit’s city beat might be somewhat more violent than elsewhere.

“Especially the casino as part of that beat,” he says. “Often, you’re dealing with people who are ejected because of alcohol problems. It’s pretty similar to a Hindley St beat policing all the hotels.” Despite the job’s risks, Maddern, Reynolds and Allen relish their work. Each enjoys his capacity to operate right across metropolitan Adelaide, and undertake the traditional police practice of “locking up crooks”.

“There’s so much potential to focus on different things,” says Maddern, “and you get that broad range of training for the young ones.”

And with its three tactical and four response teams, the branch is a training ground for many probationers. Allen speaks of one whose first arrest after graduation was a robbery with violence, and others who win early opportunities.

“Even if they’re good enough,” he says, “not many probos in an LSA get an opportunity to go to a tactical unit within six to 12 months of being a probationer. At Transit, you get that opportunity – if you’re prepared to work.”

But some transit officers fear their work is misunderstood. They speak of a perception that their role is one of simply riding buses and trains. Moreover, they hear of probationers who join the section thinking they have scored a “dud gig”.

Attitudes, however, soon change. Says Reynolds: “We’ve had people come here with scepticism, but later say: ‘This is nothing like what I expected’. That’s because you get involved in everything from graffiti to drug raids and suicides.

“It (the job) is a chance to perform not only core police roles, but also investigational work.”