November 1999 Volume 80 Number 11
"serving the protectors"
| November 1999 Volume 80 Number 11 "serving the protectors" |
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| By
Brett Williams |
Embraced By Academia
Michael Grant so loved police work that he never saw himself quitting SAPOL - until an encounter 13 years ago. He resigned with great sadness, but found success in an environment worlds away from policing.
APOL is in crisis! Police officers’ morale is dangerously low. Promotional opportunities are scarcely existent; and recruits should plan to resign after only 10 years’ service.
These are the views of highly respected University of Adelaide law lecturer, Michael Grant. Himself a police officer until 1988, when he resigned from SAPOL with 23 years’ service, Grant warns of dire consequences if “something isn’t done”.
“If there isn’t a perception within the police department that the people are valued (and) supported,” he warns, “the very worst thing that can happen is a slipping in the standard of the police department itself.
“The low morale issue is something that, first of all, has to be admitted and (then) addressed. If it’s not, it really is going to eat away at the very fabric of the police department. It’s very destructive.
“As soon as you have low morale, you get police officers in the field who don’t care anymore. Before you know it, there’s an increase in crime.
“Unless you have high morale and encouragement, what incentive is there to do your job well?”
Grant’s concerns are unmistakably sincere, and not simply those of an ex-cop with over-abundant empathy for old mates and colleagues. It’s just as much as a private citizen that he fears for the future of policing, which he sees as “one of the hardest jobs on the planet”.
But Dublin-born Grant once thrived as a young detective amid the police culture of the late ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. He loved his work with SAPOL’s consorting, dealers, anti-larrikin and fraud squads, as well as suburban CIBs - and always considered himself a “career police officer”. Thoughts of switching occupations never entered his mind.
Grant says his Irish-Catholic background drove him to law enforcement as a 17-year-old in 1965. “(I had a) strong sense of what was right and wrong,” he remembers, “what you should and shouldn’t do.
“If you have that sort of moral code, then perhaps you’re attracted to jobs like the police force.”
And, before he’d even graduated, Grant knew he wanted a commission. He was ambitious. He had worked as a labourer after failing to complete high school, which made him see a police career as “something special”.
He says if he’d risen through the commissioned ranks, he would have even aimed for the top job.
ut an inspectors course - for which he sat in 1984 - completely shattered Grant’s long-held, positive feelings about life in SAPOL. His quest for a commission failed. Examiners rejected him.
Says Grant of the course: “Half of the people were failed! Many of them shouldn’t have been. Many were as good, if not superior to some of the people who passed. It was a badly run course where a lot of good people got ‘burnt’.
“If you were seen as someone who didn’t fit in, or needed to learn about ‘the way things were done’, you wouldn’t get through. It was as simple as that.”
A high-ranking commissioned officer assured Grant that, to succeed on courses, he had to learn to “play the game”. An even higher ranked officer insisted that, if Grant didn’t believe commissioned officers were vastly superior beings to the rank and file, he shouldn’t have participated in the course.
“I found that repugnant,” Grant remembers, “and I didn’t accept it - I still don’t. I find it a rather silly way to recruit middle managers - to say that they are superior to the people they manage. In my experience, that’s not so.”
Police Association president and former colleague, Peter Alexander, regarded Grant as a man of brilliant mind and extraordinary capability. He says that, because of SAPOL’s para-military rank structure, Grant was never “given the opportunity to demonstrate his full capacity”.
“The frustrating thing in Mick’s case,” says Alexander, “is that we lost him. I wouldn’t doubt that, because he was such a free-thinking person, and extremely capable, he might have been perceived as a threat and misunderstood by some in authority.
“Personally, I was always disappointed, but not surprised, that he didn’t go on to higher rank.
“You can only ponder on the inability of the police force to maintain someone with that expertise; with those capabilities.”
Grant was devastated to fall victim to a seemingly orchestrated failure. For the first time ever, he felt he “didn’t really belong” in SAPOL.
Others whom examiners failed were similarly devastated. One told Grant that being rejected had broken his heart. And Grant believed that another candidate - since commissioned - was failed simply because he looked too young.
“In those days,” he says, “people were more inclined to take decisions that affect people’s lives without giving them natural justice.”
“Management is probably under more pressure than ever in the history of the police force”
Despite Grant’s own emotional wounding from his 1984 experience, he tried again to win a commission in 1986. He and other candidates gathered in police headquarters and sat for an examination, which was supposed to precede a three-day commissioned officers course.
But as the committed aspirants sat slaving over their papers, none had any inkling of what was to follow.
As they left the examination room, each was handed a letter which explained that no three-day course would be undertaken. “So,” says Grant, “we all sat for the exam for a course that wasn’t in existence! They decided not to tell us, but just make us go through the exam.
“That was the turning point for me. I realized at that very moment that I was leaving the police force; that enough was enough.”
rant began a law degree at the University of Adelaide the following year, and resigned from SAPOL in December, 1988. Although greatly saddened to leave the job he’d loved, Grant had always enjoyed the legal process, particularly criminal law. To no one’s surprise, he excelled as a student.
“If you were seen as someone who didn’t fit in, or needed to learn about ‘the way things were done’, you wouldn’t get through. It was as simple as that.”
In 1990, he graduated from law school with a first class honours degree and five awards for academic achievement. They included two Stow prizes and the Law Society Centenary Prize for the best overall performance by a student.
By early ’91, he’d scored a job as a prosecutor with the DPP (Director of Public Prosecutions). So this one-time detective was now plying his new craft in South Australia’s District and Supreme Courts.
But only two years later, Grant was invited back to law school to ply a different craft - teaching. He accepted the invitation and taught evidence part-time.
Later, his teaching role became more intense. In 1994, with a one-year contract and leave from the DPP, Grant taught evidence and torts full-time. Then, encouraged by academics, he applied for and won a full-time position as a law lecturer in 1998.
He now revels in his interaction with young students, some of whom are police officers. “It stops you getting old, cynical and grumpy if you’re dealing with young, idealistic people,” he insists. “It’s good for the soul.”
At 52, Grant remains unembittered by his experience at the hands of SAPOL. Indeed, he is in many ways grateful for his police examiners’ decision to fail him in 1984.
“I now really enjoy my life,” he explains. “I’ve got people I wouldn’t have met, and things I’d never have done. It’s been very positive.”
Through his police officer wife, Sharynne, former colleagues and the Police Journal, Grant stays well informed of SAPOL’s inner-workings. And a crisis, he believes, is boiling over within “management’s own hierarchy”.
“Management is probably under more pressure than ever in the history of the police force,” he says. “They (managers) have insufficient people to do the job. I do feel sorry for them.
“The pace of change has been very fast, and it’s impacted very heavily on the commissioned ranks. They’ve felt the brunt of it probably as much as the troops have.
“I also think there’d be a lot of career commissioned officers who have been badly treated by the current system; who have missed out on a dwindling number of jobs. On some occasions, you’d think a lot of them would have had claims to being the best person for jobs they’d missed out on.”
And the most compelling issue facing the rank and file, Grant believes, is also “dwindling job opportunities”. He says SAPOL and career paths no longer co-exist; that it’s impossible for police officers to “plot careers with any degree of confidence”.
Grant’s advice to aspiring cops is to qualify themselves for other professions while serving, and stay in policing no longer than 10 years. Today, he wishes he’d ended his own police career 13 years earlier.
Policing, he fears, may eventually be seen as a “low-esteem job”. And to unhappy, serving police, with talents outside law enforcement, Grant offers assurances. “There is life outside the police force and you can be happy,” he says.
“When the time to go comes, you will know that it’s the right time.”
Click here to visit
www.thefruitloop.com.au
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