Inside the Law. Vikki Petraitis
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Hardiman.
We flew over the Myer Music Bowl. There was a concert on and the pilot was careful not to go too low. ‘We get complaints about the noise if we do,’ he explained. The whine of the Dauphin engine was something every Melbournian recognised.
We flew down Swanston Street in the city. I stared in wonder at the buildings on either side – the helicopter has clearance to fly as low as 350ft during the day and 450ft at night. Then we swooped away from the city and headed out over the bay. At the time, I lived in Seaford. The drive to Essendon had taken over an hour, but flying back to my suburb only seemed to take about 15 minutes.
‘Where’s your house?’ the pilot asked over the headphones.
I explained how to get there and the next thing there we were, high in the sky, looking down on my house. It felt surreal. We didn’t stay long. Across Frankston Dandenong Road, near my place, there was a McDonald’s. The golden arches were clearly visible from the air and the pilot explained they were good navigational aids.
The shift wasn’t all sight-seeing. There are enormous costs to having the helicopter in the air, not least a significant fuel cost. We headed back towards the city. Our first call came through D24. An elderly man had reported noises on his roof and thought someone was trying to break in. We were close by and took a look. Roger Puehl shone the powerful Nitesun spotlight which really did turn night into day. The roof was clear.
‘That’s a negative,’ Puehl said to D24. ‘Probably a possum.’
The next job was a factory alarm, then a spot fire at a park in Keilor. Then came the car chase.
Having been on patrol with police the regular way – in a police car – it was a very different experience in a helicopter. A call came over the radio that police on the ground were in pursuit of a stolen late-model red Mazda in the Melbourne CBD.
‘How do you find it from up here?’ I asked.
But it quickly became obvious. From the air at night, the blue and red flashing lights of the pursuit cars were easy to spot. Not so easy was the Mazda they were chasing.
‘Look for the brake lights,’ said one of the crew.
Doing a sweep with the Nitesun, the crew scrutinised the surrounding network of dark back streets and alleyways and spotted a shadowy vehicle, headlights off; it was only visible when the brake lights flashed on and off as it turned corners.
‘We’ve lost him,’ came a voice from the ground over the radio.
‘We got him!’ Puehl radioed back.
He gave D24 the car’s location and shone the chopper’s powerful spotlight on the alley below. The Mazda slowed and suddenly, the passenger and driver’s side doors of the stolen car opened simultaneously and, without stopping the vehicle, two men jumped out and ran off.
While officers on the ground pursued the thieves, I watched in horror from the air as the still-moving stolen car headed towards a main road – and into traffic.
‘Oh God!’ I said.
The driverless Mazda rolled onto the road, narrowly missed a bus and a couple of cars, continued across the lanes until it lost speed and crashed into a parked car on the opposite side.
The tyranny of distance in this case was vertical and, from the helicopter, there was nothing we could do but watch.
In the meantime, Puehl kept the Nitesun trained on one of the men as he ran into the driveway of a block of flats and disappeared under a tree. But you can’t run from the helicopter. Puehl shone the spotlight on the tree and the guy was trapped. He radioed the location and we watched as the blue and red flashing lights approached from several directions.
The guy was apprehended by ground police then we flew away. I got home in the small hours of the morning, exhilarated. I was young enough to snatch a couple of hours’ sleep, then get up and head off to school to my class of 30 kids.
A final moment, stuck forever in my memory, happened at the Air Wing. I visited the police hangar at Essendon quite a few times during the writing of my story. On one visit I was in the mess room, chatting to some cops who were eating dinner when a call came through. A little boy had fallen into the family swimming pool; he was not breathing and paramedics at the scene were performing CPR. The boy needed urgent transportation to hospital.
The pilot and two cops got up, left their dinners half-eaten on the table, and headed into the hangar. As a newbie to the immediacy of professions like this, I felt my own heart-rate increase and silently wished them luck as they raced to save the child.
The whine of the helicopter firing up outside added to the sense of urgency but as it reached fever pitch, ready to lift off, I heard a reduction in the speed of the rotor, and then it wound down to silent. A couple of minutes later, the three men came back into the mess room and sat back down at the table.
‘Kid died,’ one of them said.
They all resumed eating.
In 1993 I also rode along on a couple of shifts with the police accident squad whose job it was to attend fatal collisions. It was here that I first truly understood the black humour needed to balance the horror found at every job.
It seemed that these guys were impervious to what they had to deal with. They showed me photos of awful crazy things, like people who had suicided by train; there were pieces everywhere.
‘We call them Sussan accidents,’ one of the officers said. ‘You know the clothing store jingle: This goes with that at Sussan.’
I understood the need for humour; to dehumanise the human tragedies. What else could they do? They had to create a safe distance from the carnage in order to do their job professionally.
But sometimes distance wasn’t possible. I recall a story a cop told me about attending a decapitation on a train line. Someone had picked up the victim’s head and was walking it back to the rest of the body when another officer pulled the dead man’s ID out from his pocket. When he read out the man’s name, the guy carrying the head blanched.
‘Hey! I know him! I’ve been to his house for dinner.’ He looked at the head with horror and recognition, his two worlds colliding.
I did a ride-along with the accident squad and attended a fatal collision at an inner-city intersection. At the scene, a young man lay dead on the footpath, a motorcycle on its side many metres up the road, a bewildered driver shaking his head, saying, ‘They came out of nowhere…’
The dead man had been riding pillion on a motorcycle. He and his mate were flying through the intersection over a crest in the road, way too fast. A car turning right had hit them. The passenger on the bike was thrown across the intersection and hit a pole. He had a shocking injury to one leg where the car had connected, but the rest of him was deceptively unscathed.
‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ I whispered to one of the crash investigators.
‘Injuries are mostly internal,’ said the seasoned cop, ‘except for that.’ He pointed to the leg.
‘But there’s no blood,’ I said. There was a trickle that had found the crack between the concrete and wormed its way along.
‘Once the heart stops, the bleeding stops too,’ he said.
Some folks learn that in science class. I learnt it on the side of the road, looking down at a body.
Standing under a streetlight in the dead of night, next to a person who’d been alive an hour earlier is surreal to say the least. And what went