February 1, 2016 AD
Watched from Every Station
Thirty-one recruits reported to the Tasmania Police Academy at Rokeby as Squad 104. Twelve had already completed the University of Tasmania's Police Studies degree, among them twenty-one-year-old Michael Yat-Sen Chen of Lenah Valley. The opening ceremony was streamed to stations across the state the morning after a constable's post attacking the university partnership had gone viral. The squad spent its first day in virtual reality scenarios, on new tablets, and facing a community panel that several recruits found hard to hear.
Squad 104 reported to the Tasmania Police Academy at Rokeby on a hot, bright morning, thirty-one recruits in Academy polo shirts. Formal uniforms would not be issued until the third week. Twelve of the thirty-one had already completed the University of Tasmania's Police Studies degree, the first time a squad had arrived with so large a share of its members qualified before training began. The opening ceremony was streamed live to stations across the state, and in more than one muster room it was watched in silence with folded arms.
The reason was a Facebook post. Over the weekend a constable in Launceston had written that the university partnership was producing officers who could quote case law and could not handle a drunk in a car park. The post had been shared thousands of times by Monday morning. The recruits walked through the gates knowing that a fair number of the people they would soon work beside had already formed a view of them.
Among the graduates was Michael Yat-Sen Chen of Lenah Valley, twenty-one years old, who had finished his degree with distinction. His first session after the ceremony was in the virtual reality suite. The scenario placed him at a domestic disturbance that escalated, over several minutes, towards danger to a child. Each decision he made was logged, and the sensors on his wrist and chest recorded his heart rate throughout. The data would be compared with his responses to the same scenario later in training.
Senior Instructor Sarah Blackwood issued each recruit a tablet loaded with case studies, bodycam footage and the Academy's learning platform. Most of the squad had it working within minutes. Three of the mature-age recruits did not, among them a former mining supervisor from the west coast in his forties, who sat with Blackwood through the morning break until he could find his own timetable.
The afternoon panel reversed the usual order of things. Instead of police explaining procedure to members of the public, representatives from disability advocacy, youth justice and refugee support services described what their clients had experienced at the hands of police. They spoke about uniforms that frightened people who had survived trauma, about officers who raised their voices at the deaf, and about well-meant assumptions that did harm. Several recruits who had joined to help people found the session hard to sit through.
The evening exercise had replaced the initiation rituals the Academy had abandoned two years earlier. Teams built towers from a limited supply of materials while blindfolded members followed instructions from those who could see. The former mining supervisor took charge of his team within a minute and kept it. Chen, on another team, said little and planned the structure before anyone touched a piece, and his tower was the second tallest when time was called.
Rooms were assigned in pairs. Chen's overlooked the tactical training ground. His room-mate was a former professional footballer whose career had ended with a knee reconstruction, the fittest recruit in the squad by a distance and the least convinced by anything said on the panel that afternoon.
