The Bad Apples aren't always Male

I was a young policeman in Auckland back in the eighties, a uniform officer. It was a time when women were being brought into the Police in greater numbers; some had progressed into CIB, which was new territory. When it came to night shift, young uniform staff would drive for a detective. It was a good opportunity to see the promotional prospects and the challenges of criminal investigation. Every nightshift one or two uniform officers would be posted with CIB. Our section at the time had a female detective. My turn came around and I was assigned as a CIB driver. Someone had warned me that she had a propensity for hitting on her driver. If you know the Auckland Central Police Station, at the bottom of Vincent street, well we hadn’t even hit the top of Vincent street and she started, “I know your married…….(yes), but would you still have sex with other women…..(I’m not interested)” I thought that might have been a big enough hint that I wasn’t interested in sex on shift, but no, she kept at it for about 2 -3 hours, till finally she instructed me to drive to her house on the pretext that she needed to pick something up. When we got to her address she insisted that I come inside, and I insisted I would stay in the car. When she realised I was not budging the temperature dropped a few degrees, and she got out slammed the door and went inside. She had already logged us off air at her place, so I waited till she was out of sight and used the radio so the operator knew I was still in the car. She came back a short while later, and talk about a women scorned….. I was instructed not to initiate any preventative police work, not to do anything without consulting her, and to drive where instructed, I even had to ask to go to the toilet. It was a long night, a long, long night. We got to the end of the shift and I went off to my sergeant and told him what had happened, and to find someone else, because I was going to be back in uniform next shift. We took a trip up to the Detective sergeants’ office, to explain what was going on, and that was the end of my week as CIB driver. Next night she bailed me up outside the shift room to find out if I had made a written complaint. I wasn’t overly concerned that she had hit on me, but she had an expectation that she was going to get sex on shift, and she took it out me when it didn’t happen. What really pissed me off though was that she stopped me being a policeman for a whole night. We didn’t do any police work that night, and from a professional point of view, she was just a waste of space in a CIB car. When I reflect back now I wish I had made a written complaint because a short time afterwards a new recruit told me about what had happened to him on night shift CIB. What he was really asking me though; is this what happens in the police? The answer was, no it isn’t, and you’ve just got the wrong impression from one person. The bad apples aren’t always male.

BB
Auckland