Recently, SAPOL ran an e-mail forum (a question and answer exchange) with the topic being "Community Policing."

One of the civilian email participants posed the following question;
"I would like to know how it is possible for police officers to continually harass people and get away with it?"

From the "other side" (the law enforcement side) Sgt. Kym Webb of Mount Barker police, (a cop with a sense of humor) replied:

"First of all, let me tell you this...it's not easy. In the Adelaide Hills we average one cop for every 600 people. Only about 60% of those cops are on general duty (or what you might refer to as "general patrols") where we do most of our harassing.

The rest are in non-harassing departments that do not allow them contact with the day to day innocents. At any given moment, only one-fifth of the 60% general patrols are on duty and available for harassing people while the rest are off duty. So roughly, one cop is responsible for harassing about 5,000 residents.

When you toss in the commercial business, and tourist locations that attract people from other areas, sometimes you have a situation where a single cop is responsible for harassing 10,000 or more people a day.

Now, your average eight -hour shift runs 28,800 seconds long. This gives a cop one second to harass a person, and then only three-fourths of a second to drink a Farmer's Union Iced Coffee AND then find a new person to harass. This is not an easy task. To be honest, most cops are not up to this challenge day in and day out. It is just too tiring. What we do is utilize some tools to help us narrow down those people which we can realistically harass.

The tools available to us are as follows:
PHONE: People will call us up and point out things that cause us to focus on a person for special harassment. "My neighbor is beating his wife" is a code phrase used often. This means we'll come out and give somebody some special harassment. Another popular one is, "There's a guy breaking into a house." The harassment team is then put into action.

CARS: We have special cops assigned to harass people who drive. They like to harass the drivers of fast cars, cars with no insurance or no driver's licences and the like. It's lots of fun when you pick them out of traffic for nothing more obvious than running a red light. Sometimes you get to really heap the harassment on when you find they have drugs in the car, they are drunk, or have an outstanding FINS warrant on file.

RUNNERS: Some people take off running just at the sight of a police officer. Nothing is quite as satisfying as running after them like a beagle on the scent of a bunny. When you catch them you can harass them for hours.

LAWS : When we don't have PHONES or CARS and have nothing better to do, there are actually books that give us ideas for reasons to harass folks. They are called "Statutes" . These include the Criminal Law Consolidation Act, Summary Offences Act, Road Traffic Act and a whole bunch of others ... They all spell out all sorts of things for which you can really mess with people.

After you read the law , you can just drive around for a while until you find someone violating one of these listed offenses and harass them. Just last week I saw a guy trying to steal a car. Well, there's this book we have that says that's not allowed. That meant I got permission to harass this guy. It is a really cool system that we have set up, and it works pretty well.

We seem to have a never-ending supply of folks to harass. And we get away with it. Why? Because for the good citizens who pay the tab, we try to keep the streets safe for them, and they pay us to "harass" some people.

Next time you are in the Hills, give me the old "single finger wave." That's another one of those codes. It means, "You can harass me" - Its one of our favourites."

Cheers,
Peter......................Enjoy.....................