Inside the Law. Vikki Petraitis

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СКАЧАТЬ general idea, I couldn’t quite capture it in the story. Finally, he said, ‘You really need to come up in the helicopter and experience a shift for yourself.’

      ‘Well, if you insist,’ I said casually. On the inside I was jumping up and down saying, yippee!

      The first time I sat in the helicopter ready for the shift, one of the crew handed me a sick-bag and said there was no shame in being air-sick, as long as I did it in the bag and didn’t mess up the helicopter. In a voice designed, I think, to make me feel nervous, he asked if I’d been in a helicopter before.

      ‘No, but I’ve been in a really tall building. Does that count?’ Coming from a family of five kids, I was no shrinking violet, even though I might sometimes look like one. The truth was I had never suffered from motion sickness and didn’t imagine I’d start now. The only thing that did make me feel a little nervous was the crew made it very clear if they got a job outside the metropolitan area, they would deposit me onto the nearest sports field and I’d have to find my own way home.

      I sat in the back, wearing headphones and a mic so I could hear the chat between the three crew members. Once the rotors were thumping at fever pitch, the helicopter lurched forward then rose straight up into the air.

      Senior Constable Tim Morgan was the shift pilot. He was assisted by Senior Constable Roger Puehl, who was training to be a pilot, and the observer was Senior Constable Cameron 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.

       Who knew a true crime writer would have to do a photo shoot. This was for the 27 August 1994 issue of the Australasian Post.

      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.

       Inviting the police helicopter to school gives a primary school teacher some serious street cred.

      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. СКАЧАТЬ