A few years ago I read and reviewed Neil Woods' Good Cop, Bad War, the story of his work as an undercover police officer in the UK infiltrating illicit drug networks. Woods tells the story of his 14 years as an undercover operator, beginning in the early 1990s. It's a hair-raising tale of subterfuge and danger written with a clear purpose. Woods was the chairperson of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an association of former and current police and customs officers campaigning for drug law reform, and he wanted to use his own experience to highlight the futility of the 'War on Drugs'.
In the early 1980s, just into his 20s and a couple of years into his police career, Banks volunteered to do undercover work, mainly for the excitement and adrenaline. What he describes is very similar to Woods' English experience, but even more cowboy-ish. The undercover operators were all young men like Banks, with no training in undercover work except a bit of hanging around with blokes who had been doing it a bit longer. They often operated alone and when I say 'alone' I mean, really alone. They nominally had a contact in the drug squad who was their liaison, but they could go weeks with no contact.
Banks' job was to adopt a false identity, pretend to be interested in buying drugs and then work his way up the chain of dealers until he got to someone serious, or as far as he could go. Then he would arrange a 'buy-bust', the purchase of a substantial quantity of drugs which would be watched by a surveillance team who would then swoop in an arrest the perpetrators, while simultaneously other officers would raid and arrest the other offenders contacted during the operation.
There were, of course, dangerous moments and he tells some hair-raising stories. However, the hardest part of it for him was the isolation and the strain of maintaining a false identity over a long period of time. Often he would go with another undercover operative to a distant town, adopt a false identity and spend months working their way into the local drug scene. He describes the impact of it:
...it was the feeling of insecurity and emptiness that comes with deep covert jobs. You're not yourself, and you're not the person you're pretending to be. You're nobody. You can't form real connections, and you can't talk to the people you are connected to. You live an artificial life, buying drugs you'll never use or sell, making false friendships, lying to everyone you meet. It's not just your life that's on hold, it's your entire personality.
And there's always the chance someone's going to try and kill you.
As Neil Woods found, this is particularly disorienting because the first people you meet are not serious criminals - in fact they are only criminals because they use a substance the law has decided is illegal. Some of these have difficult lives, histories of trauma and mental illness, and addictions for which there is no treatment. Not only are you not allowed to help them, you often end up sending them to jail, or further feeding their addictions, or both. One of the early bits of advice he was given, and which he followed, was 'never fuck a target'. It was hard - he often met attractive women and part of the job was to get close to them, but at the same time he had to keep enough distance to not give in to the temptation to go to the next stage. Once it came back to bite him. He got close to a woman who introduced him to a wide range of drug contacts and made several very clear advances, which he rebuffed. When her time in court came, she told a sad story about how the undercover officer had lured her into using drugs, slept with her and promised her the world before betraying her. To make it worse, the junior prosecuting lawyer on the case was his, from that point on, ex-girlfriend.
For this danger, both physical and psychological, the rewards from the police force were non-existent. The arresting officers, not the undercovers, got the credit for the subsequent convictions, and undercover work didn't count for anything in terms of career advancement. When he gave up undercover work three years later he found himself back where he started, as a constable in the Mobile Squad, driving around dealing with domestic violence incidents and other urgent requests for help.
But there was more to the moral ambiguity of the job than just pretending to be someone else. The undercover officers themselves become drug users to a greater or lesser extent. Banks started the job as a tea-totaller, but quickly had to learn to drink to fit in with the scene and before long was smoking cannabis regularly. He never used harder drugs but others did. The lines between them and the low level drug users they began with, and often sent to prison, were pretty blurred.
But there was a bigger problem, because this was Queensland in the 1980s and police corruption, a problem that hovered on the edge of Neil Woods' story, was front and centre. The Fitzgerald Inquiry, which ran from 1987 to 1989, revealed a network of corrupt officers and politicians which included Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Police Commissioner Terry Lewis and a number of Cabinet ministers and senior police officers. Of course, if the top level was corrupt this filtered down. Not everyone was dishonest - Banks believes most were not - but those who were didn't wear 'I Am Corrupt' badges so you never knew who you could trust. For an undercover officer this was particularly dangerous. If you were undercover in Cairns, having been sent by your superiors in the drug squad in Brisbane, then if you were in trouble the last thing you would do was call the Cairns police, because if you told the wrong person you could end up dead.
He did in fact have one extremely scary experience, where a contact lined up a meeting with a serious mafia dealer from Griffith. As he sat in the back of the car next to the dealer the man grabbed him by the ankle, feeling his boots and growling that that was where undercover cops always carried their guns. He was right, and it was just fortunate Barnes had decided not to carry his that day. The man proceeded to warn him that if he was an undercover cop he would be found out, and named a list of low profile but high ranking Queensland police he would be calling to find out. Fortunately Barnes was wearing a recording device, and took the recording back to his honest superior. The operation was abandoned, but no-one was game to take the names any further. Barnes let be known around the office that he had kept the tape and had it in safekeeping, as a form of insurance.
Although he was a police officer until 1995, the story ends somewhat abruptly in the late 1980s, just before the Fitzgerald Inquiry started and policing got turned on its head. This is not a reflective book like Neil Woods' - Banks does not outline clearly any learnings or alternative insights he gained. Despite the maturity he obviously gained over the ten years it covers and his hints of the journey he has covered since, he still talks as a loyal member of the police family, disturbed by the few bad apples but still believing in the fundamental mission. As he says, 'I still bleed blue'. On his author website he mentions that he is working on a sequel, in which I expect we will read more about his subsequent career, the Fitzgerald Inquiry and his battles with PTSD.
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For me, this book was very close to home. Banks is just a couple of years older than me, and I lived in Brisbane up to 1983 before spending most of the rest of the 1980s in a regional Queensland town. Some of his undercover work in Brisbane involved doing deals at the Royal Exchange Hotel in Toowong, which was just down the road from where I lived as a student for over two years. Some of my housemates in the latter part of that period were heavy drinking motorbike-heads (but not patched bikies or even close) who drank a lot, and the RE was their local. It's quite possible they even met him.
I also met some Drug Squad police during that time. Early in my time living there we had a couple of drug raids at our house. It was a very straight household at that point. We barely even drank alcohol, never mind kept illegal drugs in the house. Nonetheless, they rocked up at 6.00am without a warrant (drug raids did not require one) went through our stuff and left. Funnily enough, after the household members turned over and we had some blokes there who actually did use drugs they never showed up, which is just as well. The only conviction any of my housemates suffered was for theft. As he was leaving the RE one night my mate was stopped by the police who searched his bag for drugs. They didn't find any but they did find one of the RE's beer glasses, and charged him with stealing it. They were serious, yes they were, and took him all the way to court where he was placed on a 12-month good behaviour bond and ordered to pay 60 cents restitution for the stolen glass. He stuck the court order up on the toilet wall for a laugh. And they wondered why people like me had no respect for the police.
When I moved to a regional town in 1983 I developed a different kind of relationship with the police. I worked as a Child Care Officer in what was then known as the Department of Children's Services, responsible for child protection and juvenile justice as part of a small team of social workers. Like Keith Banks, I was thrust at the age of 21 into a job for which I had very little preparation and in which I received very little support. By the time I had been in the job less than two months I was going on my own to investigate child abuse allegations - Department policy said we should go in pairs but we were short staffed and covered a big area, so it only happened if we knew the situation was potentially violent. That was a joke - all such situations are potentially violent. I don't think I went to single one of these visits where the first 5 or 10 minutes didn't consist of someone shouting at me. Fortunately I didn't end up with PTSD like Banks, but I do have some regrets about situations I might have handled better with a bit more maturity and insight.
In this situation we had a lot to do with the police. In the city, or a bigger regional area, the norm was for child abuse complaints to be investigated jointly but we didn't have a proper Juvenile Aid Bureau in our area and the police who were officially called that were just uniform constables who got bumped into the job for a while and thought their job was to arrest underage criminals. So aside from a few serious cases, my main contact with the police was when they arrested someone under 17 for some offence.
We operated across a couple of different small communities and the police had their list of usual suspects who they would call on if there were break and enters or car thefts. I never saw any police corruption as such - after all, I wasn't dealing with drug dealers and gangsters but with children from abusive or disrupted homes - but I saw plenty of other dodgy stuff. At one stage the local Inspector decided there were too many break-ins going on in one of our communities and sent a couple of extra police to 'clean it up'. They duly rounded up the usual suspects and charged them with various offences. Every one of those boys told either me or their solicitors that they had been beaten up in order to extract confessions. No-one had any actual injuries to show for it, and very few wanted to make anything of it - they just showed up in court, pleaded guilty and were placed under an order that made no material difference to their lives. Only one decided to plead not guilty on the grounds that his confession had been under duress. It duly went to court, the police officer denied everything, the judge believed him, and kid was found guilty.
At other times, there was just laziness and incompetence. The law at the time specified that the court could make two kinds of orders. It could place a child under our supervision, which left them at home with a requirement to report to us. Or it could place them under our 'care and control' for a period of up to two years, which made us their legal guardian. Strictly speaking we could then decide what to do, including whether to send the young person for a period in custody. The court could not make a custodial order. However, in practice the way it worked is that the court would make recommendations. If the court recommended custody, the kid would go to custody. Otherwise, they would just go home. We never sent a kid to custody without a court recommendation.
Some of our inexperienced but arrogant local police had no time for this policy, so if they arrested a kid who was already under a Care and Control order they would simply visit our office and try to browbeat us into sending them to custody. After all, it would save them lots of paperwork. We couldn't do that but they must have thought we were omnipotent. Usually I didn't care, I didn't want the kids I was trying to help locked up. But once two of the kids I was involved with were accused of a very serious offence. The relevant officer duly turned up at my office and demanded they be locked up. I said this was impossible unless they were charged with some offence and I had a court recommendation. He tried to bully me into it (futilely, since I couldn't have done what he wanted in any case, the secure facility would not have accepted them) and then stormed out of the office. Natural justice - or any kind of justice - be damned.
To be fair, this particular officer was not the most popular man in the station. There were some other men and women there who really took their jobs seriously, went through the proper processes and cared about the kids they were arresting. Even one of the blokes who the kids told me had bashed them during the 'clean-up' later put a lot of effort into setting up a PCYC in the community and spent time working with a local youth homelessness service. As Keith Banks says, there were good cops, less good cops and outright crooks. Fortunately, I only met the first two kinds.
I was well and truly out of this scene by the time the Fitzgerald Inquiry came around, working for a homelessness agency and doing work that I saw had some real, tangible value for the people I was supporting. I watched it all unfold from afar, shocked but not really surprised at the extent of the corruption.
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