NSW Police have given a handful of community leaders, company executives, and media representatives the opportunity to go behind the scenes – from the police academy, to life on the beat.

And EFTM’s Joshua Dowling was among the lucky few to take part.

The two-day program is designed to provide an insight into the training and the daily grind of police work – and the capabilities of NSW law enforcement from the land, sea and air.

We took part in the Behind The Blue program late last year, but only now can we share the exclusive behind the scenes experience.

The program starts in the NSW Police control room in Surry Hills, where Triple Zero calls are received for urgent police responses, before each job is assigned to a police radio operator for the relevant suburb.

While this radio room primarily covers the Sydney metropolitan area, at the flick of a switch it can stand in for police radio centres in regional areas if they are down for maintenance, or need extra support during emergencies such as bushfires or floods.

No photos were allowed in here but the open-plan office looks like NASA, with dozens of operators wearing headsets sitting at long rows of desks with banks of computer screens.

NSW police radio frequencies have been digitally encrypted for years, so the days of hobbyists listening to routine police work via radio frequency scanners are long gone.

When there is a critical assignment, the police radio operator presses a button to illuminate a red light above them, to signal a supervisor from the police radio room is required.

For example, during a police pursuit all other routine communication on that channel is paused while the radio operator monitors the pursuit and relays second-by-second updates from the car crew – with a supervisor monitoring the situation alongside the police radio operator.

Many members of the public may not realise this, but for safety reasons police terminate more pursuits than they continue.

Any number of police are authorised to pull the pin: the pursuing officer, the highway patrol supervisor in the area, the general duties police supervisor in the area, plus the supervisor at police radio.

There are countless checks in place for such scenarios, and in this immersion exercise we would take part in a pretend pursuit at the NSW Police driver training centre in Goulburn to see officers in action. More on that shortly.

Before we left Sydney Police Centre we also went into another control room – also with large TV screens – that can see every corner of the CBD and key parts of the metropolitan area during special events.

A new capability, police have high-powered drones that can beam images back to the main command post.

Police showed us footage from a drone zooming in to an intersection in western Sydney that was about a kilometre away from the drone’s airborne location, and yet broadcast crystal clear, close-up, live video.

Although this was just a demonstration (and we couldn’t find out what brand of drone it was, but given the capability it did not appear to be for civilian use), it was incredible to see what police could view from a safe distance.

After this taste of technology, we headed south to Goulburn to the NSW Police Academy to take part in numerous training scenarios.

Even though the ‘guns’ were plastic and only fired pellets, participants in the Behind The Blue program were still required to apply for a temporary firearms licence to take part in the police exercise.

Most confronting was the mental health and violent domestic scenarios.

While there is a widespread perception among the public that police mostly write speeding tickets and deal with shoplifters, in fact more than 70 per cent of calls are related to drug-affected people, those suffering from mental health (threatening self harm or threatening members of the public), and violent domestics.

In fact, these public health issues are overwhelming police at the moment, which is why you are seeing so many advertising awareness campaigns.

Police officers need to study training manuals that are more than 200 pages thick to be prepared for handling the legalities of domestic disputes.

Indeed, there is more paperwork to fill out when dealing with domestics than there is when dealing with a murder. All of which takes more police off the road for longer.

As you might expect, NSW Police are working to find better ways to deal with domestics, drug-affected persons, and those suffering from mental health issues.

But as the saying goes, prevention is better than the cure. Or in this case, prevention is better than ending up in a jail cell or the wrong side of the law.

It’s honestly heart-breaking to get an insight into what police are really dealing with. Frankly, most members of the public have no idea what police go through on any given day.

In most cases, general duties police spend their entire shift going from one crisis to another. 

Perhaps unfairly, general duties police – who are the frontline responders to Triple Zero calls, the officers you see in vehicles marked “Police” with blue-and-white chequers – are not given any special allowance for the broad work they do and the crises they deal with.

Police in specialist divisions get a modest pay bump for their area of expertise, but it could be argued it is general duties police – who literally get pulled in every direction on a shift – who are worthy of special conditions.

As participants in the Behind The Blue program, we watched a scenario where police were dealing with someone threatening self harm at a replica train station (with a real decommissioned Sydney train carriage) inside the NSW Police Academy.

Even though we knew it was only a demonstration – and the person of interest was an officer acting out a scenario – it was emotional to watch.

And to think police across Australia deal with this every day.

Later, we attended a violent domestic scenario where a person of interest (in police jargon) was threatening officers with a knife.

This time the civilian participants in the Behind The Blue program had to deal with the offender – and it was frightening.

The surge of adrenalin and the thumping of your heartbeat clouds your ability to figure out in a split-second how to properly react.

Thinking I had convinced the offender to drop the weapon, I let my guard down. Then she came at me while swinging a (plastic) knife. I fired three shots (of plastic pellets). I felt horrible, but it was the appropriate action as she was about to put a knife into my chest.

Heaven help any officer that must make this split-second decision in real life, with a real knife, and a real gun.

Even though this exercise was a scenario – and the “offender” was a police officer in street clothes acting angrily – it triggered a life-and-death response from my body.

As a car guy and motoring journalist, the highlight of the program was the Police Driver Training division.

First up, we saw some of the exercises police do in general duties vehicles (sedans, SUVs, vans and utes).

There are strict guidelines as to which officers – and vehicles – are allowed to respond to “urgent duty” jobs under lights and sirens.

Personally, I believe we should be putting our novice police officers in sedans or SUVs – which have good grip, good braking, and secure road-holding.

Unfortunately a large proportion of young police officers spend their shifts in a van or a ute with a prisoner module on the back.

Utes and vans are not as suitable for urgent-duty driving as sedans and SUVs which, in my opinion, are the safest vehicles for officers responding to calls for help.

As a motoring expert, if adding more sedans and SUVs were not an option – and I had to choose between a van and a ute for general duties police – it would be my wish to see the fleet heavily skewed towards vans rather than utes.

Vans are at least designed and engineered to be configured in the format police use them. Double-cab utes are not designed for urgent-duty driving with a prisoner module on the back.

It would be better if, eventually, police only used double-cab utes for general duties work in rural or beach areas where four-wheel-drive is absolutely necessary.

After Behind The Blue participants made clumsy efforts to get around the slippery skid pan in a Hyundai iLoad (a vehicle typically used for general duties work), we took part in a seven-minute police pursuit scenario in highway patrol cars on the closed course at the Police Driver Training Centre.

The suspect vehicle we were “looking for” was an unmarked Chrysler SRT V8 highway patrol car. The vehicle we were in was a marked BMW 5 Series highway patrol car.

Before long, a job came over police radio to keep a look out for the Chrysler after an armed hold-up at a nearby petrol station (the mock scenario used in this instance).

After spotting the fleeing vehicle we followed it from a safe distance. The pursuing officer immediately updated police radio with the exact location, road conditions, traffic conditions and speed of the offending vehicle.

It was information overload for me – and I was just a passenger, not having to deliver or process the constant updates – but this is what happens in these scenarios in real life, so police can quickly determine whether to terminate the pursuit.

In the end, in this scenario the fleeing vehicle was deemed to be driving too dangerously and the officer terminated the pursuit.

And, for good measure, just as in the real world, the pursuing officer switched off the lights and sirens and started to drive in the other direction, so the offending vehicle could see police were no longer giving chase.

While many motorists think highway patrol only write tickets, they do so much more than that. They are in many instances the first cars off at life-threatening situations because they are often already on the move and free to respond quickly.

For example, the first police officer off at the Lindt Cafe siege was a NSW Police Highway Patrol motorcyclist.

Highway patrol officers are also often first off at violent domestics and other urgent calls for help.

To become a highway patrol officer, you first must complete at least two years of general duties policing before transferring to a specialist area. So it’s no surprise they are always ready to back-up their general duties colleagues.

In addition to seeing firsthand the checks and balances police have in place for various pursuit scenarios, driver training is at a much higher level than the public (and the media) realise.

Police train their drivers on the closed course day and night – in wet and clear conditions – so officers are ready for any eventuality.

All vehicle safety systems such as stability control remain on, and officers know all they need to do is keep the fleeing car in sight and provide regular updates until other cars can deploy road spikes – or PolAir can follow the fleeing vehicle from the sky.

For now, US-style PIT manouvres (where police ram a car off the road) are not part of routine police training – but are used by specialist police during anti-terror training.

With the pursuit scenarios over, day one of the program finished with dinner alongside police recruits. Almost four months into their intensive training, they were weeks away from earning their stripes and being deployed across the state.

The next day we got an insight into the capabilities of the Marine Area Command (Water Police), which is the largest of its type in Australia – and the world – given the vast NSW coastline and inland waterways that need to be patrolled.

It was here we learned police could be doing water safety patrols and random breath tests of boaties on Sydney Harbour one day, and then intercepting a large international shipment of illegal drugs off the NSW coast the next day.

To paraphrase a scene from the acclaimed TV series The Wire, it is the Marine Area Command that puts a lot of the “drugs on the table” you see in TV news bulletins after big busts.

At the Marine Area Command base in Balmain, participants also got an insight into the capabilities of the dog squad who stopped by for a demonstration.

And in a detailed briefing we learned about the challenges of dealing with the rise in domestic violence.

Make no mistake, police are doing everything they can to crack down on offenders before it’s too late.

But it’s apparent the responsibility of reducing domestic violence should not fall solely at the feet of police. There needs to be more prevention, and more intervention before a situation gets so bad that police need to be called.

On the grass area outside the Marine Area Command there was a demonstration of the Public Order and Riot Squad (PORS) who were called to deal with a man demonstrating a mental health episode and threatening passers by.

Again, although it was only a scenario, it was still confronting to watch up close.

To finish the program, another highlight, we spent four hours on the road with a general duties car crew.

I was assigned to Auburn. We were in the area for less than a minute when an urgent job came over the radio. A drug affected person was lashing out at members of the public. Among other victims, he happened to assault an off-duty officer who had stepped in to try to help.

Police responded in minutes and the offender was taken into custody and back to the station for processing.

Other participants assigned to other areas helped with broken down cars in peak hour traffic, dangerous driving offences, and other dramas in the daily grind of police work.

It was apparent police know the criminals in their area, spotting familiar cars driven by “persons of interest” almost instinctively as they went past.

But it was a lucky day for the bad guys on this occasion. With a media guest on board, the police showing me the hood would need to wait another day before stopping old mate for a chat. That’s the thing about crime. There’s always more of it tomorrow. 

Overall, the Behind The Blue program was a rare and incredible insight, and it made me appreciate police really do so much more than the public – and the media – give them credit for. 

There was one final experience to round out the program, which brought up emotions in a different way.

Two months after our intense two-day exercise, we attended the attestation of the class we trained alongside (albeit briefly).

There were tears of joy among the recruits, and tears of pride among family members in the audience.

Class 360 included 179 new police recruits – aged 19 to 49 – who were deployed across NSW having completed their training.

More than one third of this particular intake was female, and 18 officers were born overseas. 

Having had a glimpse into the process that went into the training before they hit the streets, I have a new appreciation for the sacrifices they make in the name of public safety.

It was also a privilege to talk openly with – and humanise – the officers, and to hear their honesty about the challenges and rewards of daily policing.

So, you want to be a cop?

The reality is it takes a special kind of person to be a police officer. Few in the community are cut out for this type of work.

And yet society can’t function without them.

Thanks to the NSW Police Force for allowing us to take part in this special program.