My Account
Constable Barry “Baz” Rose calls it how he sees it and in 36 years of law enforcement he’s seen plenty, from drug busts and robberies to road deaths and more, much of it in Warkworth and Wellsford. Once a wayward teen himself, he accepts that people make mistakes but would like to see them be more accountable. While he believes that police make a positive difference, he is increasingly irritated by the constraints of society’s political correctness and the lenient penalties for offenders.
Nevertheless, he told Adele Thackray that even some of his worst days on the job have helped spur him on.
In 1994 I had my leg broken in a scuffle with a car thief I’d arrested in Wayby, just opposite the silos. We were on a rutted tanker track and when he fell on me, both bones in my lower leg snapped like carrots. I thought I knew the people who lived there but was greeted by four or five people who I didn’t know and no-one would ring for an ambulance – although one of the girls got bags of frozen peas and veges to put on the break. The thief tried to rip the radio handset from the car by slamming the cord in the driver’s door and I eventually managed to crawl into the passenger side and call for help. By then the offender had flown the coop but I was able to identify him and he was located a couple of days later on Waiheke Island. At that stage I’d been doing the job for 20-odd years and what really “pissed me off” is that he was the only one who had got the better of me and got away. It only happened that once.
I spent about a week in hospital before recovering at home and had only just returned to work when the Warkworth BNZ was robbed. There were only two of us working that day and my offsider, Senior Constable Ray Burt, went into the bank and I was driving around the area when a driver floored it past me. He didn’t fit the description we had, but his reaction got my attention. I chased him to Pulham Road and he took off across the paddocks down to the mangroves but was arrested by the dog teams within a couple of hours. I think they got all the money back, bar $10. It was pretty satisfying because he wasn’t previously known to police and might otherwise have gotten away with it.
I’m the first to admit that as a teenager I was far from squeaky clean. I liked fast cars and fast motorbikes and once spent a few hours at the police station waiting to be picked up by my father. I was brought up on a Te Kuiti farm and later became a founding member of Manurewa High School, but school and I just didn’t gel and I left before I was 15. I had visions of joining the air force but my academic qualifications were zero, so I did farming work and drove heavy earthmoving machinery before deciding to make a lifestyle change and work as a traffic officer in 1975. You could say was a case of “if you can’t beat them, join them”. When I first started, a traffic officer asked “how well do you ride a motorbike?” and I said, “good enough to get away from you guys”.
To be a reasonable policeman you do need some form of education, but you also need some grassroots life experience and I had plenty of that. Most of my career I’ve been in a rural environment where you work by yourself, up to an hour away from backup. That helps you to rapidly develop your people skills. On an early posting in rural Otago, I would probably see fewer cars in a day than I would in Wellsford in 10 minutes. In those days you had to have good cause to process a drunk driver, so you followed them until they did something absolutely stupid and quite often you’d open the door and they’d just fall out on the road. Attitudes to drink driving have improved dramatically since changes to drink driving laws in 1977.
I moved to Mt Wellington/One Tree Hill in 1979 before coming to Warkworth in 1984, just after the gas pipeline went through. I dealt with a lot of rubber-burning petrolheads and drunk drivers. My attitude was to speak to people once, take their keys and drive them home, but if I dealt with them again, that was it. Right from the start I worked closely with the two Warkworth policemen so when the merger between police and traffic officers came in 1992 it was easy.
I can’t recall how many fatalities I attended in the Dome Valley, but I refuse to call them “accidents”; they’re avoidable and drivers need to realise that and take responsibility for their actions. In those days, we didn’t have crash teams and dealt with the whole job ourselves. The ones that affected me the most involved innocent kids. Child deaths are always hard, but it was the unexplained sudden death of a two-week-old baby about three years ago that really got to me. I didn’t realise how badly affected I was until a coroner recognised I wasn’t handling it well. It made sense when she told me that the stress of dealing with death is cumulative.
In the early 90s I enjoyed working with teams on cannabis recovery operations. We’d carefully put together warrants and then, with the support of aerial surveillance, a team would do multiple arrests within a short time. We got great “intel” from the community and the results were always good. Drug cultivators are a lot more sophisticated these days and like many others, I’m concerned about the rising P epidemic. In my time at Warkworth I saw a lot of nice kids turning into drugged-up dropouts. Some of our so-called experts need to realise that drugs and alcohol are right at the top of our social diseases and get the balls to do something about it.
I spent a brief stint in Orewa between 2000 and 2003 before moving up to Wellsford. Although it’s been tough at times, my family have always been totally supportive of my job. I’ve been on an on-call roster now for 30-odd years and when the phone goes two or three times in the same night it’s hard on everyone. I was always the first to find out when my teenage sons did something silly and people were always interested to see how I handled it. As a result, my youngest son had to leave his V8 Falcon parked in the garage for a couple of three-month stretches.
As far as I’m concerned the NZ police have been, and still are, a great organisation to work for but they need better back-up in the courts. Young people’s attitudes to authority, and the law in particular, are getting worse because the consequences are not a deterrent. It’s like being hit over the hand with a wet bus ticket.
I’ve always enjoyed my job, I’ve had great support from the community and I’ve worked with a fine bunch of people. The only reason I’m giving up now is that age isn’t on my side and I want to quit while I’m ahead.
When I’m off duty I like to use cabinet making skills I learned from my father and enjoy flying in small aircraft. I briefly held a private pilot’s licence many years ago and I still like to get in the right-hand seat of an aircraft to play around without taking command. Building and flying model aeroplanes at the Springhill Aviation Club effectively combines both interests.
My wife of 39 years, Rose (yes, Rose Rose) and I, love Wellsford and built our house here in 2002. Now I plan to spend my time building kitchens and cabinets from my home workshop fulltime.
