My Account
Warkworth Senior Constable Jon Williams brought the curtain down on 30 years of policing last month, when he retired from the force to pursue a career in real estate. Although he says joining the force when he was 22 was the best thing he ever did, he doesn’t hesitate to admit that he is glad his son Lachlan and daughter Alice have chosen different paths. He sat down with Jannette Thompson at his home in Point Wells …
Police officers work in a violent environment these days, much more so than when I started. Sure, drunks on a Saturday night in central Auckland didn’t mind picking a fight, but you never felt like they really wanted to hurt you.
There were no peppers sprays or tasers, and guns were kept locked in a safe at the station. Over the years, the job has also become complicated with many levels of compliance. For instance, I used to fill out an arrest form by dictating the details to a typist and it would take about an hour. Today, officers have to do it themselves and the forms can take up to eight hours to finish. We were also well paid back then. I started on $40,000 when you could buy a house in Auckland for $120,000. Now they are on about $60,000 but a house costs over $1 million. Many of the young officers have to live at home because they can’t afford to rent, let alone dream of owning their own home. I feel like I was in the police force during the best years. It was fun with a lot of camaraderie. We worked together and partied together, and I probably would have worked for free because it was such a great life.
The idea of being a policeman started when I was still a kid in Ruakaka, where my Dad was a pilot with the harbour board, working out of Marsden Point and Whangarei. In those days, nobody really asked kids what they thought they might be good at or enjoy when they left school; a job was a job and you considered yourself lucky to have one. The first time I enquired about joining the police, they told me to go away and grow-up. It hurt, but it was good advice. So, at 16, I started a building apprenticeship at the Marsden A oil-fired power station. When it shut down, I finished my time with Hills Construction in Whangarei. It was then off to Australia’s Gold Coast and later Adelaide, where I worked in construction although, for a while, I was the membership officer at a karate club. The club was probably where I started to see that I actually liked that interaction with people. Sadly, it was the tragic death of my only sister, Julia, that bought me back to New Zealand. She died when the car her best friend was driving hit a power pole. Her friend was drunk and Julia was only 18. As you can imagine, it was a horrific time for my family, particularly my parents. My two brothers both had work commitments so I moved back in with Mum and Dad for a while, and started to think again about what I wanted to do with my life.
Knocking around those building sites in Aussie taught me how to get on with people from all walks of life who had many different points of view. I learned not to judge a person by their appearance. Some of the roughest types on the site turned out to be the most caring. When I was back in Ruakaka, I visited our local cop Ian Clayton-Brown and he encouraged me to have another go. Nine months later, I was headed for the Royal NZ Police College in Porirua and after six months training, joined Auckland Central. We started learning how to be police officers by attending everything from domestics to fights at bars and nightclubs. Later, I worked in Newmarket, Glen Innes and Onehunga, which were pretty rough areas in those days.
After five years of frontline policing and shift work, the negativity started to grind me down. I stopped enjoying the job so I switched to the fraud squad for a couple of years, then moved to a new squad that was focusing on tracking and prosecuting paedophiles. Today it’s called the child exploitation squad. There were three of us on the team and even though we were experienced officers, we were shocked by what we discovered – not only how much was going on but the level of depravity. The abuse that some of the victims had suffered and never spoken about was very disturbing. Most of the cases involved boys, particularly vulnerable Maori and Pacific Island boys, who were easy targets. Girls grow up learning to be wary of male strangers, but boys don’t. Typically, the perpetrators were normal members of society, often married with children of their own. Money was often the bait.
Sadly, there were several school teachers and one case that sticks in my mind involved a high-profile entertainment bigwig. When we arrested him, he had a briefcase full of tapes, recordings of his activities. The guy went to jail where he hung himself, but not before I had to watch every tape to match the victims’ statements with what I saw on the screen. Some of those images were so horrific – I don’t think I will ever be able to erase them from my mind.
When my wife Jenny and I started a family, I felt I needed to get away from that type of police work so I moved from criminal investigations to youth aid. And I never looked back! Working with youth in a preventative way was a bit of a new direction for police in the early 2000s. Normally, we only got involved when they broke the law. Auckland’s street kids were virtually invisible so that’s where we started, in plain clothes with an unmarked van.
They were a feral little tribe, sleeping under bridges and in abandoned buildings, stealing and breaking into cars, and some of the girls as young as 12 worked as prostitutes. We’d pick them up and find safe places for them to stay, and try to help them get their lives back on track. Without exception, they came from homes where they had been physically, mentally or sexually abused. Our code was never to swear at them and it was amazing how just being nice to them broke down barriers. They just weren’t used to that sort of behaviour from police.
I found the work heart-breaking at times, but also very rewarding. Sometimes I would come home and tell Jenny some of their stories and she’d be in tears. But I found I enjoyed the work – with youth you feel like there is still a chance to turn them around and once we got them on side, they were very loyal. Kids aren’t born bad. It’s the environments they are raised in that send them down that road. Eventually I became the youth sergeant for the whole of Auckland and the police prosecutor in Auckland’s Youth Court, the second busiest in New Zealand. It was a baptism of fire, with no training, but the Youth Court works quite differently than criminal courts. Rather than being adversarial, they are collaborative with police, youth aid officers, lawyers and the judiciary working together for the best outcomes for the child. The worst thing that can happen is to send a kid to the youth jail. Once that happens, you’ve lost them because it only makes their behaviour worse.
Eventually I decided I’d had enough of city policing and wanted to return to a rural environment and was appointed the Youth Aid Officer in Warkworth. Jenny wasn’t keen to move at first, but when she saw Point Wells, she fell in love with it. That was 15 years ago. The kids were six and four at the time, and it’s been a fantastic place for them to grow up, although living in a small community where Dad was the youth officer was hard on them at times.
Rural policing with a good team like we had in Warkworth was a lot of fun. It’s also been a real privilege to be involved in Springboard’s growth, from an alternative education school at Port Albert with 10 kids to what it is today, an incredible organisation that helps kids across the spectrum. Springboard founder Gary Diprose is just one of those guys who has a vision and can make it happen. Coupled with the support of the Police and quality people such as former Mahurangi College principal David McLeod, politicians Mark Mitchell and Tracey Martin, Homebuilders and the Presbyterian Church, it made for a pretty formidable team. Ultimately, you only get change when you have this sort of community collaboration. Since Springboard arrived, youth crime has plummeted. At one time, I had 10 young people before the courts – at the moment there are none. Early intervention makes such a difference and I can only see more good things happening following Springboard’s purchase of Sheepworld, which will give it room to grow.
I’ve had some serious back issues since I was a teenager and had my lower back fused when I was 40. It was why I was never going to stay in the building game for too long and it’s one of the reasons I’ve decided to retire from the police. Wearing the stab-proof police vest was very hard and then last year, a disc in my neck collapsed which required more surgery. Real estate seemed like a good way to spend the last chapter of my working life because I’ve got my building background, plus I’ve renovated a couple of houses, and I really enjoy meeting people. I got to know Mark Macky through our mutual interest in the Omaha Beach Surf Club and Matakana School, so joining the Bayleys team felt like a good fit. I’m not nervous about starting a new career at my time of life – I believe if you have honesty and integrity, no matter what age you are, things will always fall into place.
