First Night in the Valley

Karl Matthew Jenkins worked his first Friday-night shift in Fortitude Valley, one of four Stafford officers rostered in to support the Valley's own police on the busiest night of the week. Barely a decade after the Fitzgerald Inquiry had exposed the protected vice that once ran through the district, the Valley had become the city's main nightclub strip, and its Friday and Saturday nights drew thousands of young people from across Brisbane and the outer suburbs into a few crowded blocks around the Brunswick Street and Chinatown malls.

The shift was run by Sergeant Lorraine Pike, a Valley veteran of eleven years who briefed the visiting officers at eight o'clock on the night's known trouble spots, the licensed venues under watch and the procedure for transporting prisoners to the Roma Street watch-house. Karl was paired, as at Stafford, with Constable Dean Harlow. The two spent the first hours on foot patrol along Brunswick Street, moving people on, checking identification at the edges of queues and dealing with the steady low-level business of a Friday night: public urination, a stolen handbag, a man asleep in a doorway.

Shortly before eleven o'clock a bouncer at Mezzanine, a two-storey club on Brunswick Street, flagged the pair down about a girl crying on the footpath outside. Kirra Matthews was sixteen, from Caboolture, and had been turned away at the door after getting into two earlier clubs on a borrowed licence. Her friends were still inside somewhere, she had lost her purse and her train ticket home, and she was drunk and frightened.

Karl dealt with her by the book. He took her details, established her age, explained that she could not be left alone in the Valley, and began the procedure for contacting a parent. Every step was correct, and none of it reached her. The more precisely he spoke, the more distressed she became, and within a few minutes she was refusing to give her home number at all. Harlow stepped in, sat down on the kerb beside her, and talked to her for ten minutes about Caboolture, trains and her friends before she gave him her mother's number herself. Kirra's mother collected her from the Valley police beat an hour later.

At 11.35 a fight broke out between two groups of young men outside the Tunnel nightclub on Ann Street. Karl was first into it. He separated the two most active combatants, Jason Coombes, nineteen, and Bradley Nunn, twenty-one, both labourers from Redcliffe, restrained Coombes without injury to either of them, and held him while Harlow and two Valley constables secured Nunn. Both men were arrested for affray and transported to Roma Street. Karl's notes of the incident, completed at the watch-house before the end of the shift, were the most complete of any officer's that night.

Pike's shift report the following morning commended the Stafford officers' handling of the Ann Street disturbance and recorded the safe return of a juvenile to her family. In conversation with Graham Mitchell later that week she was more specific. The new man from South Australia, she told him, was the best she had seen in a scuffle and the worst she had seen with a crying kid, and Harlow had carried him.