Two Halves of a Review

Senior Sergeant Graham Mitchell called Karl Matthew Jenkins into his office at Stafford police station at the start of the morning shift to tell him that his promotion to senior constable had been approved, eleven months after his transfer from South Australia. In the same meeting Mitchell offered him a part-time secondment to the Metropolitan North District's Investigations Support unit, to be split with his general duties shifts at Stafford. Karl accepted both.

Mitchell had put him forward for the promotion and for the secondment himself, and his reasons were mixed. Karl's casework through 2000 had been the strongest at the station, and his capacity to link apparently separate property offences had already cleared several burglaries that would otherwise have sat open. The secondment rewarded that. It also placed him in work that suited a solitary analytical officer and depended less on the partnerships he had so far failed to sustain. Constable Dean Harlow's request for reassignment had been granted at the end of December, and Karl began the year without a regular partner.

Mitchell had finalised Karl's annual review the previous Friday, and he went through it with him before the meeting ended. It rated his investigative ability, documentation and conduct under pressure as exceptional. It recorded, as his South Australian reviews had before it, concerns about the hours he worked, his limited engagement with the rest of the shift, and the difficulty other officers had in working alongside him. Mitchell told him plainly that the second half of the review would matter as much as the first if he wanted to be a detective. Karl listened, agreed with each point, thanked him, and signed the review without comment.

The Investigations Support unit was run from the district office by Detective Sergeant Paul Henning, who had agreed to take Karl on Mitchell's recommendation after reading his file. Henning's terms were clear: two days a week assisting detectives with follow-up interviews, evidence logging, timeline reconstruction and the analysis of property crime series, with no undertaking that the work would lead to a detective position. Karl was to begin the following Monday.

News of the promotion went round Stafford before the end of the shift and divided the meal room. Some officers thought it overdue for a man whose paperwork was the best in the station. Others resented the speed of it for a southern transfer who had been in Queensland less than a year and still did not drink with the shift. Karl did not hear most of either view, and spent the afternoon finishing a burglary file he had been working on since the week before.