The Only Cop in Town

Two ladies from the bowling club across the road have an important matter to discuss with Senior Constable Frank Taylor, the only cop in Stratford, 230 km east of Melbourne. Taylor greets Marge and Joan at the front fence of his house, which is next door to the brand-new police station. The grand opening is in a couple of weeks, and some bigwigs of policing are expected to attend. In charge of catering, the ladies want to check on numbers and whether Frank would prefer sandwiches or sausage rolls as the morning tea’s centerpiece. Though Taylor can be of little help on either count, the ladies like their local guardian very much. “A very nice chap … a down-to-earth man,” they chorus. “Everyone speaks highly of him.”

Contemplating morning-tea fare mightn’t sound exciting. But it’s not as though it’s distracting Taylor from a baffling abduction case. With a population of 1,800, Stratford has the lowest crime rate per capita in Wellington Shire. “The youth of this town respect the town,” says Taylor, and the older folk fill Stratford’s three churches on Sundays.

Stratford might see two or three crimes a month, says Taylor, 52, just back from a month’s sick leave for a torn hamstring. These might be a drive-off from a petrol station or drunken driving on the Princes Highway; this morning, reports have come in of graffiti on road signs on the outskirts of town. Last Christmas there was a spate of thefts of solar-powered garden lights that Taylor wasn’t able to crack. “They’re unsolved crimes,” he says, as is the disappearance of a duck from a local house around the same time: “I don’t think it was a fox.” There was a murder in Stratford just three doors down from the police sta-tion a few years ago, when a teenaged boy stabbed a man in his 50s after an argument about money. But Taylor was off duty that night, so police from neigh-boring Maffra made the arrest.

That was fine by Taylor, a father of five who hasn’t drawn his gun in 26 years in the force. Now in his fourth year in Stratford, he’s happy dividing his time between patrolling the highway and manning the station; happy for the locals to call him “Frank” on the streets and in the shops; happy to make his mark in small ways. Lately, he’s been targeting the safety habits of pushbike riders: “You’ll notice,” he says, “the high ratio of helmet wearers in town.”

This is nothing like policing in Melbourne, where Taylor spent his first seven years as a cop. It’s quieter, subtler work aimed at teaching young people the difference between right and wrong. There are five locals, he says, whom “I’ve had to visit on a number of occasions. But they’re not bad people. This is not a job where you have to be heavy-handed.” Retirement is six years away and Taylor wants to see out his time right where he is. “I could never go back to a metropolitan area as a policeman,” he says. “I love it here. It’s a town of good people. That sounds corny, but they really are. They say a policeman’s lot is not a happy one. I beg to differ.”