Geelong’s top traffic cop reflects on a fulfilling career and the love of his family as he prepares to hang up his uniform after 44 years in the force
THE family photographs pinned to his office walls have helped Senior Sergeant Shane Coles through some of the region’s toughest days.
Geelong’s top traffic cop says family has been a key driver in his ability to help steer the region’s stretched highway patrol resources through some of its toughest times.
And few who have come across him professionally would know that family includes a very famous stepson — internationally loved chef Curtis Stone.
For 44 years the senior sergeant has donned the navy threads and Victoria Police patch as a second skin — 23 of those years have been at the helm of the state’s largest highway patrol.
Yesterday he signed off for the last time after a career that’s awarded him gratitude and grief like no other.
“From 1974 to now I’ve been in various areas and seen some both horrific and enjoyable things. I just hope any legacy from my time here in regards to road safety would be if I knew I’d saved one life,” he says.
“Just one, and I’d say my career was a success.”
Sen-Sgt Coles signed up to serve the law as a 16-year-old in Melbourne’s Keilor East.
His high school friends had fallen prey to the growing heroin trade, and he felt the call to make a change.
A self-proclaimed “geek”, he was suddenly arresting those very boys with whom he’d once shared schoolyards.
“In the early days, you never knew what to expect. I remember being at Coode Island (August 21, 1991), the fire on the docks in Melbourne that nearly blew up the city,” he says.
“We were watching the seagulls just fall from the sky while trying to get people out and away from the chemical fire.
“We were taken back to Russell St (police headquarters) and told to bag and destroy our uniforms. To be told to take your uniform home and destroy it was quite frightening.” After working through the crime cars unit and Brunswick’s traffic operations division, Sen-Sgt Coles moved to the Geelong area in 1999 to take the wheel of the region’s traffic management unit as more than 30 people were dying in local crashes every year.
That number, he says, has since more than halved.
“I think the hardest thing is you go to a scene and someone’s just hanging in there and they don’t make it. When they’re trapped in a car, you see the struggle our emergency services go through trying to save their life,” he says. “Some would absolutely collapse in horror.
“The worst one I ever saw was the old dear who had been to the doctor and she’d just been told she had terminal cancer and walked down the road and straight under a rubbish collection truck.
“I got very angry and annoyed at a lot of the public that day because they were stickybeaking. They didn’t realise what we were trying to protect them from.”
It’s cases like this, where investigators never truly know what went on in the mind of a person in the days and hours before they died, that have been the most challenging.
Investigators rely on critical evidence and technology to painstakingly piece together a person’s final moments when victim statements are forever unattainable.
Training, he says, has greatly improved, allowing highway patrol officers to accurately determine whether someone has run off the road deliberately or by accident.
And the “tool kits” they use will only improve, he says.
“The thing with crime is it fluctuates as you arrest. But road trauma, it can happen in a split second,” he says.
“You wouldn’t think Joe Blow could cause it, but something can tip it to a fatal and these are the people you’re dealing with most of the time, normal people who’ve simply done the wrong thing at the wrong time. “That silly mistake, it kills people.” Sen-Sgt Coles pauses to reflect on the photographs on his office wall.
They’re the smiling faces of his two sons and five grandchildren who live in Los Angeles — a family he’s spent too many nights away from while working to protect the families of strangers.
“My life will now be family and personal endeavours. Trips to the States,” he says.
“I love my photography and plan to work with Cottage by the Sea as a volunteer so I’ll still be involved in the community, just wearing a different hat.”
His advice to the next senior sergeant to lead the Geelong Highway Patrol?
“Keep your finger on the pulse,” he says.
“Things will go up and down. We will always have good and bad years and there isn’t always a reason behind it. Try to be seen and let the public know we haven’t taken our eye off the ball.
“You’re going to upset people too, but sometimes they need a kick in the arse to get something done.”
Sen-Sgt Coles’ wife Lorraine spent yesterday morning washing the stains out of the officer’s last-ever police shirt.
With joy in her voice, she says she’s the luckiest woman in the world to have met the traffic officer who became a doting stepfather to her two sons.
“From day one he wanted to be a police officer, he left school and even did his leaving through the academy and what a fantastic police man he’s been. A fair cop,” she says.
“As the wife of a policeman it’s always been important for me to sit down with him when he got home from his shift, stay awake until he got home so he could tell me about it.
“Now it’s time to enjoy the next phase of our lives.”