How were you prepared for policing through that process of becoming a police officer?

Well, yeah, I mean, I went to the police academy and there was about 200 of us in my class.

We had some school leavers, so 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds, through to mature age people, 30s, 40s, et cetera, who had had previous careers.

We studied a mix of lectures, classroom, like legislation, procedures, right through to physical training, weapons training, everything you could think of.

So that would be... training with a firearm, driver training, practising search procedures and vehicle stops.

And we had a mock court where we would prepare briefs and be cross-examined by real police prosecutors to gain that experience and that exposure to what it might be like to give evidence in a court setting.

It was exciting.

I'm sort of curious, do you think that would have been possible or are there barriers to doing that in policing?

Did you enjoy being a sergeant?

I did, but it took some adjustment.

It was a challenge.

So I went from being a, what was I, 15 years senior constable.

I was working with colleagues and, you know, had a great little team there.

And then I was promoted within.

And I think it was challenging to be promoted within the unit in hindsight, because you're sort of going from this position of, of being a being a colleague and all of a sudden you you're also you're now responsible for people you're supervising and you're managing a team and and that that brings a different dynamic um definitely took me a little while to get my head around it um and making that step up um because you know now you're You're responsible for deploying colleagues and deploying assets across the state and responding to jobs.

Tell us about Your diagnosis, how did that occur? How did you react to being told?