Police demand more macho name for ‘Taskforce Jenny’

SYDNEY, Tuesday: Superintendent Nick Chalmers of the Wentworthville District Patrol has been stood down amid allegations that he named police taskforces without flair, imagination or metaphorical significance.

Chalmers is under particular fire for his naming of an arson taskforce. Commissioner or Police Peter Ryan deemed the name Taskforce Jenny ‘entirely inappropriate, and quite frankly, drab’. Instead, Ryan would have preferred to see the name Taskforce Phoenix, Operation Firebrand or Taskforce Cedar.

‘I particularly like the name Taskforce Phoenix’, Ryan said. ‘It’s evocative yet subtly and I think the classical allusion is a nice touch. It is true that our officers will not be collecting “cinnamon and spikenard, and myrrh” as Ovid described, nor will they be carrying a nest to the city of
Heliopolis in
Egypt and depositing it in the temple of the Sun, as the
Phoenix was known to do, but at least it is a better name than Taskforce Jenny.

The compromise name that Chalmers put forward – Taskforce Eastern Spotted Quoll – was flatly dismissed by Ryan in mediation yesterday and Chalmers future remained unclear. Speaking at a press conference yesterday, Chalmers’ claimed that ‘the issue is really one of creative control’.

Commissioner Ryan responded, ‘I can accept that a Superintendent as a right to choose a taskforce name – to play around with words and really jazz things up – but it has to be done within reason. If a name without any metaphorical resonance is chosen, it should at least sound bravely and manly. I would have found the names Taskforce Condor, Taskforce Cruiser or Operation Blue Steel entirely appropriate but girls’ names are just so not us’.

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