Ben Harvey: Gavin Cowie owns possibly the most slapped face in Australia all because of the ‘Cop enough’ ad

Gavin Cowie owns what is quite possibly the most slapped face in Australia, and not because he says inappropriate things to ladies. Gavin is the star of the WA Police Union’s latest advertising campaign, Cop Enough. He’s probably popped up on your social feed dressed in a blue uniform, or you may have seen him on a billboard. He’s the bloke sporting a black eye above the words “How much will they cop before they stop” or “It hurts more when it’s from your own government”. Those images are quite confronting but nothing compared with the TV ad, which runs for 90 seconds. “I walk into dangerous situations every day,” Gavin’s fake copper says as he walks into focus. “I get attacked by dogs. I get spat on by people I’m trying to help.” It’s after that line that Gavin is slapped across the face by someone off-camera. That’s the first of five full-blooded strikes that are delivered as Gavin talks about the day-to-day pressures of being a police officer. “Drunks swinging bottles at me outside nightclubs. Bricks thrown at my head. Cars driven at me.” Slap. “I see the bodies of teenagers in crashed cars. Kids really. And then I see them again when I close my eyes.” Slap. With each hit Gavin’s reaction changes. You can feel his anger and frustration rising. His breathing gets ever shakier and his right eye starts watering. By the fifth slap he looks like he is doing everything in his power not to beat the living crap out his behind-the scenes tormentor but, like real cops, he contains his rage and endures the abuse as calmly as he can. It is one of the most powerful ads I have seen and a credit to its creators at Fremantle creative agency kwpx&partners. If you haven’t seen the full version, Google “Cop enough campaign” and watch it. I guarantee it will make your blood pressure rise. Gavin is clearly a fine actor and also a committed one because he had to get the scene done in pretty much one take, which saw a lot of unused footage on the floor of the cutting room. Every stumbled line meant going back to square one. As a result, he was slapped 170 times in total. There are no special effects; what you see is a real beating. “I told them to just lay into it,” the 45-year-old told me last week. The crew didn’t need encouraging and by the time the camera stopped rolling (and many ice packs had been applied) his emotions were as raw as his bruised face. Gavin was a petty officer in the Royal Australian Navy before he tried his hand at acting a few years ago. “I wouldn’t say I’m an actor,” he said. “But if you want someone that looks like me to say a few lines then I can do that. “I had a lot to do with medical when I served and that required me to keep up my training outside Defence, so I had a lot to do with the ambos and by extension a lot to do with police. So I had no problem at all with this job, I wanted to give a voice to the cops. They deserve better.” We were talking a couple of days after WA Police Union boss Paul Gale branded as insulting the Cook Government’s latest pay offer. It’s going to be an ugly industrial campaign and you will see more of Gavin’s face as the weeks go by. As confronting as the ad is, with its talk of dead teenagers and getting spat on, the campaign doesn’t come close to describing the full horrors of life on the thin blue line. An advertisement that highlighted that explicit reality would be so sickening it could not be broadcast. Don’t believe me? Consider the following story about a detective investigating the discovery of a badly decomposed body found on the front lawn of a house in Padbury in the early 1990s. I’ve told it before but I’m repeating it for the benefit of the shiny bums in the Treasury Department who are fighting the police union’s pay claim. The rotting body in question was an infant’s. The police called to the scene could not tell whether it was a boy or girl, such was the level of decomposition. To work out how the child died, specifically whether it was a stillbirth, the detective took the body to the State pathology labs, where the lungs were cut out and immersed in water. A lung that sunk suggested the child never drew breath; one that floated indicated the baby died after being born alive. Chain of evidence rules meant the officer (who was a father) had to watch every part of this procedure, from the moment the scalpel was used to slice from the throat to the midriff to expose the tiny ribs. The lung test was inconclusive and the case remains a mystery three decades on. I suspect the image of that child’s butchered body has plagued the detective’s mind every day for those 30-odd years. How do you tell that story in a 90-second ad that’s age-appropriate? “I’d say to the people making the decision about the wage claim to go on a ride-along to experience what police go through but I don’t think they’d handle it,” Gavin said. I agree. Give the cops some damn money.