(Image: Facebook/The Hills Police)

If Crikey achieves nothing else as a publication, we wish to dedicate our every fibre and sinew to stamping out the scourge of cops on social media trying to be “funny” and “relatable”. 

We’ve long chronicled this blight on public life, from the merely irritating whimsy of State of Origin “banter”, or Queensland police promising to investigate “how The Wiggles created such a banger” during the Hottest 100, to the New South Wales police producing visceral TikToks that simulate being stamped on by a cop’s boot.

The latest addition to this list is the bizarre recruitment ad from the Facebook page for the police that cover the Hills district north-west of Sydney, aimed apparently at local Year 12s:

Famously, there is nothing a teenager wants to hear more than “You should be a cop”. And if that weren’t enough, nothing shows respect to young people like describing guns as “pew pews” and cars with sirens as “wee woo cars”. Then again, perhaps no method of youth engagement could fail to improve on former minister for police David Elliott, who said he’d be happy for police to strip-search his own children, and famously once got out of his wee woo car to have a scrap with a 17-year-old.

Unlike most of this kind of thing, someone at the Hills Police Area Command actually has given this one a second thought — at time of writing it appears to have been taken down. Hopefully they will follow this policy to its logical conclusion, removing other “funny” posts like this one listing the differences between when one should call an ambulance and when one should call a taxi, and this one, where they trial “new bumper stickers” which read “honk if you have warrants”.