Crime

Congratulations hoons: you are officially the most annoying people in Australia, by a statistical mile. Almost half - yes, half - of all Australians believe dangerous or noisy driving is a problem in their neighbourhood, according to data published today.

At first it might seem staggering that 45.3 per cent of Australians say hooning is a problem in their neighbourhood but when you think about it, how surprising is it really? How often are phone conversations or the break-up line in Sex and The City drowned out by some tool gunning his Subaru down the street? And for every single person in the street who has settled in for the evening, the experience is exactly the same.

(While we’re at it can I add to that the guys noodling about on their Harleys, not just the bikies who have an excuse but the middle managers from accounting firms who take out the Chopper after a stressful day of Excel.)

Continue reading "Great country, shame about the hoons" »

WHAT sort of a society breeds little bastards like these?

Thats what Britain is asking itself after the sickening details of how a ten-year-old boy and his 11-year-old brother tortured two other boys to within an inch of their lives were made public here last week.

The facts of the case, which has echoes in the killing of two-year-old Jamie Bulger in Liverpool in 1993, have provoked a storm of anger and re-opened the debate about Broken Britain and where it all went wrong for a once proud country.

Continue reading "Postcard from London: What society breeds these kids?" »

We should cut the coppers some slack as they grapple with the public handling of the attacks on Indian students in Melbourne.

Policing has long been a closed culture. Less than a generation ago the only way police reporters could get stories was to spend months or even years hanging around the Police Club, drinking with detectives and slowly building enough trust to get the inside running on big stories. These days, whenever a cat gets stuck up a tree there’s an expectation that an all-in press conference will follow within the hour to discuss its breed, name, and how the pesky little varmint got up there in the first place. 

There is no point in police complaining about this. It’s a reflection of the public’s legitimate conviction that information should flow freely from every arm of government. People have a right to know what is happening in their community and, these days, it is the job of the police to tell them.

Continue reading "Police credibility decamps in a northerly direction" »

That’s it. We’ve arrived at what is officially termed the Dizzy Limit.

NSW Police, warming to their recent self-appointment as a freelance social policy think tank, trustee of public morality and holy rolling temperance society, have announced that Australia Day should be as dry as the Nullarbor Plain. Starting now.

They have reasonable cause. Shockingly, some people treat such occasions as an opportunity to get on the squirt and a small minority of those consequently get stupid and some proportion of those play up and a fraction of those become violent and commit felonies.

Continue reading "Sorry officer, but I’m drinking for Australia" »

Amid the so-far unfounded speculation over whether the murder of 21-year-old student Nitin Garg in Melbourne was racially motivated, it’s worth remembering what we do know: a brutal killer is at large in Melbourne.

According to his housemates who spoke to a doctor at the hospital hours after their friend was killed last weekend, the young man was slashed from the abdomen up to the heart.

“Whoever did this knows how to kill,” Sandeep Sandeep, who lived with Garg, told The Age.

Continue reading "Crying wolf on racism" »

What really defines these three aspects of our society: Its race or colour? Peace or violence? Street crime or racial crime?

You might have thought that race, peace and street crime are more commonly seen in our society. People generally do. But take a second to think about your answers. 

To my mind, every person who lives in Australia should be given a ‘fair go’, an ideal that many Australians aim to hold. Australia was built by immigrants, and the influence of immigrants stretches broadly throughout society.

Continue reading "We need to face up to the reality of race based crime" »

Yesterday The Punch went to Footscray in Melbourne’s West to talk to its people about crime and racism following the stabbing death of a young Indian student in their suburb.

Footscray is not a particularly nice place. That’s not to say it’s a bad place, but there’s a reason the yuppies in the “run rabbit run” Melbourne tourism ads didn’t play hide and seek around Footscray station.

Footscray is the kind of suburb that is pretty typical of outer urban suburbs throughout the world: a working class suburb close enough to the city that becomes a cheap base for brand new arrivals to live and set up shop. The suburb’s density and multicultural population means it often described in terms like “cultural melting pot” by people who see it as a great source of authentic Pho soup.
It’s also the suburb where 21-year-old Nitin Garg was stabbed to death on his way to work at the local Hungry Jacks.

Continue reading "Talking crime, violence and racism with Footscray" »

Impartiality is everything in journalism but at the risk of sounding slightly biased it’s fair to say that if the NSW Government were a dog you would take it down to the bottom of the yard and shoot it.

Discussing the innate and irreversible badness of the NSW Government is about the most banal thing you can do these days. If anything this may be its most evil legacy – the cruelling of casual political discussion.

It’s like the inspired Gary Larson cartoon featuring nerds in hell - “Hot enough for ya?” – where remarking that NSW seems to be in political strife is as profound and insightful as noting that Germany has a bit of a chequered history, the Cuban economy could probably be doing better, or that Afghanistan has historically under-invested in infrastructure.

Continue reading "Moral lectures from the ethically challenged" »

The Daily Telegraph ran the story today as its Monday lead, “Drug lords hit town – cartels get rich on Aussie hunger for cocaine”.

A “generational shift” the paper explained, has pushed the demand for the drug making Australia the world’s most lucrative coke market. 

While this was surely a shock for the few Sydneysiders who haven’t stepped out to a bar, club, trendy restaurant or party in the past few years, for the rest of us, the story was more a case of no shit Sherlock than shock. Because, if you live in Sydney and are under the age of 55, chances are you will run into the drug every day if you knew what you were looking for.

Continue reading "Sydney awash with coke" »

SHY Keenan (corr) doesn’t like to call herself a victim nor does she like the term survivor. Both imply a resolution to an issue.

But from the age of four she was systematically raped, beaten, degraded, filmed then, at the age of 10, sold to a gang of dockworkers in the UK for four more years of abuse.

In 2000 more than 25 years after the abuse, she armed herself with a small camera lent by the BBC and filmed one of her attackers boasting about his actions. Two years later she watched in satisfaction from the back of Liverpool Crown Court as three of her attackers, including a stepfather, were handed jail terms.

Continue reading "Abused as a child, with an angry message to Australia" »

A few weeks ago we ran a column here on The Punch examining the emergence of an angry core of Australian blokes who use cyberspace as a forum to unload on how women have done them wrong.

The piece documented how even the most innocent columns on breast cancer, maternity leave, childcare or body image become a vehicle whereby crotchety men can bemoan the apparent neglect of men’s health issues, the economic pressures which single dads face, the raw deal they get from the courts.

The article had the unsurprising effect of attracting, well, an angry core of Australian blokes who use cyberspace as a forum to unload on how women have done them wrong. There was a depressingly pertinent example of this mindset last week and it’s worth pinging the perpetrators over it, as it demonstrated all the nonsensical self-pity of the men-are-victims-too brigade.

Continue reading "Even White Ribbon Day is a sinister feminist plot" »

The ability of Prime Minister Rudd and his Government to “talk tough” has never been in question.  It’s the one thing Labor actually do well.

Remember that first heady year in office when they declared a war on virtually everything – from childhood obesity and whaling, to banker’s salaries, unemployment and even the global financial crisis itself?
Conveniently, the rhetoric has never had to bear resemblance to reality. 

Continue reading "Tough on crime is an empty slogan for ALP" »

On July 18 in the quiet leafy suburb of Epping, residents woke to find that their daily paper had not been delivered. The community would soon learn of the brutal murders of newsagency owner, Min Lin and his family who were found bludgeoned to death in their beds.

In the weeks to follow, a strong sense of community support and condolence for the Lin family was shown with cards and flowers laid on the newsagency shop front for the only surviving member of the family, 15-year-old Brenda.

On August 8, over a thousand mourners from the local community paid their respects to the five slain Lin family members at the Badgery Pavilion in Homebush.

Continue reading "Grief beyond words: farewelling a slain family" »

Did I read the story correctly? Now police can’t even fine a person for drunken behaviour in public places? Time to get serious with the idiots who drink to excess, befoul public spaces, wreck the ‘quiet enjoyment’ of others, and divert our accident and emergency teams…

Here’s the basic principle – if your drunkenness results in police officers, or ambulance officers, or hospital teams, having to deal with you, you pay the full cost of this intervention – call it the ‘abuser pays’ principle.

Now I’d be in favour of bringing back the charge of public drunkenness, but I suspect that the paperwork involved these days for police officers in processing someone charged with an offence deters them from doing so, and we probably don’t have the cell space available.

Continue reading "Abuser pays – make drunken idiots pay for their mayhem" »

The kid’s “parents” - his “parents” are his mum and her current boyfriend - don’t give a stuff. He hates school, and teachers are relieved when he truants. He will not likely complete the school certificate.

He’s never learnt to control his tongue, and his is the discourse of the gutter. He’s already been before the children’s court a couple of times, and is not scared by the police – in fact one of his highs is the foot chase after a bit of rock throwing.

His security and identity are found in his small group of mates. He can look forward to a life, to quote Hobbes, which is poor, brutish and nasty. Unfortunately for the tax payer, it will not be short.

Continue reading "Failing kids, failing the community" »

Cities have personalities, they have a tone to their collective voice, and my former home town of Adelaide has a voice which can generally be described as courteous, civil, thoughtful, prepared to make a point, but also willing to listen.

My adoptive town of the past decade often finds itself at the other end of the register. Sydney is often so boisterous as to be uncouth. It can be pig-headed, abusive and rude. In its political and social discourse, Sydney’s general modus operandi is to start with a full-blown argument and work your way backwards towards civility from there.

But in the NSW school holiday fortnight just gone, which we passed happily back in SA, there was a very different edge to Adelaide’s voice. The normally sedate city sounded depressingly like Sydney at its unthinking and aggressive worst as its leaders and citizens dealt with a genuinely terrifying spate of crimes linked to the so-called Gang of 49.

Continue reading "Crimewave turns our most genteel city into a moshpit" »

On Friday week, October 30, the annual Reclaim the Night marches will be held in cities and towns around Australia. Find more information here. The Punch received this contribution from a young woman who has asked us to publish it anonymously to chronicle her story of surviving sexual assault.

Today I did something I never thought I would do again – I pulled out a figure-hugging outfit from my closet and put it on. I even made it out the door and to work still wearing it.

This particular outfit was a favourite for some years, but ever since an article in a newspaper four years ago I have been unable to wear it without feeling vulnerable and uncomfortable.

You see, I am a rape survivor.

Continue reading "Reclaiming the night: one woman’s story of survival" »

There are plenty of normal Australians – normal being defined as prone to uncharacteristic lapses of judgment – who have a dark tale involving an incident of drink-driving where they could easily have killed themselves, a friend, an unsuspecting stranger.

Whenever I see former British Prime Minister Tony Blair I’m reminded of mine. Unlike most of my mates I got through my teens and most of my 20s without ever drink-driving, in large part because I didn’t bother getting my licence until I was 22 and escaped the road-related rattiness that comes with youth.

All except for the day of the 1997 British election, when with friends I’d attended a dawn breakfast at the National Press Club in Canberra to watch the BBC coverage, where we ate a hearty English breakfast laid on by the British High Commission, washed down with English beer. Lots of English beer.

Continue reading "Let’s stop taking the piss over drink-driving" »

Steal a helicopter. Dress like ninjas.

Show you have a sense of humour by placing a bag outside the cops’ helicopter hanger with the word BOMB written on it. This will stop the police chasing you in the sky.

Scatter small sharp objects on the roads around the bank you’re targeting to slow down approaching police cars.

Continue reading "Now this is how to rob a bank" »

Any minute now an undercover policeman is sure to phone. You see, I’ve put word out I want to hire a hitman.

Have you ever noticed when a normally law-abiding citizen tries to solicit a murder, they always end up procuring a covert cop?

It got me wondering - how hard is it to put a contract on someone’s head without entangling the fuzz?

Continue reading "How I tried - and failed - to hire a hitman" »

130 million.

That’s how many credit card details Miami resident Albert Gonzalez is alleged to have stolen by hacking into US companies over recent years.

Gonzales hasn’t been the only one busy stealing financial credentials from legitimate businesses who have collated data from our online and offline transactions, others have targeted home computers using malicious software (malware) or tricked them out of us via phishing or fraudulent websites.

Continue reading "When it comes to web safety, we’re going nowhere fast" »

Since the first caveman caved in the head of his rival with a sharpened rock, it hasn’t taken us long to use new inventions to be naughty.

And so it is with the internet and every fad it spawns. It seems it’s only a matter of time before some creative crooks find in every new popular website or net gimmick a new way to commit dastardly deeds.

Like Welshman Brian Lewis who was last week jailed for life for murdering his wife (and mother of his four children) because he noticed she had changed her status to “single” on Facebook. Sadly, it’s just the latest in a string of examples of the misuse of new inventions that should be bringing us together.

Here’s our top five:

Continue reading "If there’s a way to be bad, you’ll find it on the Internet" »

I’m trying to think of an intro that won’t make me sound like a Dirty Harry-style vigilante. But I can’t so I’ll just admit it – if serial paedophile Dennis Ferguson moved into my suburb I’d be out on the street with the rest of the neighbours demanding he be kicked out immediately, and asking why he was ever let out of jail in the first place.

With one exception, which I’ll deal with further down, all the wise-headed counsel against mob hysteria is coming from people who haven’t just discovered that their new next-door neighbour kidnapped and raped three children.

Or that he’s been charged with other aberrant or disturbing conduct since then too. And is still quite obviously as mad as a meat axe, a genuinely scary-looking weirdo who would probably be safer and happier if he were still in custody, rather than popping up in an endless series of new locations across our continent, on every occasion confronted by parents who become frightened and angry when they realise who’s just moved in.

Continue reading "In defence of the angry mob" »

There’s one civil liberty which is being glossed over In the debate over the response to street crime in the Melbourne CBD. The freedom to do your job without having the crap kicked out of you.

The sickening attack on a plain clothes officer in Little Bourke Street early yesterday - the copper had his jaw broken by a drunken yobbo who king-hit him from behind - has prompted calls from the Victorian Police Union for mandatory jail time for anyone found guilty of assaulting police.

The proposal will no doubt be criticised by civil libertarians as a draconian over-reaction.

Continue reading "Bash a cop, go directly to jail" »

On the current, sickening trends, the number of Mexicans killed in the drug-related bloodshed which has paralysed the country since January 2007 will hit 10,000 within the next few weeks, or possibly even days.

To put that in perspective, an estimated 3500 people died in the 30-year period of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. It also eclipses the number of American troops killed in the War in Iraq, which at the latest count stands at 4333.

Australia’s sizeable cokehead community - even the casual users who had a discreet line in the loo last night at some groovy Sydney wine bar - should give themselves a quiet pat on the back for the role they’ve played in the deaths of these people.

Continue reading "How poseurs and clubbers helped kill 10,000 Mexicans" »

July and August have seen a lot of activity around the new National Broadband Network (NBN).  Three Tasmanian towns will be the first linked in the network that will eventually stretch all the way around Australia.  The Prime Minister has likened the NBN project to the Snowy Mountains Scheme.

The plan is for the NBN to bring 100 megabits of data, per second, to 90% of Australian homes - right to the front door - which is very different to today’s broadband experience.  Actually, it’s a bit like trading up from a ride-on lawn mower to a sports car.

Politics and the economic and technical hurdles of building such a national network aside, super-fast broadband will deliver economic and social benefits.  And risks.

Continue reading "Personal security forgotten in Rudd’s rush to broadband" »

Ask an Australian if crime is getting worse, and most will say - wrongly - that it is. Crime in Victoria, state authorities reported proudly yesterday, is down 25 per cent over eight years.

Yet they also announced another 120 police would be put on Melbourne’s streets with new powers to search for weapons, because - at least in Victoria’s experience - crime is decreasing, but the violence isn’t.

The public perception that crime is on the rise is understandable when you hear the shock and disbelief ringing through the words of Brenda Lin, in messages to her murdered family at their memorial service in Sydney.

Continue reading "No wonder we’re fearful amid crimes like the Lin killings" »

What a sin! The National Press Club actually had the temerity to invite bikers and, an even worse devil, an academic, to address their members! After decades of weekly rants from pompous politicians and bloated businessmen they broke from tradition and dived into the dark side.

Even worse the bikers and academic questioned the wisdom of politicians making stupid laws. As if our moral and upright legislators would ever push the “lock them up and throw away the key button” just to win over the law and order vote.

But make no mistake the South Australian and New South Wales laws are particularly stupid. Forget about the blatant violation that these laws bring to the justice system and just think about their consequences.

Continue reading "Devils, bikers and the National Press Club" »

My grandmother is 92 years old and lives in public housing in Adelaide’s southern suburbs. She is a custodian of wonderful old Australian expressions and a woman of firm and earthy convictions. One of her convictions is that Sydney is basically a dump, “a den of iniquity” as she puts it, its harbour wasted on spivs, tarts, crooks and hookers. A morally-bankrupt dive which has never really shaken off its uncouth convict past, and where no-one of sound mind would choose to live.

I’m starting to think she might be on to something.

This might sound odd given that it’s barely a month since I penned a sweetheart’s letter to my adoptive home of 10 years by listing the 40 things I love about Sydney.

This column is about the one thing I really hate, and am hating more with each passing day. It’s not the roads, it’s not the cost of living, heaven forbid it’s not even the State Government. It’s Sydney’s out-of-control gangster culture, which in the past few months has gone from a relatively controlled background phenomenon to a full-blown cult of violence and vanity, where the authorities have been made to look like fools as the lawless increasingly act as they wish, egged on - most alarmingly - by apparently sane people who come over all giggly and start twirling their hair in the presence of drug-dealers, bikie leaders and stand-over men.

Continue reading "Crims and their clique turn Sydney into an open sewer" »

Bashings, killings, rapes, shootings, stabbings, and murders – we hear about them every day, with alarming frequency.

Crime is so much part of our lives that the horrifying detail of them flits through our consciousness faster than it took me to type this sentence.

Rarely do we stop and think – properly – what these people, the victims of these terrifying stories, are actually going through.

We’re numb to their pain, and perhaps for good reason. But how do they do it?

Continue reading "First, get out of bed. How victims of crime keep living" »

Australians are the biggest per capita users of ecstasy in the world, a statistic no one in their right mind can believe is one to be proud of.

Politicians routinely hatch solutions to the growing degradation of our collective intellect caused by the misuse of amphetamines but they routinely ignore a simple solution to the problem.

That solution will again be put to the nation’s police ministers and the new Federal Home Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor when they meet in Perth tomorrow. It involves the very simple step of regulating the import of presses used to make ecstasy tablets.

Continue reading "One simple way to take ecstasy pills off the street" »

This graphic from news.com.au today:

In case you’ve been buried in spreadsheets or meetings all afternoon:

JUDY Moran is one of three people arrested over the murder of her brother-in-law Desmond “Tuppence” Moran.

You can read the story here.

And this from the Herald Sun:

Police say a 43-year-old man is expected to be charged with one count of murder, while a 64-year-old woman and a 45-year-old woman are expected to be charged with being an accessory to murder.

I would never presume to pre-empt the outcome of the Royal Commission into the Victorian bushfires, the worst natural disaster Australia has endured.

The speed and ferocity of the blazes that engulfed those quiet rural towns, and shattered so many lives and families remains beyond comprehension.

.

People who haven’t seen such devastation first-hand still find it difficult to imagine. Those who endured that day will find it impossible to forget.

My first experience as a witness to the devastation caused by bushfire was back in 1983, in the aftermath of Ash Wednesday

Continue reading "Bugging the firebugs: when safety trumps civil liberties" »

In the movies the “underworld” stays on the right side of uncivilised – law abiding citizens, other than small-business owners in the wrong part of town never have to see it, interact with it, or admit to their parents they may have been out on a date with it once or twice.

But in Sydney, the line between the “underworld” and the rest of has always been a bit blurred.

A couple of years ago it wasn’t a red carpet without at least two members of the Bra Boys. The big PR fish was big wave surfer Koby Abberton, but if you couldn’t get him any old Abberton would do, even Jai, who was tried, but found not guilty of the murder of Anthony Hines.

Continue reading "Sydney’s red carpet running redder than usual" »

Civil libertarians around the country have condemned my new anti-crime gang laws aimed at outlaw bikie gangs. Defence lawyers and pseudo-academics have lined up to tell the public that the bikie gangs are a harmless sub-culture comprised of grandparents who simply like a ride on big bikes.

Following the passing of our most recent law, we’ve seen demonstrations by hundreds of bikies from around the country converging on Adelaide in so-called “Freedom Rides”, an insulting reprise of the civil rights movement in the US.

But for outlaw motorcycle gangs, it’s a different kind of freedom.

Continue reading "Defending the right of bikers to bash, kill, steal, deal" »

ONE of the best columns of the year to date was this week’s hilarious, bang-on rant by former foreign minister Alexander Downer, who used his regular spot in Adelaide’s The Advertiser to get 11 years’ worth of fury off his chest about our more half-witted countrymen and women who get into scrapes overseas.

Under the pithy headline “Idiot Aussies: Grow up and take responsibility”, Downer condensed more than a decade’s worth of rage into a searing piece which dealt with everything from the taxpayer-funded exodus from Lebanon, to claims of Canberra’s neglect of convicted drug dealers such as the Bali Nine, and Schapelle Corby, who stars in the above YouTube video urging her release.

Downer used as his starting point Melbourne’s so-called “Beer Mat Mum” who, having been jailed for stealing a Singha-sodden terry-towelling mat from some Thai dive bar, is surely just as compelling a bogan pin-up as the chk-chk-boom girl.

Continue reading "Saving Australians from their own overseas stupidity" »

Silence was broken one night by sirens and the whirring of a low flying helicopter. The police chopper, with searchlights blazing, honed in on the lake-front park lands at Wattle Grove.

I grabbed my Police scanner and camera and went to see what was unfolding. The police chatter on the scanners told me the guy they were chasing was last seen in the lake waters and a mention of the nearby shopping centre.

Moving closer, I noticed a person creeping from the bird island bushes and into its murky waters.  Click, click, I had the shot, but the drama was far from over…

Continue reading "When a photographer has to get involved in an arrest" »