Police

At Melbas nightclub on the Gold Coast they won’t serve people with hand, neck and facial tattoos. You can, however, front up to the bar wearing a stocking on your head.

Helpfully you don’t even have to bring your own. For just five dollars you can buy a stocking at the club door. “It’s a policy that really works for our venue,” a worker at the bar told The Punch.

Imagine if cops were subject to the same measures. They could be, if the draft proposals being considered by NSW Police Association come into force.

Continue reading "Lay off the tatts and have a debate about the real issues" »

It’s a sunny afternoon and I’m sitting on the grass, headphones in, leaning against a retaining wall in a busy Sydney park. Suddenly, while thumbing through my phone, it’s snatched from my hand, inches from the ground. It all happens so fast I just jump up and yell, “Hey!”.

My brain catches up with what’s happened. A tall man, in a white shirt, sprints away and I see two, thin, white headphone chords flailing behind him.

My phone has been stolen.

Continue reading "Is an act of crime ever too trivial for investigation?" »

Stepping out for a fun night and a few drinks sure isn’t as simple as it used to be.

In case you hadn’t noticed, an increasing number of Australian bars and clubs are introducing security technology that would be more fittingly encountered in a Police state than a casual night out for a drink in one of Australia ‘s cities.

In a dystopian display of modern surveillance technologies overtaking common sense, nowadays if you feel inclined to venture out for a dance in one of Melbourne or Sydney ‘s bars or clubs, you can expect to have your ID scanned into a computer. And in extreme cases, be prepared to have your irises scanned as a pre-requisite for entry. Talk about a party killer!

Continue reading "Stripped of civil liberties for a night on the town" »

On Tuesday night, four shots were fired into the front of a Wetherill Park home. Inside a woman and her two children were sleeping. This incident was the ninth shooting to take place in Sydney in eight days. NSW Police have not laid any charges and have voiced their frustration, blaming the “wall of silence” in the community.

On Saturday, 25 May 2002, a man shot and wounded seven people including a child attending a wedding at a restaurant in Cabramatta. There were 140 witnesses in the New World Restaurant but no one was able, or willing, to give a clear description of the gun man.

It seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Continue reading "The great wall of Cabramatta" »

You know that shirt really makes your eyes look amazing. I bet you know lots of really important stuff. Would you like to go back to your place and show me all your confidential files?

A report has been handed down in the UK by Dame Elizabeth Filkin, “The ethical issues arising from the relationship between police and media”, prompted by allegations the News of the World phone hacking scandal was not properly investigated by Scotland Yard.

It’s a fascinating document, surprisingly free of the usual bureaucratic mangling of the English language, although it does contain case studies with a traffic light system of assessing risk - red for high, yellow for medium, green for low. But the most up-front part carries the title: “Ten tactics used by some in the media. Watch out.”

Continue reading "Public service message: Beware flirty journalists" »

I’d like to thank the Occupy Melbourne protesters, from the bottom of my heart. They’ve opened my eyes.

It’s not about their message. I’m pretty sure I already knew about the all-too-cosy relationship between banks, corporations and the media. Hell, I was told that money was the root of all evil fairly early on at Sunday School. Nothing new there.

No, they’ve shown me, through their treatment at the hands of Lord Mayor Robert Doyle, the City of Melbourne and Victoria Police, that for all the talk of freedom of political expression and peaceful demonstration in this country, if you antagonize the wrong person in authority you can expect harassment and intimidation. If you show up a puffed-up, red-faced bully, no matter the elevated position of responsibility, they’ll reach down and thump you.

Continue reading "Bullies in suits unleash their uniformed henchmen" »

At a guess you could probably assume that none of our seven High Court judges lives in Merrylands, in Sydney’s west, where the Nomads and Hells Angels are engaged in what the police reassuringly describe not as a bikie gang war but merely “tit for tat violence”.

It is also unlikely that any of these eminent jurists lives in Northmead, where an innocent woman had her house strafed with bullets while she was sleeping last week in a zany address mix-up by a bikie who was having trouble reading his UBD.

Presumably, none of the judges lives in Adelaide’s north-western suburb of Semaphore where an 11-year-old boy, the son of a former member of the Finks, was shot in the leg while he slept during a home invasion last month.

Continue reading "How the High Court exposed suburbia to biker mayhem" »

My illness is psychiatric in nature. It’s biological. It lurks in everybody’s genome, and is active in mine.

The name of my illness is weighty. It’s called Seasonally Affected Bi-polar Disorder 1. As opposed to the very brainy Stephen Fry, who reminds us of the severity of mine by calling his Bi-polar 2 (facetiously) Bi-Polar Lite.

An illness that slowly over the years, with many lengthy hospital stays, has become manageable. No longer visible to the naked eye, even. To the point that I work, study, raise a family and participate at all levels of the society as best I am able, good health permitting.

Continue reading "Sick folk subjected to a sick, terrifying mental health law" »

There can be no doubt that Christine Nixon’s size played an unpleasant part in some of the public criticism she faced over her decision to dine with friends at a flash restaurant as the Victorian Bushfire inferno unfolded on the evening of February 7, 2009.

If Christine Nixon weighed 60kg she would have been shielded from the kind of snide public remarks about how, frankly, she wasn’t about to die of starvation anyway and could probably have made do with a quick sandwich as she liaised with and – crucially – led her team at the bushfire control centre.

That’s where any sympathy for Christine Nixon should end though. If her detractors have at times offensively used her weight as a vehicle to pile on the ridicule, the former Victorian Police Commissioner has probably been just as guilty of using the “fattist” issue (that’s her term) as a foil for her abrogation of responsibility on that horrendous night.

Continue reading "Sorry, but Christine Nixon deserves the criticism" »

Waleed Aly is a well-rounded kind of chap. A lecturer in politics at Monash Uni and a former member of the executive committee of the Islamic Council of Victoria, he is also said to wield a mean axe in his rock, funk and jazz band.

Of Egyptian heritage, the Melbourne born-and-raised Aly has the gift of talking straight. And on the issue of the impending new NSW police powers to order drivers and suspects to remove their veils, he has a simple message: it was inevitable.

“This is the inevitable response to the scenario we saw a few weeks ago,” he told The Punch today, in what might cheekily be termed a “thinly-veiled” reference to the Carnita Matthews case.

Continue reading "Australia is still a long way from France" »

The Baillieu Government’s rush to hastily imprison vulnerable youths fails to consider the cost of getting “tough” on crime and the real needs of the community.

The Age reported this week the building and maintenance of a new prison in Victoria will cost taxpayers more than $1.1 billion over 25 years, and according to a government insider, “isn’t value for money”.

And there were further reports today that there is a strong push from the Justice Department to build a new men’s prison which would become Victoria’s largest. But the debate shouldn’t just be about the nitty-gritty of construction contracts.

Continue reading "Zero tolerance equals zero progress" »

Monday. The single most dreaded word on Sunday nights. But, for most people around the country today (sorry, WA), it’s a day off for the Queen’s Birthday. Yippee!

In other news, on this day in 1966, the United States Supreme Court ruled that when arresting somebody, police officers always had to read the suspect their rights. If you’ve watched as many law and order shows as I have, you’ll be well versed in this little stanza. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. Do you understand these rights?” Yes sir!

Have you got something other than statutory rights on your mind today? Tell us. Now. That’s an order.

I appreciate the high standard of human rights we enjoy in Australia just as much as the next person. But when it comes to the possession of illegal substances, I think it’s better to be presumed guilty rather than innocent, even if it intrudes on our basic right to a fair trial.

In 2008, solicitor Vera Momcilovic was convicted of trafficking ice found in her apartment, despite her claims that the drugs were her boyfriend’s and she knew nothing about it.

Now she’s challenging the legitimacy of the state’s drug laws in the High Court, claiming the Victorian Charter of Human Rights effectively invalidates them because they remove the presumption of innocence.

Continue reading "On drugs: Suspend rights and consider them guilty" »

I recently wrote a letter of complaint to my local library.

Dear Sir/Madam,  I am writing to lodge an official complaint with your management team regarding the horrible amount of noise that emanates from your establishment. I recently bought “A Touch of Frost” on DVD and your supposed “place of learning” has made it increasingly difficult to enjoy my purchase.

I constantly have to turn up the volume to drown out the hideous thumps coming from the library. Overwhelmed by this outrageous sound, I yesterday visited the building to investigate it. It has come to my attention that people are closing their books too loudly.

Continue reading "Hey complaint-lodgers, just soundproof your house" »

I would like to propose a toast.

Here’s to the jerks that stabbed a Sydney bouncer in the neck and the partygoers who bashed four police who were just trying to do their jobs.

Here’s to the arsehole back in 2005 that chipped my tooth and broke my hand while I was out trying to celebrate a friend’s birthday.

Continue reading "Drunken idiots: here’s a toast to the douchebags" »

Hey you! Yes, you. Arsehole.

Thanks a whole heap for walking down our entire street in Erskineville, at 2am on New Year’s Day and keying every single car including my brand-new VW Polo.

You liked my Polo, didn’t you? You must have liked it a lot because you singled it out and instead of just going sideways along the car you took the time to dig your key all the way through the paint into the metal up and down, up and down, up and down.

Continue reading "You just don’t mess with another man’s vehicle" »

We all know there’s an election on in Victoria and we all know one of the major campaign issues is crime and violence – no surprises there.

This is not a piece on the rights, wrongs or otherwise of the respective election platforms on fighting crime – I’ll leave that for others to dissect.

What I want to contribute is a perspective on how Victoria’s often intense and sometimes heated debate about violence and personal safety has impacted on young people in the state and the potential knock-on effect for our community as a whole.

Continue reading "Fear of violence is killing Victorian culture" »

One surefire way of knowing you’ve officially become an old man is when you catch yourself coming out with a “kids these days…” rant. Well I’ve recently discovered that I am now among that special group of people with unending old school wisdom.

I’m mourning the demise of what I call the “respect your elders” values of kids today. But I don’t blame them. I blame a new generation of mamby-pamby (not sure that’s a real term but you know what I mean) parents who want to be a child’s friend rather than a parent.

I’ve had these concerns for a while, but they’ve been brought to a head by a couple of recent incidents.

Continue reading "Ratbag kids aren’t teaching themselves how to act up" »

In February, a teenage p-plate driver and one of his passengers were killed on the Sunshine Coast Queensland, after colliding with an oncoming car in wet conditions.

In Victoria, five people were killed on impact when their out of control car hit a tree at a reported 140 km/h, the driver was 19 and on p-plates. He was carrying too many passengers, one occupant wasn’t wearing a seat belt and the driver had a blood-alcohol reading of 0.19 - well above the zero limit.

And in January, a 17 year old teenage girl on the NSW South Coast was killed instantly when she drove into a tree, also injuring her three passengers. One of those passengers, a 15 year old girl, was so critically injured as a result of the crash; she lost both her legs and sustained serious neck and chest injuries.

Continue reading "Teen road deaths don’t know about state borders" »

Around a third of Australian road fatalities are the direct result of drink-driving. Add to that the millions of random breath tests that occur across the country every year and you’re looking at some fairly good reasons not to drink-drive.

Not that you’d know that from the statistics; the percentage of alcohol-fuelled road fatalities has remained constant in the past two decades. In fact, our collective apathy toward the separation of alcohol consumption and motor vehicle control is so great as to warrant its own show on the Nine Network.

Premiering last Sunday, RBT is Nine’s attempt at discouraging drink-driving or, depending on your point of view, an attempt to capitalise on the inability of Australian drivers to understand that driving home after six beers is probably a bad idea.

Continue reading "When you watch RBT you better be drunk" »

Call it Humpty Dumpty jurisprudence. Australia has a new arbiter of taste in magistrate Robbie Williams, who has let a student off the hook after calling a police officer a prick.

Williams has enraged police with his ruling but at the same time shown himself in touch with the broader community’s appreciation of the finer points of swearing.

Police are outraged that his ruling appears to condone the verbal abuse of officers, but Williams’s decision explored the delicate way in which swear words change their intensity depending on context. There is also the less delicate reality that some police officers can be quite accurately described as pricks.

Continue reading "Pricking the bubble of polite conversation" »

Police officers are called a lot of names, but when the NSW Premier Kristina Keneally this week called us ‘wowsers’ for launching a campaign to close pubs at 3am, we were left scratching our heads.

Maybe something got lost in the translation to ocker for our Premier, but according to my research

  the term originally referred to annoying and disruptive people – the sort of people an alcohol lock-out would attempt to manage.

In more recent times, the term evolved to refer to the ‘pious’, a fair description of the hotel lobby who seems to run NSW, who (with a straight face) attempted to argue that thousands of jobs would be lost
if people were told to go home before the sun comes up.

Continue reading "Who are you calling a wowser Kristina" »

The Victorian Police Force are getting a new uniform so they “look tougher” on the street. It seems the light-blue uniform isn’t scary enough and … I’m not sure exactly, do people stand pointing and laughing? Whatever the case, a new uniform is currently being designed to revamp their image. From Good Cop to Bad Ass.

Riiiiiiight. Just like rappers knock their teeth out and insert gold replacements to show their hardcore wealth, or the way bikies intimidate with leather jackets and tattoos.

I get it.  It’s no secret that the way you dress influences what people think of you, but really, the coppers?

Continue reading "Work it copper, work it" »

As a former police officer with ten years service and a number of pursuits under my belt, I feel qualified to weigh-in on the ongoing police chase, don’t chase debacle.

It seems yet again the majority of public anger, fuelled by civil libertarians, is being directed at the “cowboys in blue”.

Predictably, the driver behind the wheel of the pursued vehicles have escaped criticism.

Continue reading "Just let cops do their jobs" »

IT’S understandable that the families of those killed in the weekend’s multiple fatality in Canberra would want to blame police. They might be able to answer for their actions.

In the outrage over another police pursuit which has ended in tragedy, it seems the person who gets the least attention is the serial car thief who started the chain of events in the first place.

But I’ll repeat – it’s understandable. He can’t answer to the grieving families.

Continue reading "Blaming police who weren’t at the wheel of killer car" »

Update Saturday 6am, map addition: Herman Rockefeller is dead. Two people have been charged with his murder. The Herald Sun reports police are investigating a swingers’ website that may have led to a meeting between the suspects and Mr Rockefeller.

Excerpts from the court report: Mario Schembri, 57, from Wallan, and Bernadette Denny, of Hadfield, have each been charged with one count of murder. A detective told Melbourne Magistrate’s Court both had admitted being involved in an altercation with Rockefeller on the night he vanished. They also admitted to police that they had assisted in the disposal of the body, the court was told. Police were taken to a residence in View St, Glenroy, where it is understood that human remains were believed to have been buried in the back yard.

You may need to zoom out a bit to see all the placemarks. Click on them for more detail.

View Herman Rockefeller mystery in a larger map

You may have seen this photo this morning taken by a photographer from local Melbourne newspaper the Preston Leader.

The common Grey Kangaroo (let’s call him Joey McCutie to personalise the plight of the species) had just been hit by and was laying seriously injured on the tram tracks in Bundoora. Here are the Leader and Herald-Sun stories.

The police officer’s decision to shoot Joey McCutie twice in the head was apparently a pretty sensible decision in light of its injuries, but it has prompted some pretty odd criticism from the RSPCA.

Continue reading "Kangaroo numbers drop to 50,890,745 after slaying" »

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" »

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" »

If you read the headlines, late-night violence in Melbourne is out of control.

To a degree this is true, but we have little chance of curbing the problem with illogical solutions.

Take some of the measures proposed in the past fortnight, for example. Firstly, there was the party promoter who banned “metrosexuals” from the Ding Dong Lounge.

Continue reading "Idiots are the problem, not alcohol" »

Well another day and yet another useless decision on alcohol.

Victoria Police will today continue their blitz on drunks at races with the running of the Oaks at Flemington.

Now it’s great that police are targeting these people to stop alcohol fuelled violence, but I personally don’t believe it’s the right course of action.

Continue reading "Targeting drivers is one thing, what about drinkers?" »

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" »

A good bit of campaign journalism was launched in Melbourne yesterday by the Sunday Herald Sun in throwing open the debate on whether the drink driving limit should be dropped to .02.

.

The Sunday reported that 39 people had been killed in Victoria alone in accidents involving drivers under the .005 mark in just the last five years.

Victoria’s Deputy Police Commissioner has tentatively backed the debate, if not quite advocating an actual change to .02

Continue reading "Should we cut the drink driving limit to 0.02?" »

What’s a long weekend in Australia without attempting to drive just a bit too far?

That one extra day can inspire many of us to pack up the car and make the most of it.

But why does that also so often mean that we decide to drive way too fast and far too recklessly?

Continue reading "Long weekends are a killer" »

Kung-Fu master, movie star and all-round whoop ass machine Bruce Lee found it hard to walk down the street in Hong Kong without being challenged to a fight by some bloke who’d watched too many of his films.

Lee would receive letters daily from other Kung Fu academies putting forward their best students for a chance to fight the master. Unsurprisingly Lee was not amused: “I find this sort of thing really annoying, I’m not going to fight with anybody.”

The bashing of AFL superstar Lance “Buddy” Franklin in a Perth nightclub (at least on the facts available) is further evidence of a less sophisticated Australian version of this ego driven phenomena.

Continue reading "You wanna fight? Why footballers get targeted" »

It was recently revealed that the Victorian Labor Government employs “a small army” of media minders and spin-meisters. But Brumby’s battalions of PR hacks cannot deny the undeniable fact that crime rages out of control.

The evidence is right there in front of us. Our TV screens and newspapers are filled with stories of the street violence that is seemingly an everyday occurrence in Victoria.

It has gotten so bad that even the police are intimidated by the marauding thugs who have come to rule our streets.

Continue reading "Mandatory minimums the answer to drunken thuggery" »

Walking to work this morning I saw a dead man sitting at a bus stop.

Well he wasn’t actually sitting, he was completely bent over from the waist and his hands dragged onto the concrete in front of him.

He was also surrounded by overfilled shopping bags and dressed in marked jeans and a grubby sweat shirt so at first glance I assumed he was homeless.

Continue reading "What makes someone stop and help a total stranger?" »

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" »

One of the most disturbing things about this morning’s counter-terrorism raids in Melbourne is the profile of the suspects, who were allegedly planning a Mumbai-style machine-gun attack on Australian Army barracks.

They were, The Australian reports, construction workers and taxi drivers of Somali and Lebanese descent, living in suburban Melbourne.

Combine this with the admission of Anglo-Australian terrorist Shane Kent that he was part of a terrorist organisation and it’s clear terrorists don’t look like anything in particular and could be living in your street.

Continue reading "Race profiles a blunted tool in fight against enemy within" »

An American company has announced that it will now make available in Australia kits that will let parents test their children for drug use.

The drug testing kits use samples of hair to test what drugs and how often kids could be using them.

The company, Confirm Biosciences, has circulated a statement claiming that the new kits will put “control back in parents’’ hands

Continue reading "Should parents be testing kids for drugs in the home?" »

The reputation of Western Australia as a frontier state received another unwelcome boost today with revelations that an Aboriginal man was set on fire after being shot with a taser gun while sniffing petrol.

At issue is whether the taser gun started the fire, or whether the man, who was violent and threatening to set himself and the police alight, started it inadvertently with his cigarette lighter.

But even before the case is investigated, it’s been declared case closed by the state’s top cop.

Continue reading "Out west, tasering petrol sniffers isn’t an issue" »

In 2006, I was driving out of Beirut airport in the backseat of a taxi when I had a horrible thought. Around me, cars were driving in and out of lanes, zipping past one another in dangerous manoeuvres and in disturbing excess of the speed limit, over packed with passengers sticking their arms, legs and even their heads out of windows.

Some were even joy riding on the roof of the vehicles in question, though this had more to do with a bizarre system of car pooling than anything else.

But my horrible thought did not in fact revolve around this chaos, but in the fact that in the midst of this was a lone police officer, driving along in relative calm as if blissfully unaware of the throngs of madness around him, but doing so because the scene I just painted was simply a part of the everyday and he no longer had a role in it. Would life in Australia ever be the same?

Continue reading "Why we should give our police a proper payrise" »

Nothing illustrates the resilience and resourcefulness of organised crime than the story of a Sydney cocaine dealer known to police as ‘Aunty’. She is a Colombian woman in her fifties who came to Australia with her family in the 1970s. She is the face of a syndicate that has been operating for almost two decades.

Her husband stays in the background but has the necessary power and influence with Colombian cocaine barons. The syndicate imports around a tonne of cocaine every eighteen months. It is estimated to have carried out at least ten and possibly as many as fourteen importations (totalling between 10 and 14 tonnes of the drug). The cocaine is sold in bulk, primarily to networks in Sydney, but it also makes its way to other state capitals.

The retirement of some distributors and the arrest and jailing of others enabled an eastern suburbs professional surfer and dealer Shane Hatfield to progress up the drug chain. By the early 2000s he was dealing directly with Aunty. One of Hatfield’s distributors was a criminal in his mid twenties who has been given the pseudonym ‘Tom’ by law-enforcement authorities.

Continue reading "The Aussie mother behind a $30 million cocaine deal" »

THE continuing carve-up of Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty has been framed around the events of 2007; or, rather, around one event, the botched handling of the terror investigation into Mohamed Haneef.

It has been used to deride Keelty as incompetent and pig-headed, as a morally questionable plod who cobbled together the flimsiest of cases against a poor subcontinental fellow who was jailed for a fortnight and waited a full year until every charge against him was dropped.

There was another event in 2007 that provides a more telling insight into Keelty’s character. It has enjoyed limited discussion in the days since he announced his resignation, as it undermines the agendas of those who are determined to portray him as set out above. This is because it goes to three things: courage, professionalism and decency.

Continue reading "Departing chief cops more flak than he deserves" »

From: Keelty, Mick
Sent: Wednesday, 6 May 2009 7:00 AM
To: All-AFP-Staff
Subject: Commissioner All Staff Message [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

All Staff,

You will be aware that recently the AFP’s Strategic Leadership Group (SLG) met to put in place a strategy for taking the organisation into the future.  The work that we started at the retreat is being finalised in a facilitated workshop conducted on 4 May 2009.

Continue reading "Punch exclusive: Keelty’s farewell email to his troops" »

BRISBANE: Today’s news that AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty is stepping down in September provides an important opportunity for the Commonwealth Government to correct the accumulated mistakes of the past.

As one of Dr Haneef’s lawyers, my professional focus has been upon his legal rights. The AFP, under Keelty’s leadership, was responsible for many of the mistakes and failures of judgment which so impacted adversely on Dr Haneef and his family.

Dr Haneef was in detention for 25 days before the charge against him was dropped. It took another six months and two court cases to remove the threat to his passport and visa rights. Throughout all of this, the AFP, under Mr Keelty, refused to admit its mistakes and continued to attack Dr Haneef’s reputation. It was not until just before Christmas, last year, with the release of the Clarke Report, that someone in an official position was prepared to say, definitively, that Dr Haneef had done nothing wrong.

The impact of the actions of the AFP on the lives of Dr Haneef and his family has been devastating. However, the Clarke Report reveals even more alarming concerns about the AFP which the government must address. It showed the AFP exhibited severe organisational problems under Mr Keelty.

Continue reading "Keelty’s departure a chance to fix AFP: Haneef lawyer" »