Police

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" »