June 30, 2010
Palm Island: CMC Report
Recall that Mulrunji Doomadgee was found dead in his Palm Island cell on November 19, 2004 from injuries inflicted by arresting officer, Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley that the police service in Queensland has a closed, self-protecting culture that looks after its own.
The legal system was seen to be complicit. Full and fair discussion of all the details of this case is being suppressed; full disclosure, disallowed. The police abuse, the lies and the cover-up indicate that Queensland's endemic racism weighs heavily on the present.
Two subsequent coronial inquiries have established that Hurley fell on Mulrunji on the concrete floor of the Palm Island police station, and that horrific, fatal injuries resulted: Mulrunji had four broken ribs, bruising to the head, a torn portal vein and his liver was torn in two. The finding by coroner Brian Hine last month was that Hurley's actions caused the injuries, but the coroner was unable to establish whether they were inflicted accidentally or deliberately.
A good question was asked by Palm Islander Brad Foster:
If Hurley and Mulrunji scuffled on the floor of the police station and it was Mulrunji who got up and walked away, and the police officer who died with four broken ribs and his liver torn in two, do you think we would still be waiting for justice?
What has been confirmed by the recent Crime and Misconduct Commission report into allegations of police misconduct is that the initial police investigation and the internal police review were seriously flawed in that they did not meet the standards required, by set operational procedures or community expectation.
More specifically, there have been double-standards, an unwillingness to publicly acknowledge failings on the part of the police, and a culture within the QPS that the best way to protect its reputation is to hide its shortcomings.
The investigations were characterised by double standards and an unwillingness to publicly acknowledge failings on the part of the police...he Police Commissioner has tolerated these self-protecting aspects of the culture and must be held accountable for the flawed Palm Island review. He supported and defended the police review process including the spirit and intent of the findings.
The inference is that the police have been evading the truth, protecting their own, and covering up the circumstances surrounding the violent death of an innocent man.
Unfortunately, the CMC findings will have little effect on the police service or the state government. That's because it has few powers. Its negative findings against police have been ignored before.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:33 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 30, 2009
tough on crime
Over the last 30 years conservative state politicians in Australia have adopted the US approach to crime in the 1980s and 1990s. This was the "tough on crime" era when incarceration was touted as the simple solution to our crime problem--which was sold as either the 'three strikes law" approach-- or "do the crime do the time" in Victoria and South Australia.
The conservative's punitive approach stands for longer and harsher penalties and the elimination of rehabilitation. Under this system, offenders who could be more cheaply deterred or rehabilitated instead incurred the most expensive -- and, from the perspective of its effect on the community, damaging -- form of punishment possible. These conservative populists have taken their policies and rhetoric from the harsh American penal system.
Incarceration was the solution to social problems, urban decay and the public fear about unsafe and disordered neighbourhoods. It emerged as a critique of the social democrat approach to crime, which held that crime was the result of "root causes" such as poverty and poor education. Law and order conservatives labelled this as being "soft on crime" and made crime a political (law and order) issue to make the streets safer by "cracking down on crime". Consequently, the number of people incarcerated in the prison system has increased dramatically.
For state politicians in Australia there can be no such thing as not being tough enough on crime. They assume that breaking the law was an individual decision, not the product of social circumstances. Therefore, the only way to reduce crime was to make sure crime didn't pay. Incarceration was the means to ensure crime didn't pay. These political elites were not simply responding to popular opinion about crime and punishment as these conservatives played a large role in shaping the public's perceptions about crime.
In this they follow James Q. Wilson, who argued that government is ill equipped to remedy the root causes of crime, even if they could be identified with certainty; that people make rational choices to commit crime based on the relative risk and reward offered; that public policy decisions regarding crime should increase the risk and lower the relative reward of crime thereby helping to deter it.
The argument is that serious street crime flourishes in areas in which disorderly behavior (graffiti, a mugging, vagrancy or drunkenness) goes unchecked.This is the broken window theory behind the conservative's punishment regime.
A problem with the "tough on crime" approach to curbing offending behavior by relying solely on incarceration is the recognition that something is deeply wrong with a modern industrialized nation imprisons a large percentage of its population; and, secondly, the problem of recidivism in that the prison system itself is criminogenic.
Thirdly, mass incarceration (including persons with mental illness, cognitive disability, dual diagnosis, Indigenous women and remandees, a significant number of who do not end up receiving a custodial
sentence at the end of their remand period) plays havoc with state budgets.Tough on crime can mean becoming bankrupt on crime. The neo-liberal solution to bankruptcy is to invest in mass incarceration as a business model--the privatization of the prison system.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:21 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
May 26, 2009
SA: bikie laws
The local news in SA has reported that the first control order will be issued against a bike gang member ( the outlawed Finks motorcycle gang) in SA. The 42-member Finks, motorcycle gang, were declared SA's first criminal organisation earlier this month. Individual control orders ban them from contacting certain people and attending specific places. The legislation---The Serious and Organised Crime (Control) Act 2008 --- includes association laws to hit those who assist them - --- it is a crime to associate with a person subject to a control order.
The justification for the legislation is that cracking down on the bikie gangs will lower the crime rate and drugs---drug importation, amphetamine production and large-scale hydroponic cannabis cultivation and trafficking Law and order has become a big political issue in SA, and the "get tough on crime" legislation has been put in place by politicians saying on TV that they are they are sickened and disgusted by violence. The legislation outlaws organisations instead of focusing on criminal actions. Meanwhile, the usual state of chaos and lawlessness persists in South Australia.
My understanding is that under the legislation---Serious and Organised Crime Control Act 2008-- the Attorney-General has right to call an organisation, which could be anything from an informal group of people who meet at the local pub for a weekly drink through to a football club or a business, a Declared Organisation. The Attorney-General can use secret and untested evidence in making that declaration, and his decision can’t be challenged in the courts.
Secondly, the substantive issue of motorcycle gang criminality, namely, a criminal conspiracy to commit serious offences using violence or otherwise, is not dealt with by the accepted process of adducing evidence at trial. Rather it is dealt with by a quasi judicial process of prohibition of an organisation by declaration and the imposition of control orders on its members. Severe penalties are then visited upon controlled members who continue some form of contact, even remote contact by post, fax, phone or e-mail – two years imprisonment for a first offence, five years for a second or subsequent offence.
The only trial which is permitted deals with the fact that contact has occurred between persons subject to control orders and nothing else; even the opportunity to show that the contact was innocent, or would not have resulted in harm, is removed. In a democracy governed by the rule of law they are both unprincipled and counter-productive.
In a liberal democracy based on the rule of law these laws abrogate fundamental legal rights for the fair trial of persons accused of criminal offences. They cement in law the concept of guilt by association and would do nothing to lessen the problem of bikie gangs’ violence because they completely miss the point — which is that bikie gangs thrive on our refusal to decriminalise drugs. By continuing to criminalise drug use, the law and order poltiicians ensure that criminal gangs can make a serious buck out of flogging illegal product, with the super profits that inevitably go with it.
There do seem to be parallels between the anti-terrorism laws and the new bikie laws with their emphasis on risk and prevention and the curtailment of individual rights in the larger interests of security. Terrorism is becoming the paradigmatic criminal offence, and in recent months, both arsonists and bikies have been labelled as terrorists by Mike Rann, the Premier of South Australia. When the South Australian laws came into effect in 2005, Mike Rann, the South Australian Premier, said:
"To the civil libertarians let me say this: that we've got legislation across Australia that deals with the threat of terrorism, but these are terrorists within our community who think they can do what they like, and that's why we're standing up to them."
Is this an example of politicians using the language and laws of terrorism (within the body politic) to gain more powers?
Richard Ackland points out in the Sydney Morning Herald that:
If a defendant does not know what is in the statement and is therefore unable to challenge it, one might wonder how the courts can fairly undertake a process of reviewing or weighing. They can't.The authorities have been given the right to present one-sided evidence, the courts have the right to accept it against the defendant and the whole process can still be badged as a fair trial.
Though the legislation has been described as laws against “bikie gangs” and as “gang laws” it is not confined in its terms to “outlaw motorcycle gangs” and its potential reach is much broader.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:12 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
January 17, 2009
thinking of the children
Given a limited amount of funding and asked to choose between two options, I wonder whether the public would choose to fund ISP filtering or child porn policing?
Last year Lateline did a story on Operation Achilles, a cooperative investigation between Queensland police and the FBI which successfully tracked down more than 20 people actively involved in producing and distributing child pornography. Among the more disturbing points the story raised was the fact that, in tracking these people over long periods, investigators were seeing the same children, over and over again, growing up in the material they were seeing.
Some of the kids could be identified and rescued, but plenty more could not be found without catching the perpetrators. Tracking these people down takes time, during which, the abuse continues and police bear witness to the process. It's hard to imagine how those doing these investigations cope with the stuff they see all day every day. How do you adequately compensate someone for doing that job?
The FBI were full of praise for Queensland police who have gained a world wide reputation for success stories in this field, and they've done it again in another joint exercise with the UK, Germany and the US, which can't be an easy thing to organise. It's one of a string of such casesover the past couple of years to make headlines, so you'd imagine the various bodies involved, the AFP and specialist state police units, would be awarded with appropriate funding. Wouldn't you?
While the AFP are the main players in these things they have cooperative arrangements with state and international policing bodies, but it just so happens that the Queensland police are better at it than pretty much anyone else, so when the AFP can't handle a case and it's to do with a state other than Queensland you have problems.
According to Stilgherrian's latest Crikey (paywall) piece :
$2.8 million, which the Howard government allocated to expand the Australian Federal Police’s Online Child Sexual Exploitation Team (OCSET), was instead used by Rudd to help create Conroy’s $44.5 million Rabbit-Proof Firewall.
The argument here takes on the Won't Somebody Please Think of the Children set, Conroy's early ammunition of choice against clean feed opposers. This emotive meme has since given way to a less coherent string of emotionally weaker dot points about the vaguely sinister 'unwanted content' and parental technological ineptitude. It's even generated someone strongly resembling a Conroy sock puppet (see comments at Stilgherrian's place).
From Verity Pravda's blog:
Finally, a little note because onroy's line about the purpose of the filter being about "protecting children" has been interpretted as being about protecting children from seeing the images - it isn't. It is about protecting the children who are the subject of the images.
No it's not. Go have a read of the Lateline transcript. The children who are the subject of the images are being tormented by people who won't be bothered one whit by ISP filtering. The main reason they're so hard to track down, and why police have to spend so much time bogged down in their horrors, is that they're technologically light years ahead of little annoyances like filters. The images they swap, which are of actual living children, are heavily encrypted. They've developed their own linguistic codes to avoid detection.
Maybe you're talking about the practice of grooming, but again, refer to the Lateline transcript. Plenty of the subjects of those images are the perpetrators' own kids and others they have easy access to in meatworld. Grooming is among the riskier approaches taken by relative amateurs. I can't be the only parent in the world to have heard kids discussing weirdos pretending to be other kids in chatrooms and on MSN, and teaching one another how to spot them. It would be easier for sickos to wait nine months to get their hands on their own kids than groom a savvy child.
Meanwhile, what does ISP filtering do for the kids police are watching grow up in these images? Precisely nothing. Those kids don't need 'protection', they need more police with the expertise required to rescue them. From Libertus:
In addition, Labor's Budget has delayed the former Coalition Government's planned increase of an “additional 90 staff” members of OCSET by 2009-10 until 2011. The Labor Government claims that its budget will result in “91 additional AFP members dedicated to online child protection by 2011”. However, it is entirely unclear how that could be achieved with a budget of $2.8 million less than the Coalition Government had budgetted for 90 members by 2009-2010. It appears Labor intends that officers be paid less, which would further exacerbate the existing difficulties of retaining technologically skilled detectives and other staff members from hijacking by private enterprise (see Parliamentary Joint Committee 2007 report below).
By accident or design, Australia has some of the best resources in the world for dealing with the serious end of the problem. Yet while we pump squillions into sporting bodies and kiddie health campaigns we redirect funding from the effective to the token. These guys deserve medals and accolades, but we give them Conroy.
So much for evidence-based policy.
Posted by Lyn Calcutt at 9:18 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
February 10, 2008
Victoria Police: corruption
The police union boss Paul Mullett is in the spotlight. He faces serious criminal charges arising from a report by the Office of Police Integrity and former Federal Court judge Murray Wilcox into top-level leaks in Victoria Police. Wilcox held that Mullett undermined a murder investigation and recommended serious criminal charges be laid against Sergeant Mullett, former police assistant commissioner Noel Ashby and former police media chief Stephen Linnell.
Matt Golding
The OPI report found that Ashby, Sergeant Mullett and \Linnell were part of a chain of leaked confidential information that helped undermine a murder investigation, Operation Briars. The OPI report alleged Sergeant Mullett headed a plot to undermine force command and install Mr Ashby as a "puppet" police commissioner instead of Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon. Wilcox recommended that the Office of Public Prosecutions consider four charges against Mullett, including perjury, providing false evidence, breaching confidentiality obligations and perverting the course of justice.
Mullett made no secret of his dislike for Nixon's attempts to clean up and modernise the force or the reform agenda driven by Nixon and Deputy Commissioner Simon Overland.
The Victorian police force is struggling to persuade a sceptical public that corruption is not endemic. Will the report by the OPI and its delegate, retired Federal Court judge Murray Wilcox, spark fresh calls for an all-encompassing royal commission into corruption?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:45 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 28, 2006
selling ministerial access
I read an op. ed. by Tony Harris in today's Australian Financial Review as I flew into Canberra this morning. Harris is addressing the issue of lobby reform and he highlights why we need to start thinking about reform. He says:
I have been authoriatively told that some lobbyists have recently had to make donations to the Liberal Party when their clients were granted ministerial appointments. Paying for an appointment with ministers in their office takes money-raising to a new low.
Yet payment for access is common in liberal democracy, is it not ? Is not the practice by both major parties of selling places at the ministerial dining table to raise funds a corrupt one? Yet it is accepted as legitimate and not in need of reform.
Lobby reform is not on the political agenda in Canberra, is it. So payment for access as a form of fund raising is only going to increase. We are walking down the American road where big busnss sets the policy agenda.
There paying for access to Congressman is par for the course . Jack Abramoff, the once-powerful lobbyist, lavished luxury trips, skybox fundraisers, campaign contributions, jobs for their spouses, and meals at Signatures, the lobbyist's upscale restaurant. This gives access to the Congressman and the lobbyist policy agenda is connected to campaign contributions. Abramoff's influence peddling on Capital Hill goes close to bribery through the use of earmarking of legislation.
Update: 29 March
Alan Mitchell argues about a different conception of corruption in today's Australian Financial Review--one based on the politicizing the public service. He says that the government's insistence on loyalty from its public servants has helped create the enviorrnment in which corruption went unchecked. This is an environment in which public servants area afraid to to pass on bad news or alert the government to their reasonable suspicions. MInisters are encouraging public servants to withhold politically embarrassing information, and in doing so are guilty of corrupting a critical process of government.
So we have two forms of corruption in Australian democracy.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:23 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
January 22, 2006
bribing the enemy
Even the OECD is pressuring Australia to increase fines and toughen sanctions against companies that resort to bribery. The Australian Wheat Board (AWB) cannot be seen as a pacesetter in best-practice management of corruption.
The corruption finger is currently pointed at the AWB because it was engaged in bribing an enemy of the nation state. As Carol Overington reports in The Australian
If the AWB had $100,000 worth of wheat to sell, it would have to inflate the price, to $120,000 or $130,000. AWB would submit the contract to the UN and get paid from the escrow account. It would keep the $100,000 for the wheat, and "kick back" the extra money to Iraq [for "trucking fees" etc.]
From 1999 until the Iraq war in 2003, AWB sold more than $US1.5 billion worth of wheat to Iraq. The "trucking fees" and the "after sales service fees" etc kept growing, until AWB found itself having to inflate the price of its contracts not by 10 per cent but by up to 30 per cent. It was doing this as Australia was preparing to go to war with Iraq and even after Australian troops had invading Iraq.
No Minister or any federal department knows anything about any of this--says the Howard Government. Our hands clean is the message being run.
Matt Golding
The activities of spin doctors and "culture of cover-up" are now engaged in seeking to obscure the real situation and to tranquillise public opinion. This has been standard practice with respect to Iraq hasn't it.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 26, 2004
Gangland: It's also the police
It is a bit like another month another killing in Melbourne. It's ever more images of more funerals with guys in dark glasses hanging around looking tough. Adelaide may have its Snowtown murders, but Melbourne is gangland. It is impossible not to notice the images of guys in suits with dark glasses staring stoney faced at the observing television cameras. The images say gangland.
The shootings are sold as gangland killing--- the gangland drug lords taking one another out ---in the media headlines. Is it a payback war between rival crime families, which has been in full swing in the streets of Melbourne. Or is just rival gangs fighting for dominance of the drug market?
The media bylines often refer to police corruption. The police are in bed with the crooks caught up in a turf war over drugs, and they have become part of an underworld tussle for power and ascendancy. The police are running drugs. And the state government is not all that interested in catching their cops.
Surely public confidence in the police and Victoria's justice system has been seriously shaken as the result of the corruption of the disbanded drug squad? So why not an independent inquiry?
Well, in Victoria the police investigate themselves and the endemic corruption in the police force with limited resources. The police investigating their own is the way the Bracks government likes it. It's government policy.
Why so? Well, The Victorians assume they have the best and cleanest police force seems to be the justification. They deny the links between "rotten cops and organised crime" The media is attacked for suggesting otherwise. The myths live on.
Yet the image created from watching media reports is that the Victorian police force is not a bunch of cleanskins:
"Melbourne's intertwined worlds of gangland drug lords and corrupt police are spiralling out of control. Police investigating their own kind have been threatened with engraved bullets and had their families followed and intimidated. One investigator, Simon Illingworth, resorted to ABC television to tell his story of bashing, threats and intimidation by his fellow police officers."
In Melbourne, it would appear that there is an entrenched system of corruption that ruthlessly protects itself. As Tony Fitzgerald, author of the Fitzgerald Report into Queensland police corruption in the 1980s, said: "The unwritten police code is an integral element of police culture . . . (it) requires that police not enforce the law against other police, nor co-operate in any attempt to do so, and perhaps even to obstruct any attempt." Entrenched or endemic corruption is often associated with legal and political corruption and/or protection.
Mark Le Grande says it is better time to establish an independent inquiry in the form of standing royal commission rather than a bureaucratic body (crime or corruption commissions) that is a downstream agencies. The latter is controlled by a government minister and "staffed by public servants who are subservient to ministers and whose careers do not prosper if they make robust decisions or take robust action to overcome bureaucratic or political intransigence."
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:14 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack