David Penberthy: Bourke St rampage and Lindt cafe siege have shown how ineffectual police have become because of bureaucracy

THE force is no longer with our police, says David Penberthy — and we should all be concerned.

IN a less politically correct era, every state in Australia was equipped with what was known as a police “force”. The word reassured the law-abiding that the force was on its side, and promised the criminal class that when it transgressed into violence it would be fought with corresponding aggression.

Over the past 20-odd years the word “force” was either dropped entirely or replaced with the more cheery term “police service”. This is what marketing types call rebranding, a wanky term that gave the world New Coke, iSnack 2.0 and, in the case of law enforcement, police forces which these days, at times, seem afraid to use any force at all.

That’s the question many people are asking in light of the two greatest outrages committed against Australian civilians in modern times — Sydney’s Lindt Cafe siege and Melbourne’s Bourke St rampage.

In both cases, the police often looked less like protagonists with a clear plan than confused and ineffectual bystanders, responding with violence only after the ultimate form of violence was visited upon the innocent.

Just to be clear from the get-go, not one word in this column is intended as an attack on the police, nor an attempt to compound whatever misplaced remorse any of those Melbourne officers must be feeling after what happened two Fridays ago.

Jimmy Gargasoulas yells at bystanders in Melbourne’s CBD. Picture: Tony Gough

Indeed, in the case of Bourke St, it should be stressed that every one of those poor victims would be alive today if not for the disgraceful vagaries of Victoria’s now-canned “bail justice” system.

For the life of me, I will never see how that abysmal idea ever got off the ground, whereby people who express an interest in legal matters could make crucial bail decisions after completing a short online course, a process which appears every bit as rigorous as the one I completed last year to coach my son’s under-11 football team.

Life-and-death matters were handed to what were effectively amateurs, the end result being that valid police fears were ignored at that bail hearing and five people died.

You can argue that it doesn’t matter what our police forces are called, as long as they are doing their job. The question is whether they are doing their job, or doing their job the way law-abiding people expect them to do their job.

And that question is answered, in part, by the fretful thinking that motivated all those symbolic name changes, from “force” to “service”, where our cops now appear to be hamstrung or indecisive when it comes to dealing with people who are demonstrably the scum of the earth.

Based on the views of former detectives and commanders, and the leaders of our police unions, it looks like our police forces have been caught up in a whirlwind of unwieldy process, rules, unrealistic occupational health and safety requirements and, worst of all, a perversely inordinate interest in the “rights” of people who are breaking the law in the most dramatic fashion and whose real-time actions should deny them the right to a leisurely trial or, in some cases, a continuing existence.

Tears are shed at a makeshift memorial in Bourke Street for those killed in the rampage. Picture: Wayne Taylor/Getty Images

Some of this is a response to past excesses, such as the spate of shootings in Victoria of troubled mentally ill people in the 1980s. But fast-forward to today and the pendulum has now swung so far in the other direction, to the point where two young guys with a baseball bat ended up showing more initiative than the cops themselves as Dimitrious “Jimmy’’ Gargasoulas was chucking burnouts in the Melbourne CBD.

As brutal as it sounds, whatever the past excesses of the Victorian police, I doubt there is a person in Australia who would disagree that Gargasoulas was screaming out for a bullet while he was chucking those burnouts — not after he had allegedly killed five poor people and injured more.

You can understand the public safety arguments surrounding questions such as shooting of suspects or continuing with police pursuits. This is the toughest area of policing, obviously. There have been instances where innocent people have died in crossfire or as a result of ensuing crashes, and the cops get the blame for that too. They are damned if they do and damned if they don’t, but the worrying thing these days is that they almost always don’t.

Last year in South Australia there were two fatal car accidents where innocent people died in collisions allegedly caused by young men driving stolen cars. In both cases, police had seen the offenders but chose not to engage in or continue pursuits on safety grounds, and the innocent people ended up dying anyway.

A woman is taken out on a stretcher after police raided the Lindt Cafe, in Sydney. Picture: Joosep Martinson/Getty Images

It is tempting to conclude that the only people these days who are at risk of being pulled over by the cops are those who are trying to obey the law. That’s those of us who unwittingly do 67km/h in a 60km/h zone, the people who work hard, pay their taxes, would never think of ignoring a police siren. If you want to evade police attention, make sure you are doing something really bad — like dropping the clutch and cracking 110km/h in a school zone — because only then can you be guaranteed that the police will leave you alone because it is their stated policy.

The Lindt Cafe siege started with some world-class squeamishness from the police about whether it was fair to call the guy with the ISIS flag and a shop full of hostages a terrorist or not. It culminated with a belated shootout after a squabble within police management about whether to storm the building.

One of the defining images from Melbourne is of police standing on the footpath, watching in the same way unarmed civilians were watching, as Gargasoulas broke every law he could. The cops watched it all unfold and acted only after the worst had occurred.

The cops have had their instincts drummed out of them, their hands tied by process. They should be told that they can get back to real policing again.