Steve Price: Why the George Floyd tragedy would never happen in Australia
Unlike America, Australians have respect for the police, which is why an incident like the George Floyd case wouldn’t happen.
Opinion
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Melbourne is no Minneapolis and Australia is not the United States and we can all be thankful that the George Floyd murder could not have happened here.
A Victorian police officer kneeling on the neck of a suspect for eight minutes and 46 seconds simply would not have been tolerated.
The officers’ training, for a start, would have meant the deadly scenario played out on the streets in front of witnesses clutching mobile phones, would have kicked in.
Given police in Minneapolis were responding to the Australian version of a 911 call after a cigarette shop owner complained Floyd used a counterfeit $20 note to buy smokes, just think for a moment about the Vic-Pol response.
I doubt unless a police vehicle was in the area they would have even responded. The shopkeeper would have been told to ring that petty crime number you call if your car is stolen and that would have been it.
If police had responded tasers would have been tried and capsicum spray likely used on the man’s face if he refused to co-operate.
I predict if that event was in Melbourne and not in a racially divided community of less than half a million people, many of whom hate police, there would have been intervention.
A half-dozen onlookers filming on their phones would be highly unlikely. The verbal advice from the Melbourne witnesses would have been ease-up mate, let him breathe.
Fellow police officers would have stepped in to calm the situation helping handcuff the offender and get him out of there.
Presumably this didn’t happen in the Floyd case because both the public watching and the police doing the arresting couldn’t be sure that someone didn’t have a gun.
The black bystanders would have been scared they might end up dead if they moved while the police would be wary of the onlookers not knowing how many of them were armed.
In a nutshell that’s the difference between Minnesota in the US and Melbourne in Australia – guns!
Police and the public over there don’t trust each other because you are always one crazy lunatic away from being shot. And the Floyd case – a simple everyday police patrol intervention that turned into a murder a trial and a guilty verdict which caused nationwide protests – can be sheeted back to America’s crazy obsession with weapons.
Compare what happened that day in Minnesota with what happened on Thursday night this week in Melbourne and tell me we don’t have the upmost regard for our serving police.
A year on from the worst one incident death toll for Victoria Police the people of Melbourne remembered with a blue light tribute organised by the State Government.
Buildings, bridges, town halls and railway stations bathed in blue to remember Leading Senior Constable Lynette Taylor, Senior Constable Kevin King, Constable Glen Humphris and Constable Josh Prestney, mowed down by a drugged-up truck driver Mohinder Singh.
He’s been jailed for 22 years and those four police paid with their lives and their families were given a life sentence without their loved ones.
All because of a speeding driver broke the road rules.
This is not the first time Melbourne has grieved for police killed doing their job.
Walsh Street, South Yarra, has a small plaque inset to the gutter where in October 1988 Steven Tynan and Damien Eyre – one aged just 22 and the other 20 – were executed by career criminals.
Ten years later Gary Silk and Rodney Miller, working undercover in Moorabbin, met a similar fate.
Victorians will never forget all eight – the Eastern Freeway victims and the Walsh St police and the Moorabbin murders.
We treasure the work our police do. It’s dangerous, poorly paid and often unrecognised. It’s why when a fringe school in Sydney this week was discovered displaying posters drawn by year five and six students that read ‘STOP KILLER COPS’ and ‘PIGS OUT OF THE COUNTRY’ so many people got angry.
The school has since apologised but what sort of education system allows a teacher to not only encourage students to express those views but then pins the offensive garbage to the walls?
What, if anything, are the parents doing about ripping their kids out of a joint that even allows that?
Principal Stephanie McConnell said the posters were part of an activity aimed at identifying what year five and six students already knew about contemporary Aboriginal history.
Cop killing pigs – if that’s what ten year-olds at a privileged North Shore Sydney school think is happening in their community – then we have a real issue.
We know local political activists from the left seized upon the George Floyd killing last year and then piggybacked their own agendas into a local Black Lives Matter movement.
They then cleverly used the brand to reignite their push for everything from cancelling Australia Day, changing the flag, negotiating a treaty for past injustice, the stolen generation narrative and deaths in custody.
The murder of a petty criminal at the hands of police in Minneapolis was shocking. Gun crime in America, with African-Americans often the victims, is sad.
Of course, Black lives matter. So do brown and white lives.
In fact all lives matter, that’s why I’m very happy I live in Australia not in Floyd’s America.
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Originally published as Steve Price: Why the George Floyd tragedy would never happen in Australia
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