Steve Price: Top cop Shane Patton needs to stop virtue signalling
Police Commissioner Shane Patton needs to ditch the political correctness and instead focus on the state’s troubling crime rate.
Opinion
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If Australia lacks political leadership — and it does — the quality of our law enforcement leaders is worse.
Can anyone remember the last time we all thought how strong and inspirational Victoria’s Police Commissioner Shane Patton was?
Most Victorians would probably struggle to even name him.
At the height of a statewide youth crime wave with Victorians terrified in the middle of the night by home invasions, car thefts, assaults and arson attacks, you must ask what Patton and his senior Commanders are doing to protect Victorians.
The force seems trapped into a politically correct response to these teenage thugs — many of them from African backgrounds — who swarm out of places like Dandenong to attack wealthy homeowners in places like Brighton, Toorak, Kew and Hawthorn.
Do we hear from our commissioner on a regular basis about his counter measures to lock up these dangerous, machete wielding repeat offenders – hardly. Has the Commissioner gone public over the soft treatment of repeat offenders – maybe I missed it.
The last time Shane Patton was prominent in the media was being attacked disgracefully in a St Kilda Street during a Gay Pride march.
Outraged at his treatment — other pride supporting officers were pelted with paint — and forced out of the parade, Commissioner Patton bobbed up the next morning on ABC breakfast radio.
The deranged behaviour by a small group of protestors was appalling but a simple question from me would be why the highest ranking police officer in the state was there in the first place?
The answer, of course, is virtue signalling to the gay community. For several years now police command has seen fit to take part in this march to send a signal that Victoria police support the LGBTQIA+ community and to recognise there are serving police officers who are members of that community.
Police have had that posturing thrown right back in their faces by an angry mob and were for some reason shocked.
Why? Because you don’t see large slabs of other public servants marching under banners for gay rights and police should have better things to do like busting drug syndicates using children to steal cars for them.
Patton’s police when not marching under rainbow flags are instead standing idly by allowing daily protests by pro-Palestinian mobs chanting anti-Jewish slogans waving banners like “from the river to the sea” a sentiment signifying their desire to obliterate Israel. Appallingly last week outside the Melbourne Town Hall the same aggressive protestors chanting and raging against Israel were not moved on by Patton’s police but allowed to disrupt council proceedings.
Instead, three Jews who turned up to attend the meeting — and set upon by the protestors with one being shoved to the ground — were frog marched around the corner by police with two of them issued with a police warning not to return to the CBD for 24 hours.
Days later mobile phone video of the protestors emerged with one of them using a microphone to praise Hamas terrorists who lost their lives on October 7 as martyrs labelling them as heroes to their mothers.
You firmly get the impression the Victoria Police service – and that’s what it is, not a police force – under Commissioner Patton are more committed to serving their political masters in Spring St than the wider Victorian public. How else to explain the hands off approach to these Palestinian protestors spewing hate speech.
Compare those actions of Vic Pol 2024 to the SAME police service under the SAME Commissioner in September 2021. It’s instructive to remind ourselves how police handled three days of protest under three years ago.
Melbourne was in Covid lockdown six and under Dan Andrews imposed stay at home orders when hundreds of protestors took to the streets arguing against vaccine mandates and the stay at home laws.
More than 200 people were arrested, fines of up to $5,000 issued, capsicum spray and batons wielded by riot police used and at the Shrine of Remembrance foam baton rounds or rubber bullets were fired into the crowd. Commissioner Patton’s officers even briefly shut down the airspace above the CBD to prevent news organisations filming police movements.
No one – me included – is suggesting the pro-Palestine crowd deserve that sort of police presence or the resources used back then, but to allow this mob to protest almost daily without any police intervention is unacceptable. We have hate speech laws in this country for a reason and Patton should use them.
Police Commissioners around Australia have a tough job. We have seen just this month the Queensland Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll hand in her badge five months short of her contract expiring. She had been under enormous pressure over the wave of juvenile crime swamping large regional communities in that State. It is the same sort of brazen teenage home invasion issue Melbourne has.
Commissioner Carroll’s problems seem minor compared with the train wreck leadership of NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb. Just this week she said she was “grateful” Beau Lamarre-Condon, the police officer facing two murder charges, had assisted in their hunt for the bodies of Luke Davies and Jesse Baird. On the same investigation she called the alleged murder “a crime of passion” leading to this weekend’s Sydney Mardi Gra banning police from marching in uniform.
What’s worse was she was found last year to have skipped the NSW Police Remembrance Day to take an Asian Holiday with her family. Webb’s media appearances are cringeworthy, and she will be luck to survive in that job.
Not for a moment am I suggesting Victoria’s Shane Patton is in that league. Compared with former Victorian police Commissioner Christine Nixon, who went to the hairdressers in the middle of the Black Saturday bushfire emergency, Patton is doing an OK job.
Victorians though want more from their police chief and his police department. Plenty of officers I have spoken to pine for the days of a tough, inspirational, independent from Government, leader of substance.
Commissioner Patton you need to dump the political correctness, the woke causes and protest marches and start cleaning up the streets of violent crime and you might just keep your job beyond your five-year contract that’s up in mid 2025.
Likes
— Former media man and Senator Derryn Hinch putting his hand up at 81 to become Melbourne Lord Mayor.
— Series six of the outstanding Formula 1 series Drive to Survive on Netflix.
— Debate finally about the impact of new fuel standards from Canberra and what it will do to the price of tradie Utes.
— Footy’s back next week, finally, it’s been a long summer.
Dislikes
— Community radio station 3CR now branding itself as “radical radio” and broadcasting claims the genocide of indigenous Australians continues today.
— Catastrophic weather predictions this week that turned out thank goodness to be fake news.
— Canberra sending its fleet of expensive BMW EV’s to Melbourne for next week’s ASEAN conference.
— Andrew Twiggy Forrest lecturing Australia about the evils of nuclear energy.
Originally published as Steve Price: Top cop Shane Patton needs to stop virtue signalling
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