Miranda Devine: Victoria Police, you are not political activists. Just do your job
It’s no surprise that the nation’s most politically correct police force would have a crime problem, explains Miranda Devine. But they have no clue how to fix it.
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As a sixth victim of the Bourke Street massacre died in hospital on Monday, Victoria’s Chief Police Commissioner Graham Ashton boasted about his officers marching in uniform in a gay pride march in St Kilda: “Victoria Police relishes the opportunity to publicly display our support for LGBTI people.”
No, Victoria Police should just do their job. They’re not social engineers or political activists. They are cops tasked with locking up bad people.
Ashton now blames a lack of money for his risk-averse, politically correct police force’s abject failure to protect innocent people.
But money is not the problem. Every year Victorian taxpayers fork out $2.5 billion for a police force which is virtue-signalling on racism, sexism, homophobia and Islamophobia.
The state’s crime rate is skyrocketing, up 12.4 per cent in the last year, with violent carjackings and home invasions a way of life.
Melburnians I know sleep with hammers and axes under their beds. Yet Victoria’s top cop thinks it’s business as usual.
On the day three weeks ago that Jimmy Gargasoulas, 26, allegedly mowed down pedestrians in Bourke St Mall with his red Commodore, police cars and a helicopter had been following him all over town for up to 16 hours. They hadn’t managed to stop him, even when he was stuck in heavy traffic.
An ice user who described himself on Facebook as “Greek Islamic Kurdish”, Gargasoulas was clearly a menace, out on bail on a series of 20 charges, and having allegedly violently assaulted his brother the previous night.
Just before driving into Bourke St Mall, he executed a series of doughnuts and burnouts in front of Flinders St station, while shouting obscenities out the window.
Yet uniformed police visible in witness videos just stood by impassively and watched.
Ashton told radio 3AW the police hanging around the intersection were in the area conducting “anti-social campaigns”, which says it all.
Give someone a ticket for panhandling but studiously ignore the maniac driving a two-tonne weapon in doughnuts in front of you.
Two courageous 17-year-olds, Tevita Mahina and Isaac Tupou, were alarmed enough to try to stop the car with a baseball bat.
“We just had to take action. No one was doing anything. He looked like he was going to hurt people,” Tupou said afterwards.
But still the police did nothing.
And that’s because Ashton and his highly paid deputies have managed to remove any initiative from their frontline troops.
Police couldn’t chase the car as car chases have been banned.
They couldn’t ram it because “it’s not our policy to ram cars,” said Ashton.
They couldn’t shoot out the tyres because since September police are banned from firing at moving cars.
So instead they were forced to watch people being slaughtered.
It’s the police at the frontline who will have sleepless nights but it’s their bosses who bear the responsibility. Ashton’s pledge of loyalty to frontline police who had to make “split second” decisions is meaningless. His boast of “welfare support” for traumatised officers is an insult. They wouldn’t be traumatised if they had been able to do their jobs.
If Commissioner Ashton had left them alone to use their judgment, innocent pedestrians would not have been run over.
Ashton’s risk-averse approach is the opposite of the most successful idea in policing in recent decades — the Broken Windows theory that inspired New York City’s zero tolerance crackdown on crime in the 1990s. By dealing with small crimes, neighbourhoods become safer.
Lax policing is like a broken window in a building left unrepaired, a signal that no one cares, and there are no consequences.
Victoria Police — and the left-wing soft magistrates and judges who let dangerous criminals out on bail — have sent the message that there is no price to pay for crime.
A week after the Bourke St Mall tragedy, escapees from a Victorian youth justice centre, armed with iron bars, tried to hijack a car carrying a seven-year-old after outrunning police.
It’s probably no surprise that the nation’s most politically correct police force in our most socialist state would have a crime problem. But they have no clue about how to fix it.
Premier “Red Dan” Andrews has promised an extra $2 billion to recruit 3000 new police officers, but Victoria already has more police per capita than NSW, which boasts the lowest crime rate in 25 years.
The sleeping giant of public anger is starting to stir — and if Ashton had any dignity he would resign.
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When it comes to soaring crime rates, Victorians are like frogs in boiling water.
They seem to accept a level of chaos and disorder unheard of in NSW, which boasts its lowest crime rates in 20 years.
Victoria has twice the crime of NSW and half the imprisonment rate, which tells you something about the perils of leftist judges and magistrates who don’t believe punishment should fit the crime.
Maybe it’s a coincidence, but the insignia of the NSW police force reflects a far more serious approach to law and order.
In NSW the police motto is the Latin “Culpam poena premit comes”, which means “Punishment follows closely upon crime”. This is what most citizens expect of their justice system.
The NSW insignia also features a soaring wedge-tailed eagle carrying a scroll with the word “Nemesis”, and its mission statement is “to protect life and property and to detect and prevent crime”.
But in Victoria, the police paraphernalia is all very tame and PC. A bland five-pointed badge features the mystifying motto “Uphold the Right”.
This has been bizarrely translated literally from the French “Tenez le Droit”, which actually means uphold the law or uphold justice. Victoria Police’s mission statement also is weak: “To provide a safe, secure and orderly society by serving the community and the law.” Blah blah.
They launched a female recruitment drive on Sunday, as if a “diverse” force is the answer to their problems. But they might be more successful if they hardened up their motto.
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