Andrew Rule: Ice war claiming all kinds of victims

WE’RE losing the war against ice and the casualties are not always clearly visible in our crime statistics, writes Andrew Rule.

Not all the casualty figures from ice show up in the crime statistics.

LATE on Grand Final morning, an observant customer in the McDonald’s at Hampton Park realised that two men sitting outside were drug dealers working in tandem: one taking cash and the other holding the drugs to pass to a steady trickle of buyers.

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A telephone call to a relative living nearby reinforced the watcher’s suspicions. Yep, said the relative, those two are always there, doing the business. What’s more, he said, local police don’t seem to notice when they drop in to get burgers and coffee or to use the toilets. It’s as if the dealers are part of the scenery, hidden in plain view.

Eleven days earlier, about 4pm on September 19 at a big rural property at Anakie, north of Geelong, a landholder saw two males trying to get over a fence into his property. They were putting branches onto the wire to give themselves something to scramble over when the owner drove up on his tractor then walked over to the fence to challenge them.

“One was about 25 — a tall, prison-fit-looking guy, with tattoos on his neck, wearing gold chains, a tracksuit, hoodie, baseball cap and runners,” the landholder said later. “The kid was only about 12 or 13 but they were both high as kites, and full of crazy talk.”

At first the intruders turned around and went to walk off but then they switched back and turned aggressive, claiming they were “yabbying” in the creek nearby.

Aggravated robberies and assaults are still rising.

It was obviously a lie: they had no yabby nets, buckets or bait.

The older man then claimed he was the teenager’s “social worker” but this seemed even less likely than the yabby story, as his next move was to produce a large knife and lunge at the farmer through the fence.

The farmer had nothing with which to defend himself. He grabbed the man’s arm and rammed it onto the electric fence wire. The shock made the assailant drop the knife, which the teenager picked up and waved.

The farmer said he was going to call the police if the pair did not leave. He ran over to his utility and drove down the adjoining road to see if they had a car hidden behind trees. He saw no car, which made him think they had been dropped off by someone else to break into farm buildings and then be picked up later.

When he pulled up near the intruders, the man ran at him with the knife again. The farmer reversed his ute out of danger then called 000. He was put through to police (at Geelong, he thinks) who told him to lock himself in the car and not do anything to provoke the intruders until police could “get a van” to the scene.

The tattooed man made a show of using his phone to snap photographs of the property’s front gate, obviously trying to intimidate the owner, then walked off with the youth. The landholder returned to his house, worried about his children.

Six hours later, at 10pm, police had still not arrived. When the landholder called them, he was told there was only one available police van between the Bellarine Peninsula and Corio. The farmer let his sheep dogs loose to guard the house yard. At 3am next morning they started barking as a couple of cars went past on the little-used road.

In ‘iceland’ nothing changes — except the street price.

Minutes later, the farmer heard an explosion further up the road. He believes it was one of the cars he’d heard pass, being torched. He found the burnt-out shell after daybreak. When he reported it to police, they were apologetic about not appearing the previous day, he says. “But still no one came out.”

He wonders now what the intruders might have done if he had not installed a powerful new electric fence unit only weeks before. “It was the perfect Taser,” he says. If the electric jolt had not made the man drop the knife, who knows how badly it could have ended?

From now on, the farmer says, he will be ready to defend his property and family without police help as police seem spread too thinly to respond quickly to potentially urgent calls from outside their immediate area.

It’s a point not lost on the family and friends of country policeman Gavin Frew, whose funeral at Wangaratta late last week was a jolting reminder of the toll that ice inflicts. The leading senior constable took his own life two weeks ago because of the trauma of years of dealing with the terrifying violence that ice causes.

He told a family friend recently he had been “worn down” from facing crazed and aggressive drug users and coping with the drug’s effects on the community and on the roads: the abused and neglected children, the terrorised parents and neighbours, the endless round of thefts and robberies to subsidise the drug, the car crashes and road rage.

He had transferred to a less public role in the traffic branch but the change had come too late to ease his agitated state of mind.

Frew, known to be quick with a smile and a joke, had been a popular country policeman in his various postings. He played football and cricket in local teams with more enthusiasm than skill, endearing him to battling rural clubs.

A dealer can double sales within days if the ‘reviews’ are positive.

Meanwhile, in “iceland” nothing changes — except the street price. Just days before fellow police lit candles for Gavin Frew at a memorial service last Friday, they arrested a young woman and her brother in a car at Wodonga with 54 grams of ice worth around $30,000 to sell by the gram. A year ago, that cache would have been worth much more. But, according to a well placed source, the ice supply is so strong that the street price has dropped to $50 “a point” (10th of a gram) from a high of $100. This is true of dealers from Dandenong and Hampton Park to Sunshine and Werribee.

“A big shipment must have come in,” says the source, a reformed user who watches the drug trade. Dealers are so keen to compete that they are arranging “passouts” the way wineries have tastings to lure customers.

At a prearranged time and place, the dealer’s “associates” pass out free samples of a new batch of ice to “runners” who pass them to regular buyers. Word spreads fast. A dealer can double sales within days if the “reviews” are positive. We are all paying for that, indirectly.

Meanwhile, the number crunchers and spin doctors tell us that crime is down in Victoria.

A more honest way to label the tiny half per cent drop is to say that after five years of rises, some categories of crime have not risen lately the way others have.

This is like saying that crippling traffic jams are no worse than they were last year and isn’t that wonderful? But as for an actual improvement — don’t hold your breath.

Meanwhile, aggravated robberies and assaults are still rising. Out in the suburbs and the regional cities where most of us live, police like Gavin Frew are losing the battle against ice. Not all the casualty figures show up in the crime statistics.

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