Beware the fog of war: How fear and confusion can be life-changing in policing

The bungled police raid in Fitzroy was shocking but it’s not the first time it’s happened. Sometimes cool heads lose out to adrenaline, writes Andrew Rule.

Time was when maverick police could raid the wrong house, hold a gun to an innocent person’s head and then shrug off any complaints. Jane Doe and Joe Citizen had no luck taking on City Hall in the good old days.

Times have changed. Police still make mistakes, as they did so bizarrely in Fitzroy North last weekend, but these days their victims have a fighting chance of having wrongs righted.

Evidence of that is that the independent anti-corruption outfit known as IBAC has the job of investigating how a cluster-flock of highly-trained police — the air wing, dog handlers and not-quite-elite Critical Response Group — could get the hunt for a suspected house invader so spectacularly wrong.

It’s possible IBAC might be a less blinkered and more rigorous than an investigation conducted by fellow members of the police union. The investigation will study what went wrong two hours after midnight last Saturday morning, when a bunch of armed police burst into living quarters above the Hares & Hyenas bookshop in Fitzroy.

The response group members wear a version of the military-lite gear VicPol copied from New York cops, adopting the “black shirt” look that the then chief commissioner Ken Lay suggested at the time was to make police look more intimidating than they had in their traditional lighter blues.

Chief Lay was right, judging by the effect on the innocent man injured in the raid: he was so successfully intimidated he fled, was chased down and hurt so badly he landed in hospital. He might end up with a permanent injury to one arm — and enough compensation to buy his own police helicopter. Or maybe a small resort.

The victim this time is Nik Dimopoulos and he was terrified of the raiding party because, he says, he didn’t realise they were police until after he’d tried to escape what he instinctively feared was a group committing a hate crime against gay men.

Nik Dimopoulos. Picture: Facebook

Mr Dimopoulos is unlikely to change his views, despite sabre-rattling from the police union. He has engaged Robinson Gill, a rising law firm that has made its name by flogging police (in court) who flogged the wrong suspects.

To be fair, it’s true that if you look closely in daylight, you can see the word POLICE printed on the officers’ bulletproof vests. But a terrified person in the dark might not see that when woken by doors being smashed, yells and screams, and guns being waved around.

Mr Dimopoulos and his two middle-aged and law-abiding housemates seem firm on their recollection that the police raiders did not identify themselves clearly enough before handling their “target” so roughly he might not regain full use of one arm.

But at least the top brass, in this case Assistant Commissioner Luke Cornelius, had the grace to come clean straight away.

“We stuffed up,” he said as soon as a microphone was in range, a change from the weasel words often used to defend the indefensible.

It was much different from the police reaction after Delia Lawrie, then 22, was woken early one summer morning in 1989 by three armed men in street clothes who charged into her Windsor flat.

The men — two in suits, one in denim — turned out to be detectives from St Kilda police station, then known as “the St Kilda Police Force” for its ruggedly independent attitude to policing a patch that boasted much of Melbourne’s drugs, theft and prostitution.

Like Nik Dimopoulos, Delia Lawrie feared she was going to die. The dread lingered long after the actual danger was gone. She and her then boyfriend Tony Carter-Smith (who’d left for work before the police raid) had to move out of the flat because it unsettled her so much. She would later return to her home town of Darwin, which was where we contacted her this week.

Delia Lawrie was terrified following a bungled police raid on her Melbourne home 30 years ago. Picture: News Corp Australia

Ms Lawrie, who was a staff member of the Australian Journalists’ Association in 1989, has gone on to a prominent career in Territory politics. She is an accomplished and savvy professional woman, but recalling her ordeal still brings back a flood of bad memories:

“It was early morning. Tony had already left to go to work (and) he’d left the front door to our flat accidentally unlocked. I was asleep in bed, naked. I woke to men in plain clothes bursting through my bedroom door, pointing hand guns at me and shouting ‘Don’t move or we’ll shoot’.

“I dived completely under my doona in fear and started screaming … I truly believed I was going to die. I did not think they were police. As I was cowering under my doona screaming, I heard ‘Police’. My screaming went to crying and my head surfaced from under the doona. I was sobbing and shaking uncontrollably as they threw questions at me.

“The questions were delivered very aggressively and went on for about 10 to 15 minutes. I continued to sob. I cannot begin to describe how vulnerable I felt, naked under the doona. One of the men said ‘Why don’t you calm down and stop crying?’.

“When it finally dawned on them they had the wrong place and wrong person they told me to get out of bed because they needed to continue questioning me. I refused. I told them I needed to get dressed first.

“I never found out what went wrong or why. Cops closed ranks and closed (it) down.”

It turned out the police were chasing a potentially armed and dangerous offender who had just moved into a flat in the same block, but someone had mixed up the flat numbers.

On Delia Lawrie’s telling, the response she got was more-or-less “Cop it sweet, princess. These things happen”, although she extracted some assurances that police raiding parties from then on would be clearly identified.

MORE: POLICE UNION BOSS ‘PROUD’ OF FITZROY RAID COPS

POLICE ADMIT THEY ‘STUFFED UP’ ON RAID

To be fairer to the police than they apparently were to Ms Lawrie, it is a fact that adrenaline is such a potent stimulant that it makes people do extreme things during peak “fight or flight”. A policeman well-known to this column still has nightmares because he accidentally shot another officer in a long-ago raid on a drug dealer. It wasn’t until the shaken constable unloaded his pistol after the shooting that he realised it had been discharged, proving the “offender” had not done the shooting.

The point? In the fear and confusion of conflict, we humans make mistakes. Terrified “targets” sometimes do not hear what is being screamed at them and cannot see in the dark or with bright lights dazzling them. And, on the other side, hyper-anxious officers can get it just as wrong. Soldiers call it “the fog of war”.

[e-mail]