Andrew Rule: The men and women of Victoria Police deserve our respect
BEING sceptical of authority isn’t necessarily bad, but there is a right time and reason to bag police, writes Andrew Rule.
Andrew Rule
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BLAME the Baby Boomers. Everybody else does. Back when they were getting their free university educations and shoplifting flared jeans, they started the fashion for calling police nasty names.
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What fun it was, abusing cops as pigs and fascists — and fascist, chauvinist pigs — and anything else they could think of between rolling joints, drinking Mateus Rose and planning what to wear come the Revolution.
The anti-authority attitude came with the Che Guevara T-shirts but has lasted much longer. Those rebels without a cause are now middle aged but a lot of their kneejerk anti-police bias lives on.
Being sceptical of authority is not necessarily bad. We know this from revelations that bent priests, teachers and other reptiles got away with abusing the vulnerable for so long.
But there is a right time and reason to bag police. It shouldn’t be a cheap “gotcha” moment contrived from trivial stuff that we know, deep down, doesn’t matter a damn. What really matters is that the people we pay to uphold our laws are good people and good at their job.
The waves on Port Phillip Bay topped three metres last Sunday — but it doesn’t take a freak storm to make the bay dangerous. It can mug the unwary any time.
Just ask the two recreational fishermen who launched their small boat from Altona to spend the night fishing a couple of weeks ago. It seemed a good idea on a warm evening but when the wind and waves sprang up after midnight, the boat took water.
If it hadn’t been for the water police answering the distress call fast and accurately, those two would have drowned. As it happened, their boat sank just after the police arrived around 3am and pulled them out of the water.
It happens all the time. The week before the Altona rescue, water police saved a Geelong man whose boat sank after hitting an unlit channel marker while crossing from Point Wilson to Portarlington at night.
You can bet that those three grateful people and their families — and all the others that police save every year — won’t be too concerned about another recent news item involving water police.
That was the story about two water police using one of their special rigid-hull inflatable boats to go to Corsair Rock, the lethal reef on the Portsea side of “the Rip” that has wrecked many ships — and which throws up an offshore surf break that can be reached only by boat unless you want to do a Harold Holt.
Using the boat as a launching point, the water wallopers surfed the break. And why wouldn’t they? One of them is a former police and emergency services Games surfing champion. The other would like to be.
In other words, the surfer-cops were doing a little extra unofficial training after taking part in an annual counter-terror exercise off Swan Island, which involved Special Operations Group officers boarding the Queenscliff-Sorrento ferry in a mock hijack scenario.
So who really cares? You could argue the only thing wrong with their after-hours adventure in the department’s $650,000 boat is that the SOG guys weren’t with them. Because these are exactly the sort of bold, fit, adventurous “self-starters” we taxpayers really need in an emergency.
And you can bet there will be an emergency, soon enough. The Queenscliff ferry might never be hijacked — but you can bet a boat full of potential drowning victims is going to get into trouble in the Rip some time. That’s exactly when you want water police with the nerve and the nous to manoeuvre a fast boat in rough water. It’s all part of saving lives — or chasing crooks.
The sort of cops capable of surfing the Rip with the sharks and hidden reefs is just what the doctor ordered. Let’s hope they didn’t get much more than a mild rebuke at police headquarters, otherwise they’ll find jobs where initiative and nerve is rewarded.
In political, legal and media circles, we are too quick to jump on police for perceived faults that don’t really matter or are distorted and overblown. One of the all-time examples of this was the sanctimonious outcry when the then chief commissioner Simon Overland jumped on a flight to Sydney with a spare clip of ammunition in his bag.
The fact is, Overland was a serving senior officer trained and licensed to carry firearms. Secondly, he had been prominent in pursuing armed and dangerous criminals that intelligence experts considered a threat to him and his family, so he was required to carry a weapon more-or-less around the clock. Thirdly, a handful of bullets — without the gun — is no more threat to aircraft safety than a packet of the licorice and chocolate variety.
Overland had his critics for other reasons — but a pistol clip in his luggage was and is nothing to beat up on him about. Maybe he should have had his pistol as well. He was hardly going to hijack the plane — but he could stop some lunatic doing that just as easily as a “sky marshal” could. If someone like Overland or the surfing coppers were on every flight, armed, we’d all be better off.
Remember that Pavel “Mad Max” Marinof shot and wounded four police just doing their job in the mid-1980s — and took shots at three more. The renegade Bulgarian gunman, a lethally expert shot, was public enemy number one while on the run for eight months.
No wonder that the detectives ordered to find him armed themselves, regardless of regulations, with heavy “buckshot” cartridges in their shotguns. When they pulled up Marinof in a panel van on the Hume Highway north of Melbourne, he shot and wounded them both.
But one of the detectives was still able to shoot through the rear of the panel van with his shotgun. The buckshot did its job, killing the maniac before he could escape into suburbia and endanger more innocent people.
That’s the sort of fast and fearless reaction that might have prevented the Lindt Café’s fatal outcome a generation later. Trouble is, instead of applauding guts and determination, we are quick to kick the people we pay to protect us if they stray from the occupational health and safety manual that looms over every operational officer.
This is not an argument to “green light” every would-be Roger Rogerson, bash artist and bully in uniform. But we shouldn’t automatically assume the worst about those we pay to protect us. Under the law, even the worst offenders get the benefit of any doubt. Surely police acting in good faith are entitled to the same.
Bumper sticker slogans ain’t literature. Sometimes they’re not even logical. But that doesn’t mean they are always wrong. Back in the days of anti-war marches when “hippies” provoked “pigs” into confrontation, someone came up with a line that nails an uncomfortable truth about law and order versus police brutality.
“Next time you get mugged,” it went, “call a hippy.”
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