Opinion
If there’s one group that Australians distrust more than politicians, it’s the media. Increasingly, we can throw police onto the “Do Not Trust” pile.
Like politicians and the media, security and police departments are now routinely lying to Australians’ faces.
For instance, in 2017, ASIO boss Duncan Lewis unequivocally asserted that, “I have absolutely no evidence to suggest there is a connection between refugees and terrorism”. Lewis also vowed there was no evidence of the children of refugees being radicalised in Australia.
That was untrue.
In fact, over 80% of terror attacks or thwarted plots in Australia in the last twenty years were perpetrated by refugees or their children. Dozens of children of Muslim refugees have been radicalised, including many who flocked to join the Islamic State. More recently, Sydney mosques have hosted clerics advocating genocide on Jews.
A year later, the Victoria Police commissioner flatly stated that Africans in that state were not over-represented in crime statistics, and there were no African gangs operating in Melbourne.
That, too, was a lie.
In fact, not only are African-born people in Victoria well over-represented in crime stats, in particular crimes, they are astonishingly over-represented. Despite being just 0.1% of the Victorian population, Africans accounted for ten times that number in crimes. In particular crimes of violence, they are up to ninety times more likely to be offenders than anyone else. Bear in mind, too, that those figures are only for African-born: Australian crime data does not record crime by ethnicity, so crimes by the children of African migrants are masked as merely “Australian”.
As for gangs — Victoria Police insisted there weren’t gangs, just groups of networked criminal offenders.
Which is calling a spade a rectangular manual earth-moving implement.
Now, Victoria Police are at it again, cheered on by the hooting left media.
Police are mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it any more. That’s right, after Chief Commissioner Shane Patton stood his ground – to say the least – after Sunday’s LGBTQ Pride March, at which activists robustly objected to police participation in the event, Victoria’s finest now have a bone to pick with Andrew Bolt, firebrand columnist with Melbourne’s US-owned tabloid, the Herald Sun.
Note the sneering attempts to poison the well: “US-owned”, “tabloid”. It’s worth pointing out that The Age is likewise a tabloid.
The Bolter had quite the tale to tell late last month, in his newspaper column and on his Sky News TV show, about a chap called Frank Strazdins, who claimed a police officer arrested him in Swanston Street on Australia Day.
Strazdins’ crime? Having two small Australian flags protruding from his baseball cap, he reckons. Cue the standard outrage from Andrew.
But there was nothing standard about what happened on Tuesday. Coming off a two-week run-up, Victoria Police’s communications unit put out a lengthy statement blasting Bolt’s broadcast and column as “inaccurate”, “nonsensical” and “fanciful”
The Age
But what did Strazdins and Bolt actually say?
Frank Strazdins has spoken out after he was placed under arrest for inciting a riot by having the Australian flag on his head near an Invasion Day protest.
Mr Strazdins told Sky News host Andrew Bolt that he was walked off the road, away from the protesters.
Sky News
Was Strazdins arrested, or taken into custody? An arrest is defined as “to seize someone and take them into custody”. Under Victorian law, a person is in custody if “he or she is in the company of an investigating official and is being questioned; or to be questioned; or otherwise being investigated”.
Clearly, by Strazdins’ story, he was either arrested or taken into custody. According to Strazdins, as he and his partner were returning from the Shrine of Remembrance wearing their Australian flags, they found themselves in the midst of a chanting mob of “Invasion Day” protesters. Whereupon, he says, he was unequivocally told he was under arrest.
“Within two minutes, a police officer approached me and said, ‘You are under arrest for inciting a riot’.”
Strazdin’s partner confirms the story and says they were only allowed to leave if they took off their Australian flags and left for nearby Southbank, using backstreets.
So, by his witnesses’ own story, Bolt was correct.
What’s the police version?
The police version of events is that an officer approached Strazdins as he stood in the middle of the busy thoroughfare and advised him that his attire might be provocative to the 30,000-odd Invasion Day protesters who were approaching. The officer was apparently even so kind as to advise Strazdins and his partner about the safest route to take to their stated destination, Southbank.
The Age
This sounds suspiciously like, again, Victoria Police calling a spade a rectangular manual earth-moving implement. It is clear that, even by their own, prettified, version, police took Strazdins into custody (remember: “in the company of an investigating official and is being questioned; or to be questioned; or otherwise being investigated”) before ordering them to move on.
Potayto, potahto. This, people, is why you should always use your phone to record any interaction you have with police.
Certainly, it should have been beholden on Bolt to seek comment from the police before airing the story, but what’s worse? A journalist being a bit sloppy or police threatening ordinary citizens who are being perfectly law-abiding and carrying the flags of their own country — and then lying through their teeth about it?