Drunken violence seems to have an unintended consequence: it has made public authorities stupider. ABC’s TWT has reported on a recent incident in the Melbourne CBD and what makes me numb are the responses of the police and the Mayor.
© Jesse Smith
On the weekend a police officer was seriously injured after being smashed in the head from behind with a bottle. In another incident, a woman was found wondering the streets of Melbourne with a stab wound to her stomach.
Citing a visit to New York as the inspiration, the Victorian Police Association is recommending mandatory sentencing for violent assault – a situation which removes any capacity for judges to take any considerations into account when determining the sentence of someone found guilty. Basically, zero-tolerance.
When your job involves something like chasing dangerous criminals or stopping violence, then you can understand the desire of the VPA to want some protection themselves.
Robert Doyle, Mayor of Melbourne City, offered this piece of tripe as support for the recommendation:
When you attack a police officer then you are really attacking the foundation of society and I think the harshest measures of the law should be for those who are bashing the people who, after all, are designated to take care of the rest of us.
Since when are the police the foundation of society? I always thought people were the foundation of society, but that is sounding a little crazy against what Doyle is saying. The police are a public authority, not a benelvolent ruler. The legitimacy of their authority rests upon the normative consent of the public. They are not a public authority simply because they are government funded or because they deal with the public.
Utterances like this truly do give the impression we live in a society where justice is synonymous with law and order, rather than fairness and doing what is right.
In the end an idea like freedom is compromised: we need more punitive laws because people don’t know how to use their freedom. The liquor licensing law changes aren’t working…quick get in more CCTV cameras! The next step that seems to be on the horizon is perhaps the scariest. I’m not exactly sure what to make of the suggestions implied in these statements by the Victorian Police chief:
SIMON OVERLAND: There is probably 300,000 people who come into the CBD on a Friday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday night. They don’t live in the area. They come in from around Melbourne. Many of them come in to have a good time. Some of them come in to cause problems.
We are looking to understand where people are coming from. What sort of patterns we are seeing and then what we can put in place to either dissuade them from coming into the city or what other action we can actually take to deal with the root cause of the issues.
How do the police dissuade someone from coming in to the city? More importantly, how do they actualy identify those people they need to dissuade?
Brian Kearney from the Hotels Association is less equivocal about the matter:
BRIAN KEARNEY: If initiative such as that stopped the people that we don’t want in the city from coming into the city – that would be an excellent initiative.
Which people would that be, Mr. Kearney? Seeing as hoteliers and nightclub owners don’t see the problem occurring inside their doors, they see it coming from on the street. David Butten, from the Nightclub Owners Forum, was quite frank about who the problem people are: those who drink on the street. I’m sure Mr. Kearney et. al. would surely agree that it is these people who are going to be targeted. It’s very convenient: it gets rid of an aesthetically unpleasant sight as well as forces people into licensed venues. Win-win!
What is going to happen to picnics and BBQs in the park? Are we going to have to have alcohol free BBQs and picnics? I suppose they could impose time limits – this is what happens mostly in Sydney. After dark, no drinking. The point is that it’s just continuing to shift the problem from one sphere to another. In the end it’s going to push drinking into the home and who is to say that this isn’t the source of drinking problems anyway?
I suppose the thing that irks me overall is what is happening to our sense of public space. The term public, here, is being conflated with economic or commercial. In so far as this is a public issue it relates to the safety of those people who have a legitimate claim to public space – commercial entitites, like pubs and clubs, and their paying patrons. There is very little sympathy for those who drink on the streets: Why do they drink on the streets rather than in these establishments? What does this say about their relationship to the public sphere? The only attempts to look at these questions are within the frame of surveillance and control. And the issue does not stop there considering that mandatory sentencing is being espoused. This is tantamount to surveilling and controlling our judges. Why do we hate the freedom of others so much?!?!
Hi; good blog, but it looks a bit funny. Using Firefox, I have to scroll in both directions to read a posting, and the postings appear next to each other instead of being stacked vertically. Did you intend this?
Hi Chris. Thanks for dropping by. Yes, I intentionally designed the blog so it scrolled horizontally. Just wanted to try something a little different. I know it’s not the most intuitive design, but it is straightforward.
From the main page, use the angle quotes (« and ») to navigate to the previous or next post, respectively. If you are at the beginning or end of a page, you will automatically be taken to the previous or next page, respectively.
If there is a post that seems interesting, simply scroll down to read it. Or click on the post title to view the whole post on a single page. Similarly, when viewing a post on a single page, there will be angle quotes that you can use t navigate to the previous and next posts.
Come to think of it, I should probably put this in some sort of navigation help that’s available everywhere on the site.
So the bad idea becomes a bad reality in WA. Read about how they have decided to implement mandatory sentencing for serious adult offences against police and other public officers.