In Australia, there are lawyers, and then there are lawyers. There are actually two levels of lawyers. There are the lower, basic lawyers, called lawyers. Then there are more senior lawyers, called barristers.
Barristers are very expensive, and are granted the title by the bar.
When one becomes a barrister, they are referred to as "Master". If I were a barrister, then I would be referred to as Master Larson in the court.
My friend Loretta works for a law firm. She told me that there is a very nice Barrister in town that used to work for her brother's firm named Mr. Bates.
Honest to God. That is not a joke. I'll let you figure out the rest of it. I've love to be on the jury in a case he represents. I would be on the floor laughing.
Thursday, July 15, 2004
Friday, July 09, 2004
Police Rant
I wanna rant about the police here. If you all back in the US think that Australia is a peaceful and fair land, you are wrong. The police here are terrible. No better than the criminals in my opionion.
My problem with them is that they are worthless at best, and corrupt at worst.
Within a week of getting here, I was on the train and this local started talking to me. He discovered that I had just moved here from the US. He gave me some advice. He told me that if I ever get involved with the police, then expect a "phone book massage". He told me the best way to survive this is to roll back and forth so the phone books do not hit the same part of your body twice if it can be helped. It distrubutes the blows across your body.
For those who don't know, a "phone book massage" is a beating where they use a phone book as the weapon. When you use a phone book, it doesn't leave the tell-tale bruises and wounds that can be used as evidence of the beating.
Secondly, I was told by locals when I got here to never leave anything in a car. They said someone will break the window and steal it.
Lets just start with burglery. Perth has the highest burlary rate in Australia. It is much worse than in the US. You can't leave your home unlock, even when you are home. You can't leave anything of value in your car. It will get stolen.
This one really boils my blood. You never see police patrols in the neigborhoods. You never see the police just driving around checking things out, looking for people that don't belong there.
Perth is a big city of suburbs. Most people live in houses. So during the day, most neighborhoods are empty as people go to work. It makes great pickings for home burglers. They can drive around all day and not get harassed.
The police never respond to burgleries any more. They just sit on their asses, hand you a report to fill out, and tell you file an insurance claim.
I know this because about 60 percent of the people I work with have had their homes burglerized at least once. Only said the police bothered to come out.
There are many reasons for this sorry state of affairs.
First, the whole state only has one PD. Seriously. That is how they do it here. There is the Western Australian Police Department. They do all law enforcement for an area the size of the western US from the Missispi River to the Pacific Ocean.
The closed all the smaller local police stations years ago in a move to consolidate services. There are only 3 or regional super stations in Perth.
Now the problem with having only one PD, is that they have no accountability. They are charge of policing themselves. This leads to one hell of a lot of corruption. As a citizen, you don't get to vote on the chief. In fact, you can't go down to the cheifs office and pound your fist on the desk and demand that they put a stop to the brazen theives.
Officers that don't cooperate may find themselves assigned to a beat literally out of the middle of nowhere, thousands of miles from there home.
I've been trying to figure out why the insurance industry has not demanded that the police get off their asses and find out where all these stolen items are getting fenced. When I received quotes on my home burglary insurnace it all became clear. They charge a fortune, $80 a month in my case. They simply pass the costs onto the public.
A few weeks ago I was helping Loretta prepare her rental property for a new tenent. It is a house in a medium neighborhood. We had the front door open and we where in the kitchen painting. Suddenly she screamed. There was a teenage (about 19) Aborignal man standing in the middle of the living room looking around. He had just walked in like he owned the place. He was suprised to see he was caught and claimed he was looking for a glass of water. That was pure BS of course. He walked by the hose outside to get in. It was a cold day, about 6 in the evening. There is a corner store at the end of the block you can see.
I followed him outside. He walked over to this car full of other young male Aborginals, who then slowly drove off cruising the neighborhood looking for homes to break into.
Loretta told me that this is common, especially in the summer when people open their doors to get a breeze. It even happened in her house a few times. Burglers just walk or drive down the street. When they see a door open, or just a screen door, then walk in and grab what ever they find.
Part of this problem, IMHO, are the gun control laws in this country. If the burglers knew that they would have a good chance of getting their heads blown off, then they might think twice before walking into someone's home uninvited.
Basically, only the criminals get the carry weapons, and they do. And the public just has to take it. The cops get to carry sidearms. But they are too busy protecting the speed trap cameras from outraged citizens to bother to respond to calls of criminals breaking into a home.
Now here is the icing on the cake are far as I am concerned. What the police have decided to do about this problem is launch a PR campaign. Yup. They are spending valuable tax dollars on posters and TV ads. There are two campaigns. One targeted to the burglers. The other targeted to the victims.
Lets start with the victims ads. They have a serious of public service announcement style spots where a friendly officer goes how how to keep from being a victim. In one particlar ad, she talks about how you should always leave your glove box and ash tray open so theives can see there is nothing valuable inside. She advises that you never lock anything of value inside your car, even for a minute.
Others talk about how to lock your home up tight, even when at home. How to put locks on screen doors, don't have open windows on the street.
These ads made me so mad that I wanted to kick the TV. So what they are saying is that we the public should live in parinoid fear and turn our homes into little jails. Bullshit. How about this? How about the police spend their energy busting these criminals? How about getting off your asses and finding about where all this stolen loot is being fenced? How busting heads of the criminals you know to get answers? How about patrolling my streets when I am away at work? Grrrr. Do your damn job.
The other ad campaign is targeted to crimanals. It features a slick TV ad that looks like a plug for CSI. Fancy graphics show DNA being analyzed in a darked high-tech lab by white-coated technicions. I deep menacing voice claims "You leave part of yourself behind at every burglery. You leave some DNA. We will use this DNA to find you and throw you in prison!".
Ooooooh. I bet they are so scared. Hey bozo police... News Flash! Did you realize that you actually have to bother to show up and investigate a break-in to gather the DNA evidence? Since as far as I know you guys do nothing put rubber stamp theft reports for insurance claims at the central office, how are you going to bust people with fancy DNA anaylysis?
So there you go. Stupid solutions for serious problems. It gets worse.
Next topic. Corruption. This is out of control all over Australia. I don't know any Aussies that trust the police. There are stories every day about how cops here and there are found aiding criminals, stealing, killing, and so on.
In particular, there are two cases here in Perth that illustrate how bad it is. First, there is the case the the Perth Mint Swindle. Back in the mid 80's, someone, or some group, stole some gold from the Perth Mint.
The police blamed it three brothers, the Micklebergs. The three brothers were convicted on very flimsy evidence and thrown in prison for a very long time.
In the last couple of years, one of the detectives on the case decided to come clean. It turns out that he and some other detectives had fabricated all the evidence. They had beaten the Mickleberg boys at remote police stations. When they still refused to confess, they simply made the confessions up.
Last week, after 20 years, the bothers finally had their convictions reversed. There is a good book about all of this. It is called "The Mickleberg Stitch".
The other case concerns the other detective involved in fabricating the Mickleberg evidence. He was a senior detective named Don Hancock. After he took early retirement, he bought a bar out near Kalgoolie.
A few years ago some bikers (Hell's Angel types) got into a row in his bar. He threw them out. It apparently was no big deal... just the usual weekend brawl between drunk bikies. The bikers went over their camp site outside of town and sat around the campfire drinking beer.
A shot rang out the only house nearby. On the bikers was shot through the skull from a high-powered rifle.
The evidence was clear as a bell to everyone involved. The only house nearby belonged to Don Hancock. The path of the bullet came from the house. He had rifles, being ex-law enforcement and all. He had a grudge against the bikers he had thrown out of his bar.
But, the police did nothing. They refused in investigate. When forced, they somehow could not come up with anything. They said the muder was a complete mystery to them.
After a number of years of stonewalling it became apparent to the bikers that nothing was going to be done. So they took things into their own hands and blew Don Hancock up with a car bomb. Don and a friend went to the horse races for an afternoon of betting and drinking. When they got back into their car, it exploded, killing them both instantly. Someone had placed a bomb under the car while they were inside.
Of course the police were all over this. They eventually got some low ranking biker to admit to it. They had him somewhere for three weeks getting info out of him. It saw his photo after the confession. To me, he looked like he had been tortured. He looked like those American POW's you saw having to apolgize on TV in Vietnam.
After Don Hancock was murdered, his partner detective, Tony Louwinski, decided to come clean out the Micklebergs. He claims he waited so long because he was afraid of Hancock.
It turns out Hancock was as dirty and mean as they came. It doesn't seem to me that the police are at all suprised that he got what was coming to him. To me it illustrates how bad the corruption is.
There is more. The police investigate themselves. They comission reports to, get this, the police. So, there are no checks on their activities.
Recently, the boyfriend of a friend of mine got into a scrap with the police. He was on a party riverboat when two of the patrons got too rowdy and started breaking things. The captain called the police. When the boat docked, the two rowdy guys took off on foot. Then the police showed up and arrested my friend's buyfriend.
He protested telling them they had the wrong guy. The captain even told the police that the two guys had left and they had the wrong guy. The police didn't care. They eventually let him go, but they decided to charge him with a felony, resisting arrest.
There were two cops there. A guy and a woman. The woman cop tired to tell the guy cop that he had the wrong guy, but he wouldn't listen.
Her boyfriend is a law student, and nice guy. He was very ticked off. So he pleaded not guilty and demanded a trial. The prosecuter tried to offer him a deal on a lesser charge. He refused.
In June his trial came up. He showed up with his friends who had been on the boat as witnesses. He also got the captain there. He suponed the female officer, but she refused to show up. The guy officer lied like a rug under oath. The boyfriend and the other witnesses could not believe some of the outright lies he was telling.
He was sure the female officer refused to show up for the trial because she would have to perjure herself under cross examination. Either that, or get blacklisted and posted out in the middle of the desert.
He was aquitted. Fortunately for him, the judge could smell bullshit when he heard it. Good thing too because if he had lost, he would not be able to get licensed to practive law when he graduates because of a felony on his record.
My problem with them is that they are worthless at best, and corrupt at worst.
Within a week of getting here, I was on the train and this local started talking to me. He discovered that I had just moved here from the US. He gave me some advice. He told me that if I ever get involved with the police, then expect a "phone book massage". He told me the best way to survive this is to roll back and forth so the phone books do not hit the same part of your body twice if it can be helped. It distrubutes the blows across your body.
For those who don't know, a "phone book massage" is a beating where they use a phone book as the weapon. When you use a phone book, it doesn't leave the tell-tale bruises and wounds that can be used as evidence of the beating.
Secondly, I was told by locals when I got here to never leave anything in a car. They said someone will break the window and steal it.
Lets just start with burglery. Perth has the highest burlary rate in Australia. It is much worse than in the US. You can't leave your home unlock, even when you are home. You can't leave anything of value in your car. It will get stolen.
This one really boils my blood. You never see police patrols in the neigborhoods. You never see the police just driving around checking things out, looking for people that don't belong there.
Perth is a big city of suburbs. Most people live in houses. So during the day, most neighborhoods are empty as people go to work. It makes great pickings for home burglers. They can drive around all day and not get harassed.
The police never respond to burgleries any more. They just sit on their asses, hand you a report to fill out, and tell you file an insurance claim.
I know this because about 60 percent of the people I work with have had their homes burglerized at least once. Only said the police bothered to come out.
There are many reasons for this sorry state of affairs.
First, the whole state only has one PD. Seriously. That is how they do it here. There is the Western Australian Police Department. They do all law enforcement for an area the size of the western US from the Missispi River to the Pacific Ocean.
The closed all the smaller local police stations years ago in a move to consolidate services. There are only 3 or regional super stations in Perth.
Now the problem with having only one PD, is that they have no accountability. They are charge of policing themselves. This leads to one hell of a lot of corruption. As a citizen, you don't get to vote on the chief. In fact, you can't go down to the cheifs office and pound your fist on the desk and demand that they put a stop to the brazen theives.
Officers that don't cooperate may find themselves assigned to a beat literally out of the middle of nowhere, thousands of miles from there home.
I've been trying to figure out why the insurance industry has not demanded that the police get off their asses and find out where all these stolen items are getting fenced. When I received quotes on my home burglary insurnace it all became clear. They charge a fortune, $80 a month in my case. They simply pass the costs onto the public.
A few weeks ago I was helping Loretta prepare her rental property for a new tenent. It is a house in a medium neighborhood. We had the front door open and we where in the kitchen painting. Suddenly she screamed. There was a teenage (about 19) Aborignal man standing in the middle of the living room looking around. He had just walked in like he owned the place. He was suprised to see he was caught and claimed he was looking for a glass of water. That was pure BS of course. He walked by the hose outside to get in. It was a cold day, about 6 in the evening. There is a corner store at the end of the block you can see.
I followed him outside. He walked over to this car full of other young male Aborginals, who then slowly drove off cruising the neighborhood looking for homes to break into.
Loretta told me that this is common, especially in the summer when people open their doors to get a breeze. It even happened in her house a few times. Burglers just walk or drive down the street. When they see a door open, or just a screen door, then walk in and grab what ever they find.
Part of this problem, IMHO, are the gun control laws in this country. If the burglers knew that they would have a good chance of getting their heads blown off, then they might think twice before walking into someone's home uninvited.
Basically, only the criminals get the carry weapons, and they do. And the public just has to take it. The cops get to carry sidearms. But they are too busy protecting the speed trap cameras from outraged citizens to bother to respond to calls of criminals breaking into a home.
Now here is the icing on the cake are far as I am concerned. What the police have decided to do about this problem is launch a PR campaign. Yup. They are spending valuable tax dollars on posters and TV ads. There are two campaigns. One targeted to the burglers. The other targeted to the victims.
Lets start with the victims ads. They have a serious of public service announcement style spots where a friendly officer goes how how to keep from being a victim. In one particlar ad, she talks about how you should always leave your glove box and ash tray open so theives can see there is nothing valuable inside. She advises that you never lock anything of value inside your car, even for a minute.
Others talk about how to lock your home up tight, even when at home. How to put locks on screen doors, don't have open windows on the street.
These ads made me so mad that I wanted to kick the TV. So what they are saying is that we the public should live in parinoid fear and turn our homes into little jails. Bullshit. How about this? How about the police spend their energy busting these criminals? How about getting off your asses and finding about where all this stolen loot is being fenced? How busting heads of the criminals you know to get answers? How about patrolling my streets when I am away at work? Grrrr. Do your damn job.
The other ad campaign is targeted to crimanals. It features a slick TV ad that looks like a plug for CSI. Fancy graphics show DNA being analyzed in a darked high-tech lab by white-coated technicions. I deep menacing voice claims "You leave part of yourself behind at every burglery. You leave some DNA. We will use this DNA to find you and throw you in prison!".
Ooooooh. I bet they are so scared. Hey bozo police... News Flash! Did you realize that you actually have to bother to show up and investigate a break-in to gather the DNA evidence? Since as far as I know you guys do nothing put rubber stamp theft reports for insurance claims at the central office, how are you going to bust people with fancy DNA anaylysis?
So there you go. Stupid solutions for serious problems. It gets worse.
Next topic. Corruption. This is out of control all over Australia. I don't know any Aussies that trust the police. There are stories every day about how cops here and there are found aiding criminals, stealing, killing, and so on.
In particular, there are two cases here in Perth that illustrate how bad it is. First, there is the case the the Perth Mint Swindle. Back in the mid 80's, someone, or some group, stole some gold from the Perth Mint.
The police blamed it three brothers, the Micklebergs. The three brothers were convicted on very flimsy evidence and thrown in prison for a very long time.
In the last couple of years, one of the detectives on the case decided to come clean. It turns out that he and some other detectives had fabricated all the evidence. They had beaten the Mickleberg boys at remote police stations. When they still refused to confess, they simply made the confessions up.
Last week, after 20 years, the bothers finally had their convictions reversed. There is a good book about all of this. It is called "The Mickleberg Stitch".
The other case concerns the other detective involved in fabricating the Mickleberg evidence. He was a senior detective named Don Hancock. After he took early retirement, he bought a bar out near Kalgoolie.
A few years ago some bikers (Hell's Angel types) got into a row in his bar. He threw them out. It apparently was no big deal... just the usual weekend brawl between drunk bikies. The bikers went over their camp site outside of town and sat around the campfire drinking beer.
A shot rang out the only house nearby. On the bikers was shot through the skull from a high-powered rifle.
The evidence was clear as a bell to everyone involved. The only house nearby belonged to Don Hancock. The path of the bullet came from the house. He had rifles, being ex-law enforcement and all. He had a grudge against the bikers he had thrown out of his bar.
But, the police did nothing. They refused in investigate. When forced, they somehow could not come up with anything. They said the muder was a complete mystery to them.
After a number of years of stonewalling it became apparent to the bikers that nothing was going to be done. So they took things into their own hands and blew Don Hancock up with a car bomb. Don and a friend went to the horse races for an afternoon of betting and drinking. When they got back into their car, it exploded, killing them both instantly. Someone had placed a bomb under the car while they were inside.
Of course the police were all over this. They eventually got some low ranking biker to admit to it. They had him somewhere for three weeks getting info out of him. It saw his photo after the confession. To me, he looked like he had been tortured. He looked like those American POW's you saw having to apolgize on TV in Vietnam.
After Don Hancock was murdered, his partner detective, Tony Louwinski, decided to come clean out the Micklebergs. He claims he waited so long because he was afraid of Hancock.
It turns out Hancock was as dirty and mean as they came. It doesn't seem to me that the police are at all suprised that he got what was coming to him. To me it illustrates how bad the corruption is.
There is more. The police investigate themselves. They comission reports to, get this, the police. So, there are no checks on their activities.
Recently, the boyfriend of a friend of mine got into a scrap with the police. He was on a party riverboat when two of the patrons got too rowdy and started breaking things. The captain called the police. When the boat docked, the two rowdy guys took off on foot. Then the police showed up and arrested my friend's buyfriend.
He protested telling them they had the wrong guy. The captain even told the police that the two guys had left and they had the wrong guy. The police didn't care. They eventually let him go, but they decided to charge him with a felony, resisting arrest.
There were two cops there. A guy and a woman. The woman cop tired to tell the guy cop that he had the wrong guy, but he wouldn't listen.
Her boyfriend is a law student, and nice guy. He was very ticked off. So he pleaded not guilty and demanded a trial. The prosecuter tried to offer him a deal on a lesser charge. He refused.
In June his trial came up. He showed up with his friends who had been on the boat as witnesses. He also got the captain there. He suponed the female officer, but she refused to show up. The guy officer lied like a rug under oath. The boyfriend and the other witnesses could not believe some of the outright lies he was telling.
He was sure the female officer refused to show up for the trial because she would have to perjure herself under cross examination. Either that, or get blacklisted and posted out in the middle of the desert.
He was aquitted. Fortunately for him, the judge could smell bullshit when he heard it. Good thing too because if he had lost, he would not be able to get licensed to practive law when he graduates because of a felony on his record.
Police get demoted
The detectives who were involved in the brawl with the American university students were demoted back to beat police. They may be fired. The police union is of course claiming that this is all a bunch of nothing.
They are wrong. These detectives used their police power for personal revenge matters. They abused their authority.
The police where holding one of the American students in jail and trying to charge him with assaulting an officer and all sorts of crap. He was the one that managed to get a clean punch in and knock out the front teeth of one of the detectives.
However, the prosecutors refused to file charges claiming that everyone was at fault for the brawl and no blame could be laid on one person. The student flew home to the States. I don't blame him. The cops will be looking for him and trying to make his life hell.
They are wrong. These detectives used their police power for personal revenge matters. They abused their authority.
The police where holding one of the American students in jail and trying to charge him with assaulting an officer and all sorts of crap. He was the one that managed to get a clean punch in and knock out the front teeth of one of the detectives.
However, the prosecutors refused to file charges claiming that everyone was at fault for the brawl and no blame could be laid on one person. The student flew home to the States. I don't blame him. The cops will be looking for him and trying to make his life hell.
Crazies
We have a receptionist here at IBM. Actually, two part time ones. They sit by themselves on the first floor dealing with a million things. It is thankless job. Most quite after a few months.
They have a panic button they can hit if they need help. It triggers a flashing light up in the sales floor where most people work. When the light goes off, most people jump and check on lobby. It only takes a few steps to get where you can peer down the atrium to see what is going on.
Most often, it is a false alarm. Usually a new receptionist hits the button by mistake. However, no alarm is ignored. We always check. It wouldn't take but a few seconds to round up some big guys should there be the need.
I often talk to them. They are very nice, and I think a tad lonely for something other than people demanding this or that.
One of the receptionist told me about an incident from last year, I think. This guy walked in and told her that he had invented DOS back in the mid 1960's and he was here to collect his royalties. She just laughed, until she realized he was dead serious. He started getting belligerent and demanding his money. She had to call the police on him.
It turns out he was an inmate at the local loony-bin, Greylands Hospital, who was out on a day pass.
They have a panic button they can hit if they need help. It triggers a flashing light up in the sales floor where most people work. When the light goes off, most people jump and check on lobby. It only takes a few steps to get where you can peer down the atrium to see what is going on.
Most often, it is a false alarm. Usually a new receptionist hits the button by mistake. However, no alarm is ignored. We always check. It wouldn't take but a few seconds to round up some big guys should there be the need.
I often talk to them. They are very nice, and I think a tad lonely for something other than people demanding this or that.
One of the receptionist told me about an incident from last year, I think. This guy walked in and told her that he had invented DOS back in the mid 1960's and he was here to collect his royalties. She just laughed, until she realized he was dead serious. He started getting belligerent and demanding his money. She had to call the police on him.
It turns out he was an inmate at the local loony-bin, Greylands Hospital, who was out on a day pass.
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