The problem with the police

Enforcement of the Covid rules, including the authoritarian decrees and fines imposed by state premiers, provided multiple examples of poor policing: the petty closing of cafes, prosecutions for reading in a park, chasing individuals along a closed beach, stopping fishing from a pier the day after 10,000 gathered in a demonstration, and even a Police Commissioner who denounces the cruise industry as criminal, are among them.

We now see the police routinely looking the other way when demonstrators spew their hateful antisemitism and calls for genocide against the Jews, even arresting a solitary Jewish observer. The Australian public are never likely to accept the police as one of them while those sorts of things occur.

Change is necessary. Corrupt and thuggish police must be rooted out and the selective enforcement of laws based on political allegiances prohibited. Victimless crimes should never be given priority and arresting people should be the last resort for problems that originate in drug use, alcoholism, mental illness and poverty.

The fundamental responsibility of governments is to protect life, liberty and property. If the police were to focus on these while upholding Peel's Principles, Australians might even respect them enough to come to their aid. As it stands, many would refuse.