Illustration: Simon Bosch.
Court 4.4 at the Downing Centre was packed – standing room only
– when I paid a visit recently to observe the legal sausage factory
process the prodigious amount of time-wasting that the police and the
justice system impose on the public every year. The police, in
particular, are running an enormous con job.
Only 21 per cent of
police rostered hours are spent on criminal investigations, according to
the last annual report of the NSW Police. The rest of their rostered
hours are occupied with traffic matters (10 per cent), bureaucratic
process (15 per cent), courts and custody (six per cent) and community
support (45 per cent), which appears to mainly involve patrols and
responding to calls.
About six million times a year NSW police
stop people who are doing nothing wrong, or issue infringements for
minor offences. Most people just pay the fine, which is what the police
and court system count on. It's a growing revenue stream for the
government.
This particular journey of discovery was triggered by
the sound of a police siren outside my house a few days before
Christmas. It was the middle of the afternoon, in a quiet suburban
street, yet a police officer felt the need to give his siren a blast at a
woman sitting in her car. She drove off.
It was poor policing but it got worse. Every year, millions of people
are subject to pointless, pedantic, time-wasting in the name of public
safety.
Two weeks after the siren incident, the woman, Jo,
received a traffic infringement notice, a $242 fine for double parking.
She was outraged, given that she had only stopped briefly, was not
blocking the light flow of traffic and her driving record was excellent.
She ticked the box on the form saying she would go to court.
She
received a court attendance notice by mail. Her presence would be
required at Downing Centre at 9.15 am on March 30. She was now a
"defendant".
After receiving (free) legal advice she changed her
mind and mailed back a form advising that she was pleading guilty and
did not need to attend court. She filled in the space available to
explain if there are circumstances that would mitigate the penalty.
She
heard nothing. As the court date approached, she called the State Debt
Recovery Office. All they knew was that she was due in court.
On
March 30, Jo appeared in court 4.4 in the Downing Centre. The courtroom
was packed. I counted 45 people, not counting lawyers at the bar table.
Clearly, everyone had been told to turn up at 9.15 am. This says a lot
about how the courts value the public's time.
The registrar began
pushing through cases. After 40 minutes, and numerous cases, Jo's name
was called. She was instructed to go to court 4.3, where a magistrate
would handle her matter. The waiting thus started again.
This
court was also packed, with a row of people standing at the back. The
magistrate was Greg Grogan. Over the next two hours I watched him strike
a balance between compassion and legal gravitas.
For the first
time in this process, someone seemed to be exercising common sense. All
morning, Grogan took the view that if someone was bothered to come to
court, and could provide him with a plausible case for mitigation, he
would waive the fine or reduce the suspension.
In this legal sausage machine, it was primarily the police prosecutions that were put through the grinder.
Then it was Jo's turn. She began describing the incident. "I was sitting in my car…"
Grogan interjected, incredulous: "You were in the car?"
Jo
continued. "A police siren went off". Grogan looked even less
impressed. After a few more sentences, he had heard enough. "This case
is dismissed."
It took less than a minute of testimony but half a
day in court. The police officer with the heavy hands on the police
siren, whose judgement had not been vindicated by the court, had long
ago moved on.
Multiply this example by about a million times a
year and you get a sense of the scale of the make-work by the police and
productivity lost by the public. Over the past 15 months, police have
conducted more than 6.5 million random breath tests on motorists. Only
about 0.35 per cent of these tests result in charges being laid.
As
another way of increasing revenue, the state government has contracted a
private company, Redflex, to operate a growing number of mobile speed
traps, for profit. Not surprisingly, the number of people trapped and
fined as a result of speed cameras is up by 50 per cent in the past
year, according to the NRMA.
All these intrusions and this
bureaucratic make-work is always justified in the name of "public
safety" but the downward trend in fatalities over the past decade has
come more from the introduction of air bags than from the four to five
million random stops by police each year.
The government could
achieve broadly the same impact by directing the police to conduct half
the number of stoppages, at half the cost, and half the social
disruption. I'd like to see a study which seeks to quantify the
productivity lost by the hundreds of thousands of hours of the public's
time wasted by inefficient and intrusive practices by the justice
system.
Instead, both sides of politics, wanting to appear tough
on law and order, are complicit in the giant con by the police, this
bureaucratic make-work, this time-wasting and intrusion, all at our
expense.
smh.com.au 12 Apr 2015
That's only half of it.
The police 'force' in Australia is a slave to the corporations and not for the people as commonly misconceived.
They are literally at the top of the criminal food chain.
the mainstream media is really reluctant to expose the police 'force' as a criminal organisation.
