Unfortunately for the 'good people' of Australia, the colony's police forces are rife with corruption.
The police literally cannot be trusted in any 'alleged' criminal matter.
In court they lie, tamper with evidence, destroy evidence and even tamper with witnesses and/or produce false witnesses with full support of the Anglo-Masonic setup legal system.
After all, the brethren look after each other.
Miscarriage of justice occurs in every single courtroom across the land, to the detriment of society as a whole, where the victims of the justice business are deliberately left without a remedy.
Keep in mind that the old-adage "the system is broken" is a false one, as the reality is that the system is functioning perfectly, the way it was designed to.
Corruption has increased over the years, but the authorities would have you believe there is less.
Here is one story that the public news media are allowed to inform the general population of, the one that the colony's original corrupt police force could no longer hide.
I Catch Killers podcast:
Deborah Locke reveals death threats after exposing NSW police corruption that changed everything
She saw too much. Then they found $20,000 in her car. What happened next would spark Australia’s biggest police corruption inquiry.
When former detective Deborah Locke joined the NSW police force in 1984 as part of the last class to graduate from the Redfern Academy female officers were, in her words, “lower than a police dog.”
“They used to make us wear these big, baggy culottes – [pants that were like] big long skirts,” she recalls of the bizarre uniform choices made on behalf of police women in the eighties on this week’s episode of I Catch Killers with Gary Jubelin.
“I remember once jumping a wooden fence chasing a bloke who was doing a break-and-enter, and I’ve jumped over the fence and my big baggy culottes have come over and hooked over the top of the wooden paling fence, and I’m hung up and I am just hanging on the fence, waiting for someone to come.”
Yet little did Locke know that her outfit would end up being the least of her concerns during her time on the force.
The former officer turned whistleblower after witnessing first-hand the corruption that was rampant in the NSW police force during the eighties, a move that would leave her in fear for her life, a pariah in the force and the catalyst for the infamous Wood Royal Commission into police corruption.
‘They’re going to kill us’
The journey from ‘one of the boys’ to whistleblower unfolded over several years. After beginning her career in North Sydney, Locke eventually took a role within the Gaming Squad in the late eighties, at a time when she was heavily in the grips of alcoholism, something that made her male colleagues view her as a ‘drinking buddy’, on the many trips to bars and pubs the squad would partake in as part of its questionable methods.
Yet it was here that the extent of the corruption became apparent.
Cash bribes were commonplace between illegal gambling providers and police, and Locke regularly witnessed police tipping off providers before a raid in exchange for payment.
“Every time we did a raid they knew we were coming,” she tells Jubelin, “the cops, there were cops taking quids.”
“One time we went and [the illegal gaming crew] had a film crew and they’re videoing us. They had a big welcome sign waiting for us, they knew we were coming.”
But the point of no return came when $20,000 was discovered in the boot of Locke’s surveillance car. She’d been in Bathurst on a two-week study block, as part of a course she had enrolled in to advance her career, and when she returned she discovered the money had come from an illegal bookie who’d bribed members of her squad. Her boss, who was not involved in the corruption, had discovered the bribe, and had made the extraordinary decision to arrest the officers involved through the Highway Patrol.
“The next day, I rock into work and everyone’s just traumatised,” Locke, who was part of the small surveillance team now dubbed ‘dogs’, recalls. “Everyone’s rocking. And the next thing you know, people are drawing pictures. They’re going to kill us.”
“It was dangerous, we were all scared,” Locke continues. “And it was a horrible situation. It was just ridiculous. Even though I wasn’t even there or part of it, I was just tarred with the same brush – it was my car, and so I’m in on it.”
Locke was granted an overnight transfer to the Parramatta detectives unit, in order to be protected.
“By the time I got to Parramatta though, they already knew who I was, what had happened,” she says.
“And I was classified as a dog and a whistleblower.”
‘I’m going to go jail with these guys’
At Parramatta, Locke continued to witness corruption.
“If the gaming squad was like a circus, Parramatta was a whole different ball game,” she says, where detectives would have frequent contact with Roger Rogerson, a disgraced former cop who had already been dismissed from the force. Locke recalls Rogerson would “hold court” in Chinese restaurants, associating with major gangsters and being fawned over by police officers keen to win his favour.
It was Lenny MacPherson, one of Sydney’s most notorious gangsters in the eighties, that eventually triggered Locke’s whistleblowing. While drinking with senior officers and underworld figures at a Parramatta hotel, Locke was pulled aside and asked to perform a ‘favour’: obtain a gun license for MacPherson’s second wife.
The scheme was as bizarre as it was corrupt. Her superiors wanted her to go to Gladesville police station, present the application, and effectively pretend to be MacPherson’s wife.
Despite being offered increasing amounts of money to comply, Locke refused the bribe.
However, in the process of handling the paperwork, she realised she was trapped. “I was hanging on to the piece of paper,” she says, “so the fingerprints are on it.”
Ultimately, it was a literal interpretation of the police code of conduct that led to Locke becoming an official whistleblower.
“It’s probably my autism,” she explains, “I’d read the policies and procedures and it said, if you saw corruption and you didn’t say anything or do anything, you would also be guilty of that offence. And the stuff I saw going down, I was worried. I took it literally. I thought: ‘I’m going to go to jail with these guys.’
Whistleblowing, death threats and a royal commission
When Locke first went to then soon-to-be commissioner Tony Lauer to report the corruption, she says she was met with “disgust”.
“He said, ‘you don’t know what a detective is, you’re a whistleblower’ and I’d never heard that term,” she says. “I got up my courage and I bravely said to him ‘what’s a whistleblower?’ He looked at me with disgust and said, ‘you know, that’s cops who are dobbing in cops’.”
At Parramatta, the atmosphere turned lethal. Officers openly discussed her “disappearing,” and Locke lived in constant fear for her life.
“There was a copper that was going to speak out against the abortion squad in the seventies,” she says, “and he got shot sitting on the toilet. And I got told a few times that was gonna happen to me.”
The path to systemic change finally opened through independent MP John Hatton, a long-time crusader against the ‘boys’ club’. Locke became the only officer in the state with the backbone to sign statutory declarations alleging current corruption.
Her lone statutory declaration was enough for Hatton to set things in motion, and eventually the Wood Royal Commission into police corruption, which shattered the bubble of police impunity. It exposed a widespread culture of bribery, drug trafficking, and protecting criminals.
While many corrupt officers were granted amnesty to resign, the Commission’s findings fundamentally changed Australian policing by introducing rigorous accountability and oversight.
The downfall of Roger Rogerson and Glen McNamara
While Roger Rogerson had previously been acquitted of the attempted murder of whistleblower Michael Drury, he would eventually face justice in 2014, when he and Glen MacNamara – who had previously made a name for himself as a ‘clean’ cop – were convicted of the murder of Jamie Gao.
Locke – who had formerly posed with MacNamara at the launch of his own ‘anti-corruption’ book, was especially outraged by his involvement.
“They said, look, he’s doing a book, come and support him … We’ve got a photo in the paper, you know, his arm around me,” she says.
Years later, Locke watched the downfall of the men who had once operated in the shadows. “I used to go down and watch them at court, and I’d wave, ‘hi Glen, hi Roger,’ and they’d just look at me. He had the gunpowder all over him and it was like a video in court,” Locke explains, describing how surveillance footage captured the pair drinking beers and stepping over Gao’s body.
“I just felt so good to see Roger in the dock, you know? He was glaring at me, like ‘that b***h!’”
See YouTube video:
source:news.com.au
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