Plenty of police would like to work in a professional police force. It is those police that need to make their voice heard in the Union. It is not disloyal to stop bad police doing bad things. It is not disloyal to not support poor, incompetent or unlawful policing. Most know who the verballers, bullies, racists and time wasters are. Day by day they are making the job more and more difficult for the good police.
Good police need to find a way to get a voice and do something before an external agency with limited notion of the nature of policing comes in. Because in its efforts to clean things up it will almost invariably create innocent victims.
Again, until police who investigate police can truly consider those other police to be suspects nothing will change. And the consequence will be that in the future some good police and their careers will inevitably become collateral damage.
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They may go to their graves bemoaning the injustice of it all. But they have continually had their chance to change the bad parts of the culture post Fitzgerald and they haven't taken it. It would be a tragedy if the only time they had an insight into why things have gone so wrong was when they decided to ask themselves a question they ask the rest of us all the time - who started this?
Hey! It's your so called “mate”.
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About the Author
Nigel Powell was a police officer in England and Queensland. In 1987 he was involved in the establishment of the Fitzgerald Royal Commission in Queensland, and before that worked closely with the investigations of The Courier-Mail and the ABC’s Four Corners program. Subsequently, he spent two years as a senior education officer for the New South Wales Independent Commission against Corruption (ICAC).