Urban terrorists' apologist's swing into action.

A Fields day for the do-gooders
March 3, 2005
http://www.smh.com.au/news/Miranda-Devine/A-Fields-day-for-the-dogooders/2005/03/02/1109700539801.html
Events of this week offer a sound argument for zero tolerance of crime, writes Miranda Devine.
As a rookie police reporter, I once stood on a hill in the middle of a Sydney suburb just like Macquarie Fields with a plain-speaking former country cop who was commander of the area. Below us on one side of the hill was a sea of new houses and, on the other side, older dwellings, most public housing.
The police officer explained what he saw as his job: to protect the people on one side from the people on the other. Early each morning, the young couples with mortgages would go out to work, leaving their empty houses as prime targets for the people on the other side of the hill, who did not work at what you would call real jobs but were busy, nonetheless, breaking into the houses and stealing the property of their neighbours. His was a simple understanding of what communities expect of their police: to uphold the law, preserve order and protect law-abiding people from law-breakers.
But it's not so clear for police any more, judging by reaction to riots at Macquarie Fields sparked by the deaths of two youths on Friday night in a stolen car which crashed during a police chase. It's not the business of police to be chasing stolen cars, it seems. That's a violation of human rights.
"Cops will die" reads the graffiti on Eucalyptus Drive near the crash scene this week. "We know who the real criminals are" reads a banner. "We just want justice."
No, the new job of police is to stand in a line for hours as target practice for hooligans with rocks and Molotov cocktails and provide entertainment for the neighbourhood and the TV crews parked around the clock.
On Rosewood Drive on Sunday night, residents reportedly "clapped and cheered" when a policeman was knocked down with a heavy plank of wood and "could not get up".
Welcome to the brave new world of law enforcement, NSW-style. If you talk to police they will tell you the story is not about over-zealous police victimising joyriders. They had reason to believe the youths in the stolen car were part of a larger group responsible for a "very large" number of aggravated break, enter and steal offences from houses in suburbs such as Rose Bay, Manly, Oyster Bay and Como. They were also suspected of stealing hundreds of luxury cars and of a small number of armed robberies.
As the Premier, Bob Carr, told reporters, the youths in the car were "persons of interest ... There was police activity taking place quite unrelated to the pursuit of a stolen car".
Most of the people who live in Macquarie Fields are law-abiding, industrious people who support the police. After all, they probably rely on them more than residents of ritzier suburbs. But this week their placid suburb has been portrayed as a disadvantaged hellhole, inhabited by violent victims of government neglect.
The reaction to the riots has been curiously polarised. You either regard the violence as the inevitable result of the gap between rich and poor or you believe individuals who have chosen to break the law should face consequences.
The former, root-cause mindset can be summed up by James Athanasou of Maroubra, writing on the Herald letters page: the riots should "be perceived as an index of underlying discontent, poverty, alienation and oppression in a significant proportion of Sydney's community".
Social workers and academics explained all week that nothing more can be expected of youths who are bored and disadvantaged, especially when their wickedly aspirational neighbours are getting ahead and "embarrassing" them.
Pah! says the Police Commissioner, Ken Moroney, who said at a press conference this week that he grew up on a housing commission estate in Villawood. "Nobody owes you a living. It is about life choices. You can make those choices. It isn't about a self-defeatist attitude."
Pah! says Cheri Burton, MP for Kogarah and Carr's parliamentary secretary, who grew up in public housing in Minto.
Pah! says Carr, who says he grew up next door to public housing estates. "Our job is to back the good people, not to mobilise excuses for people who are motivated by criminality."
Pah! too from Ron Sinclair of Bathurst in another letter in the Herald: "I know many British child migrants who, like me, came here in the 1950s from severely disadvantaged backgrounds ... The mayhem at Macquarie Fields is but a symptom of a wider societal malaise where some will not take responsibility for their own actions and where misguided policies encourage a dependency mentality with governments expected to do more for individuals than they can or should."
Disadvantage should not be used as an excuse for criminal behaviour, says a former Cabramatta detective, Tim Priest, chairman of a federal advisory group on crime in western Sydney. He points out that during a time of real poverty in Australia, the Great Depression, crime rates barely changed.
He blames the riots on a culture of impotence at the top of a NSW Police Service that is so preoccupied with avoiding complaints against officers it is paralysed at times of crisis. The result is that front-line officers are left unprotected and looking foolish while future rioters are emboldened.
He advocates the return of tactical response squads of highly trained, armed officers in special trucks ready to be mobilised within an hour to quell disturbances before they turn into full-scale riots.
But Priest's zero-tolerance approach has little support among policymakers and academics who advise them. Despite the stunning success of zero-tolerance policing in New York during the 1990s, when small crimes were taken seriously and the police presence ramped up, crime rates plummeted and no-go areas were salvaged, it remains unfashionable in NSW.
So the riots will continue and police will remain powerless, just as they were in the Redfern riots a year ago.
We haven't learnt anything since then, Priest says. A lengthy NSW parliamentary inquiry came up with the dazzling conclusion that the police who were attacked in the Redfern riots needed more "cultural awareness training".
devinemiranda@hotmail.com