Chimbu.
Years of political knee-jerks have caused them to be so isolated from the community they serve, that they are completely out of touch.
I think that the drive to have tertiary educated 'professional' law enforcement people has also led to the out of touchness. Of course any agency needs people who can read whole sentences with big words in them, but they also need people with relevant experience and people skills.
When an agency starts taking people the day after they graduate from their Bachelor of Criminal Justice (which they entered two months after they finished high school) and ignores applicants with real world life experience because they don't have a fancy piece of paper, you know that shortly the agency will be further removed from the real world than Star Trek.
I'm not overly familiar with CASA; is this a problem? It is in a number of state and federal agencies.
It needed someone to march into his business, line up Barry and the post-holders...
And that someone needed to be sure they had the backing of their agency and the surety that their agency would persue the aforementioned people if they continued to operate. Otherwise, they'd just end up looking stupid.
When officers don't have that confidence they'll generally use the softly-softly approach rather than put their own necks on the line in an action that may be considered politically unwise or un-PC. Most agencies are now run by people who are professional public servants and care far more about their own promotion than doing the job they're supposed to do. Fearless crusaders are not popular within today's public service and they don't usually get promoted.
As a result, the people who do get promoted (and end up running the joint) are often the sort of people who'd walk backwards to Burke before they put their name to a Decision.
Again; dunno about CASA but it's a hell of a problem in other agencies.
Hempel was always going to be a hard nut to crack. He had lawyers, he didn't follow the rules and he was popular. I don't know that marching into the office of a person like that was going to be terribly effective; I think they would have had to prosecute him. That takes time, effort, dogmatic drive and causes a lot of bad
PR. If they had done that there probably would have been a bunch of people on here and elsewhere defending Big Bad Barry who was being picked on by the nasty government.
When you're the guy (or girl) signing off on that sort of operation you have to be prepared to cop a lot of flak and you have to be sure the Minister and the DPP will back you. Would they? Or would they snivel off to the sidelines and leave you up to your neck in it? This is where hindsight
does become a factor, because we all know the outcome. If there hadn't been a fatality we wouldn't be talking about it and he'd probably still be operating.
Should they have prosecuted him? IMO, absolutely; he was acting in contravention of the law and their direction. It was the right thing to do.
Do I understand why they didn't? Yep. Been there, done that, got given the 'you're a loud mouthed trouble-maker' T-shirt
. Now it's gone really pair shaped on them and they're scraping for excuses, none of which are very believable.
IMO, this has shown that the regulator can't or won't regulate. That's a problem, because now everybody knows. Make a noise, threaten to sue, defy the rules; what are they going to do about it?
