Cockney Doll
Senior Member
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Australian Politics
Posts: 333
Queens Park.Sydney
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Former NSW detective Tim Priest was one of the front-line cops who lead the war against crime in the drug-ridden streets of Cabramatta. Yet he found himself waging his biggest battle not against the drug gangs but against the very organisation he worked for. Eventually, he could stand it no longer and spoke out about the politics and bureaucratic bungling, chronic lack of resources and crazy policy decisions that seem endemic to the New South Wales Police Service. For this, he was labelled a 'whistleblower' and ultimately railroaded out of the force.
Parliamentary enquiries subsequently proved that Tim Priest had spoken the truth and, perhaps more shockingly, that what the newspapers reveal is merely the tip of the iceberg.
Tim Priest teamed up with academic Richard Basham to publish a book, To Protect and to Serve. It is available at all bookstores. It is required reading for every person who is concerned about crime in New South Wales and why the police are afraid of the ethnic gangs.
This article was first published in the January 2004 issue of Quadrant. It is re-published here with the permission of Tim Priest.
Download a printable version (pdf file 308 Kb)
Tim Priest
I believe that the rise of Middle Eastern organised crime in Sydney will have an impact on society unlike anything we have ever seen.
In the early 1980s, as a young detective I was attached to the Drug Squad at the old CIB. I remember executing a search warrant at Croydon, where we found nearly a pound of heroin. I know that now sounds very familiar; however, what set this heroin apart was that it was Beaker Valley Heroin, markedly different from any heroin I had seen. Number Four heroin from the golden triangle of South East Asia is nearly always off white, almost pure diamorphine. This heroin was almost brown.
But more remarkable were the occupants of the house. They were very recent arrivals from Lebanon, and from the moment we entered the premises, we wrestled and fought with the male occupants, were abused and spat at by the women and children, and our search took five times longer because of the impediments placed before us by the occupants, including the women hiding heroin in baby nappies and on themselves and refusing to be searched by policewomen because of religious beliefs. We had never encountered these problems before.
As was the case in those days, we arrested every adult and teenager who had hampered our search. When it came to court, they were represented by Legal Aid, of course, who claimed that these people were innocent of the minor charges of public disorder and hindering police, because they were recent arrivals from a country where people have an historical hatred towards police, and that they also had poor communications skills and that the police had not executed the warrant in a manner that was acceptable to the Muslim occupants.
The magistrate, well known to police as one who convicted fewer than one in ten offenders brought before him during his term at Burwood local court, threw the matter out, siding with the occupants and condemning the police. I remember thinking; thank heavens we don't run into many Lebanese drug dealers.
Lebanese family terrorises neighbourhood
In 1994 I was stationed at Redfern. A well known Lebanese family who lived not far from the old Redfern Police Academy were terrorising the locals with random assaults, drug dealing, robberies and violent anti-social behaviour. When some young police from Redfern told me about them, curiosity got the better of me and I asked them to show me the street they lived in.
Despite the misgivings of the young police, I eventually saw this family and the presence they had in the immediate area. As we drove away in our marked police car, a half brick bounced on the roof of the vehicle. The driver kept going.
I said, 'What are you doing, they've just hit the car with a house brick!" The young constable said, "Oh, they always do that when we drive past."
The police were either too scared or too lazy to do anything about it. The damage bill on police cars became costly and these street terrorists grew stronger and the police became purely defensive. You see, the Police Royal Commission was about to start and the police retreated inside themselves knowing that the judicial system considered them easy targets. The police did not want to get hurt or attract Internal Affairs complaints.
Call me stupid, call me a dinosaur, but I made sure that day that at least one person in the group that threw the brick was arrested. I began by approaching the group just as that magistrate had lectured me and the other police involved in the Croydon search warrant. I simply asked who threw the brick. I was greeted with abuse and threats. I then reverted to the old ways of policing. I grabbed the nearest male and convinced him that it was he who had thrown the brick. His brave mates did nothing. By the time we arrived at the police station, this young fool had become compliant, apologetic and so afraid that he kept crying. You may not agree with what I did, but I paraded this goose around the police station for all the young police to see what they had become frightened of.
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