21 minute read
President
President Mark Carroll
Getting protests in perspective
The Police Association was unequivocal in its condemnation of the killing of 46-year-old US citizen George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer last month.
We not only acknowledged the shock and anger which swept across much of the US after his death but also understood why protests for change erupted globally.
And, as an organization which has itself undertaken peaceful protest marches, we would scarcely have criticized other demonstrators.
The association respects and supports the right of citizens to assemble and protest.
Our tolerance was an absolute zero, however, when it came to protest participants who resorted to violence, arson, looting and killings in the US and UK.
No fair-minded observer doubts that they were infiltrators, who in no way honoured George Floyd. US authorities should, and must, hold them to account for their criminal acts.
As we all know, the Floyd killing and, more broadly, the perceived failings of US law enforcement sparked the protests.
Almost none of the ways in which we go about policing in Australia bear any resemblance to police practices in the US.
So it is disappointing that some social commentators have sought to link the policies and actions of US police with those of Australian police.
It is a cheap point to assert and those of us in policing know it to be thoroughly false.
When some media act irresponsibly by running with falsehoods and misrepresentations, they exacerbate tensions and drive divisions even further.
One appalling example was the lie in some media headlines and columns that Aboriginal man David Dungay Jr died in police custody in 2015.
Mr Dungay, who suffered from diabetes and schizophrenia, died not in police custody but in Long Bay Prison in Matraville, NSW.
And many deaths which do occur in custody result from pre-existing medical conditions, drug abuse and alcoholism.
Proud Aboriginal leader and Alice Springs councillor Jacinta Price frequently repudiates the assertions of social commentators.
She has, for example, highlighted the misrepresentation of indigenous deaths in custody. In a recent Sky News interview, she said:
“If you really wanted to reduce indigenous deaths in custody which, of course, we all know isn’t as many as non-indigenous deaths in custody, and that more people die outside custody than in custody.
“But if you, in fact, wanted to reduce those numbers and reduce the rates of incarceration then you would begin with being honest about the fact that almost 70 per cent of Aboriginal people … are incarcerated for acts of violence against their loved ones.”
The social disadvantage which indigenous people suffer, particularly in rural communities, represents a failure of successive governments’ social policies.
And, when those policies fail in areas such as mental health, it is police who have to deal with the fallout. It is police, not the government, who have to confront the man or woman who has a psychotic episode which endangers the public.
The onus is on government to ensure that the indigenous community has access to mental-health and other services. The Police Association does not dispute the number of deaths or seek to avoid accountability, as Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement chief executive Cheryl Axleby wrongly asserts.
There is also an onus on the executive level of Australian police forces. Now is the time for all leaders to look inward and reflect on their policy regimes insofar as policing indigenous communities.
There is nothing to be lost and everything to gain from a dose of introspection.
Police Association members work particularly hard at building quality relationships in indigenous communities, such as those on the APY Lands. The association has played, and will continue to play, its part in supporting those members.
To that end, we have written to Premier Steven Marshall and Commissioner Grant Stevens with a range of measures for their consideration of implementation.
One of those measures is to review the legal definition of a death in police custody. Many commentators are failing to mount honest arguments about what the figures represent.
For example, one of the deaths included in those figures was that of a man who fled the police, jumped into a waterway, and drowned. Police officers risked their lives by also jumping in and attempting to save him.
A death like that does not in any way represent a police failure, as many commentators assert.
The Police Association does not dispute the number of deaths or seek to avoid accountability, as Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement chief executive Cheryl Axleby wrongly asserts.
Ignorant protestors can hold high their banners that wish death on cops. But the shame attaches to them, not to police. And expressions of such intense, undeserved hate only serve to lose them support in any case.
SA police officers, retired and serving, deserve credit rather than scorn for the effort they have put into indigenous relations and the successes they have achieved.
Poor sentencing is poor messaging
No one should need to perform a street survey to get an idea of the public perception of judicial sentencing. The public voices its concern almost weekly over one lenient sentence or another which the court has handed out for serious offending.
One of our features in this issue (A little more justice in the penalty) covers an appeal against the leniency of such a sentence. An offender who, among other things, had kicked and severed the patella tendon of Brevet Sergeant Jason Smith walked free from court.
Three District Court appeal judges agreed that his sentence, which they increased, was manifestly inadequate.
But our cover story (New Year hitand-run) provides an extremely clear picture of where the court system fails on sentencing and imposes injustice on victims. And police, of course, are among the most common victims of serious offending.
It doesn’t get much more serious than failing to stop at an RBT site and, then, driving straight into, and over, a copper and fleeing. But that extraordinarily violent act played out last year, and Senior Constable Sam Petts might well have lost his life.
To speak to Sam, as I have, and to read his story is to understand his rethink of the very career he committed himself to 20 years ago.
And the courtroom sequel only validated his rethink.
Offender Aman Quensier got nothing more than a two-year suspended prison term and a good-behaviour bond. So, for all the physical and psychological damage he caused Sam – and grief he imposed on Sam’s wife and children – he never saw the inside of a jail cell.
It behoves all of us, but particularly lawmakers and the judiciary, to reflect on the message these appallingly lenient sentences send.
As police officers, we know exactly what message potential offenders would have taken from the Petts case. It was that you can, among other things: • Drive on an expired licence. • Fail to stop for a breath test. • Run over and injure a police officer. • Flee the scene of your crime. • Lie about your actions… …and keep your freedom.
Outcomes like that deliver neither justice nor deterrence and greatly diminish confidence in our legal system.
New Year hit-and-run
Sam Petts made a valiant attempt to stop a defiant driver charging straight through an RBT site. But his effort left him and his family paying a heavy price.
By Brett Williams
wo young girls peer into their parents’ T bedroom on New Year’s morning. With the door ajar, they can see their police officer father lying in bed. They know he got badly injured on duty a few hours earlier and has been to hospital. Their mother, who police have telephoned around 1:30am, has told the girls their father fell victim to a hit-andrun driver. The news has traumatized Abigail, 12, and Chelsea, 10. They cry as they gaze at their dad, Senior Constable Sam Petts, who appears to be asleep. But Petts is awake and can hear his daughters talking in tearful voices. He sees them in his bedroom doorway and tells them he is awake and to come into the room. The worried girls go to their dad and embrace him and cry. “It’s all right,” Petts assures them. “I’ll be okay.” But Abigail, perceptive beyond her years, sees the extent of the injury to his bruised and swollen left leg. She knows the sports and outdoor life she and Chelsea enjoy with their dad is over – at least for a while, and perhaps permanently. For both girls, the situation is “overwhelming”. That was the scene in the Petts household on the first day of 2019. It would never have played out as it did were it not for an irresponsible, lawflouting 22-year-old. Aman Quensier was the sole cause of every bit of stress and heartbreak the Petts girls suffered.
He had driven his car not only into their father but also over him at a Mile End RBT site on Henley Beach Road. Petts, then 41, was there working the line with seven other cops when Quensier disobeyed police directions to stop. He instead ploughed straight through the site at 12:50am.
Without a shred of justification for his actions, Quensier risked the lives of every police officer on the scene. It seemed that the one ability he had that morning was to make appalling decisions.
He decided, for example, not to render assistance to Petts and to flee after running him down. Then he evaded pursuing police and later left investigators to find him rather than handing himself in to them.
But the first of his acts of bloodyminded defiance was to drive on an expired licence. He should never have been behind the wheel of any vehicle that morning. And had Quensier met his legal obligation not to drive, Petts and his family would never have begun the year as victims.
Petts, a member of the Heavy Vehicle Enforcement Section, had begun his shift at 7pm on New Year’s Eve, 2018. The mild summer weather that evening was perfect for the crowds which would soon gather for the NYE fireworks in the city.
As those celebrations played out, Petts and his colleagues set up their RBT site and started testing drivers around 12:30am on New Year’s Day.
They had run another static site earlier, and without incident, on Tapleys Hill Road at Glenelg North.
Now, on Henley Beach Road, was a build-up of west-bound traffic. The fireworks had finished, and many who had gathered to watch them were pouring out of the city in their cars.
Sergeant Darryl Foyle had positioned himself at the entrance to the Mile End site and was directing drivers in for testing.
The RBT operation ran without a hitch for around 20 minutes, during which Petts undertook a dozen-odd breath tests.
But just then, he heard Foyle, yell: “Stop this one! Stop this one!” Quensier, in a white Mazda 6 sedan, had defied Foyle’s direction to pull into the RBT site and kept driving.
Petts, at that moment, had his back to the oncoming traffic but quickly turned. He saw the Mazda heading in his direction in the right of two west-bound lanes.
The sight of a determined RBT evader was nothing new to Petts. In his then 15-plus years as a traffic cop, he had seen many of them. To this one, he reacted with confidence and on instinct to get Quensier to stop his car.
“I stepped out into the right lane and signalled him to stop,” Petts recalls. “But he was accelerating, and I thought I was going to get hit.
And just as Petts took that jump, Quensier momentarily hit the brakes, and down for another split-second came the nose of the car.
Facing page: the RBT operation set up on Henley Beach Road; above left: Petts (centre) steps out into the path of the Mazda; above right: Petts at the start of his slide across the bonnet toward the driver’s side of the Mazda.
“That’s when I landed on and slid across the bonnet,” Petts says. “It was like something out of the movies when you see a copper slide across the bonnet of a car.
“I think my firearm broke his windscreen and, after I slid across, I landed perfectly on my feet, right at his door, facing him. It felt like he’d stopped but, when you watch the video (of the incident), his wheels don’t really stop turning.”
Continuing to act on instinct, Petts thrust his right arm into the Mazda through its open driver’s window as the car remained in motion. He reached for the ignition keys and simultaneously yelled “stop”.
Quensier stared straight ahead, unmoved by a police officer reaching into, and desperately trying to stop, his moving car.
“He didn’t even look me in the eye,” Petts says. “Clearly drunk or drug-affected, he was watery-eyed and had the dazed look on his face. When I yelled ‘stop’, he just stared straight down the road as if I never existed.”
So, neither the instruction Petts yelled, nor the danger he faced hanging on to a moving car, made an impact on Quensier. Indeed, he put his foot to the floor and imperilled Petts even further.
“I actually had my hand on the key when he took off and I was very close to getting that key out,” Petts says. “Then I just felt myself go with the car. It happened so fast.”
Trapped by his arm, where he had thrust it through the driver’s window, Petts could not immediately pull away from the Mazda. Under its speed, he stepped involuntarily as the car dragged him for 10-odd metres.
But, then, his arm somehow became free. He stumbled, fell shoulder first to the ground, and wound up with his leg under the car.
Petts was now destined for serious injury. There was no way he could pull his leg out from between the front and rear right wheels of a car travelling at 20-odd km/h. Not after the heavy fall he had already taken.
In an instant, he felt the car “bounce up” as its right back wheel ran lengthways over his lower left leg, from foot to knee.
“So, from the left knee down, my whole leg and my foot got driven along, actually crushed underneath the wheel,” Petts explains.
“And then, from there, he’s gone flat out. He just disappeared as fast as his Mazda 6 could take him. Down the road and he was gone. Out of sight.
“Fortunate for me was that I’d put on a brand-new pair of high-top boots that night. I think that went a long way to saving my ankle.”
Petts shouted a few expletives as he writhed on the ground after the car wheel had run over his leg. Charged with adrenaline, he did not immediately feel great pain – but he soon would.
While his colleagues rushed to his aid, Petts urged them not to “worry about me” but, rather, to “go and get him (Quensier)”.
Officers clambered into two police Kluger SUVs and went after the fleeing hit-and-run offender, but he had had too great a start on them and escaped.
He would not escape accountability, however. Working RBTs with Petts that morning was Senior Constable Norman Hoy, who had refrained from rushing to aid his colleague.
“I saw him kind of spat out the back of the car as it accelerated away,” Hoy says. “I took maybe two steps
towards him and then thought: ‘No, sorry, Sam. Someone’s got to get the rego of this car.’
“So, I actually turned my back on him and got the rego number. And, then, I kept repeating it to myself because I didn’t want any distractions to (make me) forget it. All I wanted to do was get on the radio and repeat the rego so that it’d be recorded.”
Above left: Petts is run over by the Mazda; above right: officers rush to aid Petts; facing page: Petts on the road as officers in an SUV go after Quensier; right: swelling and bruising to Petts’ foot and knee; below right: the Mazda 6.
For Petts, the extent and impact of his injuries hit home immediately. He felt certain that both his lower leg and knee were “done”.
“I couldn’t move it (my leg),” he says. “It started to swell with pain and there was no way I could get up. I thought: ‘It’ll be a knee reconstruction or some sort of career-ending, or very debilitating, injury.’ ”
Beyond the concern he held for his professional life, Petts was already fearing the effect the injuries might ultimately have on his personal life.
“What am I going to be able to do with the kids?” he wondered. “Am I going to be hobbling around and getting old before my time?”
But, now, the task was to get Petts off the road where he lay in the path of the steady flow of traffic. His colleagues, aware of the possibility of spinal or head injuries, wisely refrained from sitting him up or lifting him. Instead, they simply dragged him off to the side of the road.
Then, after a passing off-duty ambo saw the stricken Petts, she stopped to help him. Without equipment or pain relief to administer she could only
check him over, but even that gave Petts a measure of comfort.
With all the New Year’s Eve activity and traffic, on-duty ambulance workers were as busy as cops. So, it took around 30 minutes for an ambulance crew to get to the scene.
There, the ambos gave Petts some green-whistle pain relief before whisking him away to the Calvary Wakefield Hospital.
He got examined, received pain medication, wound up with this leg strapped, and went home on crutches – but without clarity about his injuries. That morning, the hospital could not perform X-rays or CT scans, so the precise damage to his leg would remain unclear.
“It wasn’t until days later that I could get a CT scan done and then found out that there was no ligament or other damage,” he says. “But there was lots of bruising and swelling. My leg and my foot were twice their normal size.”
And it would come to light later that Petts had suffered cartilage damage in his knee joint.
“It (the cartilage) should be nice and smooth, but it’s all rough,” he explains. “It’s wearing, and the medical advice is that, at some point in the future, it’s going to wear out.”
After Petts had been home and had some rest, he tried but was still unable to get a CT scan done. So, his HVES colleague, Senior Constable 1C Mick Ellis, drove him into work, where Petts wanted to type an affidavit.
“And, as I was sitting there in the office, I heard a call on the radio, on our chit-chat channel,” he recalls. “They’d found him (Quensier) and locked him up. I was really punching the air. It gave me relief.”
HVES members had run checks on the Mazda and found that its registered owner was not Quensier but one of his family members – resident interstate. It also came to light that he was in breach of a goodbehaviour bond in connection with a traffic matter from 2017.
Says Petts: “I thought: ‘Good job, boys.’ I owe gratitude to the whole team. They all banded together, and all played different roles, running around, hitting different houses…
“They got names from Facebook and went to all these different people and got his address in the city. Everybody chipped in. It was great.”
Petts was now left to undertake his recovery during a month off work. For two weeks, the only mobility he enjoyed was on crutches because his injured leg could not bear any weight.
“Now, it’s about managing the injury to try and keep the cartilage as long as I can,” he says. “I take a natural anti-inflammatory every day in the morning and that gets me through the pain. There’s also a lot of physio I’ve been doing, exercises, and I wear a brace.”
Petts rightly asserts that Quensier could well have caused him far greater injuries. It staggered both him and his colleagues, for example, that he emerged without severe head trauma.
In his mind he saw images of his boot or accoutrement belt getting caught in the undercarriage of the Mazda. The car would drag him along the bitumen and shred the bare skin of his arms below his short uniform sleeves. He even dreamed of the scenario.
The psychological effect on Petts became even more evident when he started to consider other jobs, including his old one as a stevedore.
“I felt a bit flat,” he says, “and I kept thinking: ‘Do I need to put myself out there like this all the time? Is there something better out there? What else can I do in life?’
“But, then, you realize we have a very good association, very good remuneration, and very good job security.
“Occasionally, we have incidents like this (hit-and-run) that’ll come up, but if you can get through them…”
Above: Petts being dragged by the Mazda before he lands shoulder first on the road. Accountability was a long time coming for Quensier. The case never got to the District Court until last month, when he pleaded guilty to aggravated cause serious harm.
Through his barrister, Craig Caldicott, he offered excuses for his actions. Each one gave Petts and his colleagues good cause to roll their eyes.
They heard claims that Quensier had panicked because of his expired licence and the breach of his good-behaviour bond. Another claim was that he did not know he had slammed into, and run over, Petts.
“They were just the usual cop-out excuses,” Petts insists. “He 100 per cent knew what he was doing. He basically used his car as a weapon.”
As one of many cops who think of the justice system as “broken”, Petts is certain that Quensier will spend no time behind bars. But that will not make him respond with anger – he is beyond that.
“It’s up to the courts,” he says. “And if they’re not prepared to do it for us (deliver justice), well, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Whatever anger, even hatred, Petts had for Quensier has faded. He is not “holding any grudges” against him. His feeling now is indifference rather than animus. And that fits with the way his daughter, Abigail, now 14, sums up his character.
She describes her dad as a forgive-andforget kind of bloke. She, on the other hand, thinks it unlikely that she will ever forgive Quensier.
“There was always the potential for an injury that could’ve made my dad not come home that night,” she says. “It was just the stupidity of (Quensier) not stopping when it was such an easy thing to do. It could all have been prevented so easily.” PJ
