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Drunk probationary cop assaults terrified woman while waving badge

<p>A 41-year old NSW police officer might have just had the shortest career ever with the state’s Police Force, after being <a href="https://amp.9news.com.au/article/07bf385c-62e2-428a-90af-f052bfa61fb7">caught on camera</a> assaulting a woman and trying to arrest her while off duty, after a drunken night out.</p> <p>CCTV footage shows the officer chase and then grab the terrified woman by the back of the neck when she seeks refuge inside a bank’s after hours ATM area.</p> <p>The officer holds her with one hand as he waves his badge in the air.</p> <p>The woman calls for help, and a member of the community, 21 year-old Levi Minchin, steps in.</p> <p>Mr Minchin reports that he saw the man heckling the young women on Tucker Street in Ryde moments beforehand, and took it upon himself to help.</p> <p>Mr Minchin is seen getting between the two and trying to diffuse the situation.</p> <p><img style="width: 500px; height: 281.25px;" src="https://oversixtydev.blob.core.windows.net/media/7838480/police-officer-off-duty-4.jpg" alt="" data-udi="umb://media/6ca62de82f774f0cacb5e3d1dd67e7f0" /></p> <p>He reports telling the told the off-duty officer to leave the woman alone. The officer is then seen to grab him around the body, before Mr Minchin spins his body, causing the intoxicated officer to be thrown to the ground just outside the bank.</p> <p>Mr Minchin then performs what is known as <a href="https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/what-is-a-citizens-arrest/">a citizen’s arrest</a>, which is something he is legally entitled to do under <a href="http://www6.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/legis/nsw/consol_act/leara2002451/s100.html">section 100 of the Law Enforcement (Powers and Responsibilities) Act 2002</a> when witnessing a perpetrator committing a criminal offence, <a href="https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/can-i-arrest-a-police-officer/">including an offending police officer</a>.</p> <p><strong>Drunken ‘power trip’</strong></p> <p>Mr Minchin reports that the officer was swearing aggressively, and told him that he was “gone”, “finished” and that the young man didn’t “know who you’re fucking with.”</p> <p>He says the officer “kept saying he was a police officer like that was the definition that he could do what he wanted.”</p> <p><img style="width: 500px; height: 281.25px;" src="https://oversixtydev.blob.core.windows.net/media/7838478/police-officer-off-duty-1.jpg" alt="" data-udi="umb://media/2d397e7a902c4888a1d56d27191dbd9c" /></p> <p>The officer graduated from the police academy just a few weeks ago.</p> <p>He has now been suspended from the NSW Police Force, and has since handed in his newly minted badge.</p> <p>He has also been charged with two counts of <a href="https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/criminal/offences/assault/common-assault/">common assault</a>.</p> <p>A spokesperson for the NSW Police Force says the officer has been terminated for “bringing the force into disrepute and not upholding the values expected.”</p> <p>Police brutality</p> <p>It’s certainly an embarrassing and serious indictment on the NSW Police Force which has already strained relationships with many sectors of the community, given the increasing number of reports about, and footage of, officers engaging in criminal conduct.</p> <p><img style="width: 500px; height: 281.25px;" src="https://oversixtydev.blob.core.windows.net/media/7838479/police-officer-off-duty-5.jpg" alt="" data-udi="umb://media/78544f6c88cf4217aad3326ea49ec8d2" /></p> <p>To recap some of the most recent from 2020:</p> <p>Two Sydney Wales Police officers have been charged with <a href="https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/nsw-police-officers-charged-with-sexually-assaulting-and-filming-schoolgirl/">sexual assault offences against a 17-year old school girl. </a>Their case is before the courts and they have both been suspended from the NSW Police Force.</p> <p>Last month, a female police officer from the Newcastle region was charged with a domestic violence offence and this case is also currently before the courts and she is currently on long term leave.</p> <p>Earlier this year it was revealed that a senior officer remains suspended on full pay despite <a href="https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/nsw-police-officer-remains-on-force-despite-being-guilty-of-sexual-touching/">being found guilty of the offence of sexual touching</a> a female colleague at a Christmas Party.</p> <p>Another police officer from Northern NSW has been suspended <a href="https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/nsw-police-officer-charged-with-possessing-child-abuse-material/">despite being charged with posessing child abuse material</a>. And yet another, from Goulburn remains employed on ‘restricted duties’  by NSW police despite being <a href="https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/nsw-police-officer-found-guilty-of-common-assault/">found guilty of assaulting an indigenous man in custody</a>.</p> <p>These are only a handful of cases, and some suggest they’re simply the ‘tip of the iceberg’.</p> <p>Lack of consistency in accountability</p> <p>But what they also illustrate is the concerning lack of consistency with which NSW Police deals with misconduct by officers.</p> <p>All police officers sign an oath to serve and protect, and <em>any</em> deviation of that oath should automatically result in serious consideration of employment status.</p> <p>However many are suspended on full pay, or at least suspended (meaning the option remains open for them to return to their jobs) until the completion of the justice process, which can drag on for months, even years.</p> <p>It seems that those in authority tend to forget that taxpayers fund the police force at a cost of at least $3.4 billion each year.</p> <p>The taxpaying community most certainly has expectations around transparency and accountability for police behaviour. It should certainly follow that any officer which brings the “force into disrepute and does not uphold the values expected”, say for example, by being suspected of, or charged with, a criminal offence, should have employment terminated, immediately, and without the need for any further explanation.</p> <p>Certainly in the private sector any employee who brings an organisation into disrepute or breaches company policy faces serious consequences, often dismissal. It is not unreasonable for the general public of NSW to deserve similar standards from its publicly funded police force.</p> <p><em>Written by Ugur Nedim and Sonia Hickey. Republished with permission of <a href="https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/drunk-probationary-cop-assaults-terrified-woman-while-waving-badge/">Sydney Criminal Lawyers.</a></em></p>

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Why retail workers are wearing a second badge

<p>Since the start of the pandemic, retail workers have been at the forefront of people’s frustrations as they copped abuse on the daily.</p> <p>In April, one woman was filmed racially abusing workers at a Telstra store in Sydney, telling a staff member to “go back to China, while this week another customer berated retailers over their face mask policies, saying such views “have no basis in science or fact”.</p> <p>In a bid to curb the rise of abuse, particularly during COVID, staff at some of Australia’s biggest chains will now wear a second name badge.</p> <p>Employees at stores such as Woolworths, Target, Big W and KFC will have a tag on their uniform stating either “I’m a mother”, “I’m a father”, “I’m a son” or “I’m a daughter” to remind customers they are someone’s family member.</p> <p>A Woolworths employee recently went viral on TikTok after she explained the importance of the badge.</p> <p>“A lot of people have been asking on my videos what this says and it says ‘No one deserves a serve, I’m a daughter’,” Dakota Rae Shaw said in the video.</p> <p>“Basically the union brought them out to us so that people could imagine if it was their daughter they were speaking to.”</p> <p><img style="width: 323.727px; height: 500px; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="https://oversixtydev.blob.core.windows.net/media/7837116/screen-shot-2020-07-29-at-30527-pm.png" alt="" data-udi="umb://media/e6d21d25f98e44dd8f805dd04bf6cbd9" /></p> <p>According to the union, over 85 per cent of workers are being abused while they work.</p> <p>SDA NSW secretary Bernie Smith said there has been a reported 44 per cent reduction in customer aggression since the badges were rolled out.</p> <p>“The idea of the badges is to humanise the person behind the counter, so the customer sees them as a person rather than somebody processing their sale,” he told Yahoo.</p> <p>“They’re someone who’s part of a family and part of a community, and the badges make people think twice.”</p> <p>A Facebook user recently shared her experience of a staff member wearing a badge saying “I’m a son” at Woolworths store at Lennox Head, on the northern NSW coast, on Saturday.</p> <p>“He was wearing a second badge … I started asking questions as to why, and he said it was an attempt stop the abuse that they cop,” she wrote.</p> <p>“He said he hasn’t experienced it in Lennox yet but in Byron Bay he did all the time because of (in his words) ‘the sense of entitlement most people there had’.</p> <p>“It breaks my heart that young people just trying to do their job, especially during a pandemic, have to put up with this c**p.</p> <p>“If you witness it, call it out. Not ok.”</p>

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Family reunited with late grandfather’s war badge

<p>When Neil Robertson received an email from two history enthusiasts who were keen to reunite a Returned Soldiers Association badge with his family, he was confused. </p> <p>"We didn't know about it."</p> <p>Southland history buff Iain Davidson found the badge, belonging to Neil's grandfather Charles Edwin Robertson, in an antique store. </p> <p>Davidson contacted Ian Martyn, a Kiwi army veteran who runs the website Medals Reunited New Zealand, a free service that helped reunite war medals with soldiers descendants.</p> <p>Together the pair looked through service records and archives to identify who the badge belonged to, and to locate any living relatives.  </p> <p>Stamped on the back of the badge was the regimental number – 8/3051, making it fairly easy identify the original owner, Private Robertson, Martyn said. </p> <p>Charles Robertson was the youngest of three brothers who served in World War I. </p> <p>Charles and his brother, Private John Christopher Robertson, were both posted to the Western Front, fighting in the battles of Flers and Morval at the Somme.</p> <p>Charles was reported "missing" on September 27, 1916. He was found with severe gunshot wounds to his back, right arm and right leg and was immediately evacuated to a field hospital in France and then transferred to a hospital in Birmingham, England. </p> <p>In January 1917, he was declared "no longer fit for war service on account of wounds received in action" and on June 11, 1917, he returned to family home at Browns.</p> <p>He was the only one who ever came home, his two brothers both died on the battlefield. </p> <p>Neil said he was excited to be reunited with his grandfather's badge.</p> <p>Martyn and Davidson had found him and his family through the Auckland Museum online cenotaph, Neil said.</p> <p>His grandfather had died before he was born. That made the war memorabilia even more important because it was all Neil knew about him.</p> <p>The family had no idea how the badge found its way into an antique store, Neil said. </p> <p>The family was in possession of all the other war medals awarded to Charles and his brothers. </p> <p>"It's a bit of a mystery."</p> <p><em>Written by Joanna Griffiths. First appeared on <a href="http://www.stuff.co.nz/" target="_blank"><strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Stuff.co.nz</span></strong></a>. </em></p>

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