Police officer allegedly ‘hit teen in face’ while bodycam was switched off

A cop switching off a body camera during a confrontation is prima facie evidence of conscious ill intent.  One hopes that this is treated as a matter of great gravity.  The testimony of the officers concerned should be disregarded as corrupt

Queensland’s corruption watchdog has reportedly been asked to investigate an alleged case of police brutality after claims a Brisbane senior sergeant punched an intoxicated teenager in the face while his body camera was turned off.

A senior constable had been questioning a 19-year-old boy about a brawl at a Brisbane railway station in May last year when the sergeant allegedly appeared and confronted him, The Courier-Mail reports.

Bodycam footage obtained by the newspaper shows the officer swearing at the teen before he allegedly deactivates his body camera.

“What are you looking at me for? What’s your problem?” a voice can be heard asking.

“Why are you looking at me?” another voice responds.

“Because you’re a f----- idiot, that’s why I’m looking at you,” the first voice answers.

Officers claim that within the minutes of the constable’s body camera being turned off, the boy threatened to bite the sergeant and was then hit by the sergeant.

The teen had been arrested after his involvement in a brawl with a group of men at Boondall train station on May 4 last year.

The Courier-Mail reports a complaint has since been lodged with the Crime and Corruption Commission Queensland by barrister Allistair MacAdam.

A police spokesman told the newspaper the matter was with the corruption watchdog and “it would be inappropriate to comment further”.

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Honest cop to run at upcoming Qld election

The former Gold Coast officer, who was ordered to stand trial this month over claims he leaked footage of police beating a handcuffed man in the basement of a station in 2012, made the announcement on Facebook on Saturday.

He will contest the seat of Southport, which is currently held by LNP incumbent Rob Molhoek.

Flori said he had decided to run after other people suggested he should make a career change and venture into politics. "I've had some lengthy thoughts about it, I've discussed it with my family," he said on the social media video. "We've come to the conclusion today that it's probably an option that I'd like to take up."

Flori said the support he had received over the past five years had given him the courage to venture into politics. "As my past has shown I don't always follow the crowd, I don't follow or don't need to follow any particular party line or party policy," he said.

"I thought independent was the best way for me to try and approach this so that I can not only receive your thoughts...I can vote with my own conscience and how I feel the public need to be represented, honestly and with some sort of integrity."

Flori said he had some "basic platforms" but he wanted to hear from people in the electorate about the issues they were most concerned about.

Flori is facing misconduct charges over the alleged 2012 leak.
If found guilty at trial he could face jail time.

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Free weddings for all same-sex couples but not vfor normals

Come again? I thought this was about equality??

The sky-high cost of a wedding could be slashed for all gay couples wanting to marry in Sydney's inner west if the newly elected mayor gets his way.

Fresh from taking charge of the newly formed council, Labor's Darcy Byrne will soon move to see same-sex couples married in its halls and community centres free of charge should such unions be legalised as a result of the postal survey.

"We have one of the largest and proudest LGBTQI communities in Australia and the inner west must lead the national charge for civil rights," Cr Byrne said.

"I will ask that our newly elected councillors formally endorse a recommendation that we make our facilities available for same-sex marriage celebrations, and that we actively invite and welcome couples wanting to use our halls."

Cr Byrne, previously mayor of Leichhardt, seized the mayoralty of the 15-member Inner West Council this week under a power-sharing deal with two Liberals and an independent.

Labor's five councillors were happy to see a Liberal become deputy mayor and lock the Greens, who hold five seats as well, out of any leadership positions.

The council was formed following a 16-month period of administration after the merger of Marrickville, Leichhardt and Ashfield councils in May 2016.

"On the day that this country finally accepts that love is love, I want couples to know that the inner west will welcome them with open arms if they want to celebrate their marriage in our public facilities," Cr Byrne said this week.

The free venue policy would be in place for 100 days after the successful passage of same-sex marriage legislation through the Parliament.

The average cost of Australian weddings could be as much as $36,000 or even double that, with venue hire accounting for a sizeable chunk of the budget.

The council takes in one of the most left-wing areas of the country and support for same-sex marriage in the inner west is likely to be extremely high.

Nationally, the public debate over same-sex marriage has turned ugly in recent days, with former prime minister Tony Abbott being headbutted in Tasmania, although the alleged assailant said it had "nothing to do" with same-sex marriage.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull labelled the incident "disgraceful" and "un-Australian" and urged calm and restraint.

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Andrew Hastie: Army man, Christian conservative and a rising star of the Liberal Party



Hastie — now a rising star of the Liberal Party and a conservative pin-up boy at the centre of an ideological firestorm over same-sex marriage — is recalling the brutal selection course he endured to gain entry into the Special Air Service Regiment, the Australian Army’s toughest fighting force. The SAS course, held in the remote West Australian bush in the middle of winter, is regarded as the most physically and psychologically challenging of its kind in the world. If you survive it, you can survive just about anything.

Hastie went on to become an SAS ground force commander, fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan and conducting anti-terrorism operations in the Middle East. The seeds of his ambition to serve were planted as a boy when his grandfather, Flight Lieutenant Norman Hastie, showed him the bullet wounds he received while rescuing two downed Australian airmen in the Pacific during World War II. Yet by 2015, at the age of 32, Hastie had had enough of the military. “I realised the limitations of nation-building at gunpoint,” he says of his experiences in Afghanistan, where he survived several roadside bombings. “I remember thinking, ‘This is crazy.’ I had real doubts about how much we could actually achieve there.”

During those long deployments, something else had taken hold in the soldier’s mind: a greater appreciation of the conditions that led to the flourishing of Australian society and a desire to help preserve his own country’s institutions and cultural heritage. Hastie, who joined the Liberal Party in 2013, had long harboured ambitions for a political career and held little fear of the vicissitudes. “I’ve often said that warrior politics are much fiercer than federal politics,” he says.

When Don Randall, the long-serving Liberal MP for the federal seat of Canning, died suddenly in July 2015, Hastie grasped his opportunity. He resigned from the Perth-based SAS, giving up his protected identity status, and won preselection — with the backing of West Australian Liberal powerbroker Mathias Cormann — for the poll in Canning, a largely working-class electorate south of Perth. Yet this was no ordinary by-election. In Canberra, it was seen as the contest that would decide the fate of Tony Abbott, who was under mounting threat of a leadership spill from Malcolm Turnbull.

Sniffing blood, the national media swarmed into Canning to get a glimpse of the hitherto unknown Hastie. And it became ­obvious that the Liberals had unearthed a unique candidate. Here was the conservative politician from central casting: a churchgoing, squeaky-clean ex-soldier who spoke about protecting Australian values and Western liberal democratic traditions. He also had a fearlessness uncommon in a political newbie.

Hastie didn’t impress everyone, of course. Where some saw a man of conviction, others typecast him as a Bible-bashing young fogey with antiquated views on topics such as homosexuality. He was ripe for ridicule on social media, where he was also depicted as a warmonger or a brainless beefcake. “The first tweet I ever looked at about myself said, ‘Gee, Hastie looks as dumb as batshit’,” he smiles. He did, however, prove he had substance, quoting chunks of Edmund Burke and ­William Shakespeare to journalists, some of whom were taken aback at the thought that a military man might also be a deep thinker.

He looked good on television, too, quickly earning the sobriquet “Tasty Hastie” and being nominated for the Crikey website’s 2015 sexiest politician of the year. “It’s like a committee of gay men were asked to design a parody of a straight man — muscled, wavy hair, nice eyes, dimpled smile, family man, army uniform, son of a preacher man,” wrote one reader in endorsing Hastie for the title. “Is it wrong that the Christian fundie thing just makes him even hotter to me?”

This curiosity about Hastie only intensified after Fairfax newspapers ran front-page stories during the ­by-election campaign about a soldier under his tactical command in Afghanistan who’d cut the hands off dead Taliban soldiers in the heat of battle in order that they might later be identified through biometric screening. The headline in The Sydney Morning Herald read: “Star Abbott recruit probed for chopping off hands of dead Taliban”. Hastie, who remains vexed that he was accused of being a “war criminal”, had been cleared of any wrong­doing and was elsewhere on the battlefield when the incident took place in 2013. The soldier who cut off the hands was cleared this month after a two-year investigation by the Australian Federal Police.

Speaking for the first time in detail about the incident, Hastie says his initial reaction to seeing the severed hands was to focus on the need to quickly return to base, given the fading light at the time and low fuel loads on the helicopters. “When I saw the hands, my intuition kicked in,” he says. “I thought, ‘That doesn’t seem right’. But the blokes told me that they had been trained to do it. I put it to one side and focused on the task of extraction. Once I got on the helicopter, a whole series of questions flooded my mind on the flight back and that’s when I decided to investigate further upon return. That led to me reporting the incident up the chain.”

The Fairfax story wasn’t the end of what Hastie regarded as unfair media treatment during the campaign. At a press conference a few days later he was grilled over revelations that his father, a Presbyterian pastor, was a Creationist who had dismissed evolutionary theory in his writings. When one reporter asked Hastie if he believed God made the world in six days, he could no longer contain himself: “You’re not hearing me, mate,” he responded, his eyes flashing. “People are sick of this crap. ­People are sick of trying to drag petty issues into public policy discussions.”

Two years later, Hastie remains touchy on the subject. He claims he has been depicted in the media as a “religious nut job” and he’d rather not discuss theology at length. “I don’t want to shy away from it, but in an era of identity politics and cultural Marxism people are looking for every reason to delegitimise someone. So every view I hold henceforth will be seen through the prism of, ‘Oh, he’s just whacking us with a Bible’.”

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Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here