Posts Tagged ‘Police’
Monday, August 3rd, 2009
Debbie Guest; 3/8/09
The petrol an Aboriginal man was sniffing before being shot with a Taser and bursting into flames came from a service station that continues to sell sniffable fuel, despite repeated community requests. Police told The Australian that Ronald Mitchell, a 36-year-old petrol sniffer from Warburton, 1540km northeast of Perth, was sniffing fuel from the Laverton BP station before he threatened police with the fuel and was shot with a Taser. Sergeant Nick Hamer, who fired the Taser, said he was acting in self-defence. Aboriginal women in the central desert region said BP Laverton refused to sell non-sniffable Opal fuel because they wanted a bigger subsidy per litre from the federal government. Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council chairwoman Margaret Smith said petrol from Laverton was coming into Warburton and putting young people at risk of permanent health damage.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Drugs, Police
Posted in Aboriginal, Australia, Drugs, Human Rights | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
Michael McKenna; 23/6/09
When police arrived at the yellow brick units in the central Queensland town of Brandon about 2:50am on June 12, Antonio Galeano was in a rage. The two young constables, one just a few months out of the academy, had been dispatched to the suburb just south of Townsville after a triple-0 call minutes earlier from a screaming woman. His girlfriend had just got away, cowering in a neighbour’s place and terrified that Galeano, 39, who had flung her across the room by her hair, was coming and couldn’t be stopped. Galeano was well known to police as an addict with a taste for methamphetamine, and someone of whom to be especially wary. A year ago he had been arrested on weapons charges, including possession of guns and a samurai sword. This father of one had a history of mental illness and had somehow walked out of the Townsville hospital hours earlier, after having been taken there by police the previous day for a mental health assessment. Doctors had cleared him.
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Tags: Australia, Human Rights, Police, Violence
Posted in Australia, Human Rights | No Comments »
Monday, May 11th, 2009
Mark Dodd & Debbie Guest; 11/5/09; (3 Items)
An accused people-smuggling kingpin, whose extradition is being sought by Canberra, has accused Indonesian police of accepting bribes to turn a blind eye on smugglers’ operations. Hadi Ahmadi, an albino dual Iraqi-Iranian arrested 10 months ago in Indonesia, claims there are “many many smugglers” at work who are untouchable. “They’re sending ships to Australia, they are sending (them) every month,” he told SBS’s Dateline program. “Nobody can touch them. They (smugglers) are free in Jakarta now. They are working, nobody touches them. Even if the police arrest them they pay money and are free.”
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Tags: Australia, Indonesia, Migrants & Refugees, Police
Posted in Aid / Trade, Australia, China, Human Rights, Indonesia, Refugee & Migrant | No Comments »
Thursday, November 20th, 2008
Belinda Merhab; 20/11/08; (2 Items)
The NSW Ombudsman has recommended a two-year freeze on further roll-outs of Taser guns, saying police standards for their use are inadequate, and the health risks are unknown. Bruce Barbour told state parliament yesterday that general-duties police, who were issued the stun guns last month, were using Tasers at a higher rate than special operations police, who began using them in 2002. “It is clear the number of incidents where Tasers will be used in the future will increase significantly,” Mr Barbour said. “There is already evidence of this. Tasers have been used on people on five occasions in the first two weeks of general-duties use. This compares with only 48 incidents over a five-year period” by special unit officers… The use of Tasers, which stun a victim by emitting a 50,000-volt electric shock, have been linked to heart complications and death.
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Tags: Australia, Human Rights, Police
Posted in Australia, Human Rights | No Comments »
Saturday, November 15th, 2008
Michael McKenna; 15/11/08
Queensland police face disciplinary action after they held down and tasered a 16-year-old girl who had defied an order to move on because she was waiting for an ambulance to treat her sick friend. The Crime and Misconduct Commission and police ethical standards unit are investigating the April incident – during a year-long trial of tasers – which has drawn a strong rebuke from a magistrate of the Brisbane Children’s Court. The girl, who cannot be named, had a charge of obstructing police dismissed after the Children’s Court yesterday ruled one of the two officers involved did not give adequate directions, under police move-on powers, before he and two private security guards held the slightly built teenager down, shot her in the thigh with the taser and then arrested her, initially on a charge of assaulting police. Magistrate Pam Dowse also criticised the police officers for over-reacting to the teenager’s refusal to leave her unconscious friend, a girl, before the ambulance arrived. The teenagers were alleged to have been involved in an earlier altercation with another group of tourists.
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Tags: Australia, Police, Violence
Posted in Australia, Health & Children, Human Rights | No Comments »
Saturday, May 10th, 2008
Jamie Walker; 10/5/08
Having worked on 50 Aboriginal land rights cases, anthropologist Peter Sutton says that time is up for the nation’s troubled indigenous communities. Professor Sutton, picking up on this week’s Mullighan report in South Australia, the latest to uncover rampant child sex crime in an Aboriginal homeland, said governments should withdraw funding rather than perpetuate the cycle of abuse. There was no future in “state-funded ghettos”, he told The Weekend Australian. Asked if they should be closed down, Professor Sutton said: “No, I am talking about withdrawing funds rather than actively closing them. The fact is they are artificial communities. If they were full of white fellas, no one would dream of propping them up just because the people say they want to stay there.
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Tags: "Outstations", Aboriginal, Australia, Drugs, Facilities, Housing, Police, Sex Trade
Posted in Aboriginal, Aid / Trade, Australia, Drugs, Human Rights, Racism, Sex Trade | No Comments »
Friday, April 11th, 2008
Natasha Robinson; 10/4/08
Police have not found any evidence to indicate a child sex trade is occurring in the remote Northern Territory mining town of Nhulunbuy. Northern Territory acting Assistant Police Commissioner Colleen Gwynne said yesterday reports that underage girls were being paid in alcohol, cash, marijuana and taxi fares for having sex with white men in Nhulunbuy could not be substantiated by a child abuse taskforce. The police statement comes after Arnhem Land leader Galarrwuy Yunupingu publicly stated last week that a rampant sex trade was occurring in Nhulunbuy, 650km east of Darwin, involving at least 10 girls aged between 13 and 15.]
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Drugs, health, Human Rights, Police, Sex
Posted in Aboriginal, Australia, Health & Children, Human Rights, Sex Trade, Womens Rights | No Comments »
