Watch-house assaulter gets 500 hours community service.

Sorry, yes I should have dropped standard. Guess I just didn’t like the comparison with being punched in civic and being sprayed. I think one is random and the other orchestrated. I guess I just think the sentence should have reflected the breach of trust and the emotional scars of the victim’s more. Flesh heals but the mind is a strange unpredictable thing. My apologies.

Read my post again dexi. I never said it was a standard assault.

Except than this is more than a standard assault. Its a breach of trust as well.

I was sprayed with OC spray as part of some training in the Army many years ago, so I know what its like to be sprayed. It hurt me a fair bit for about 15 minutes, and got less and less over the next 45 minutes. An hour after the spraying I was back to normal, with no injury or side effects.

I’m not saying what he did was right, however getting punched in the face is a lot worse (bruising, cuts, ongoing pain), and it happens regulary in Civic, will little punishment (from what i’ve read) from the courts.

This sort of sentence should be a standard for assaults, not an exception.

Dexi,

That matter is still before the courts.

farnarkler said :

Hmmm I wonder if the people he assualted were little angels. I suspect they weren’t.

So it’s okay for the police to repeatedly assault handcuffed people, just so long as they aren’t ‘angels’?

WTF is wrong with you?

Of course this was a completely isolated event and in no way reflects badly on the culture of the AFP.

Birch was just a bad egg, the fact that he got away this for so long in no way suggests insufficient supervisor/oversight. Right? (He was caught in the end, after at least 7months of this behaviour. See the system works!)

Also, the fact that a number of other officers stood around and did nothing, never reported him means nothing. Statistical blip, somehow we got all the bad cops working at the one place on the same shift. AFP officers would never treat someone in custody badly. ALL these guys were just abnormal bad guys.

This has nothing to do with the culture of the AFP, nothing at all.

What ever happened to the policemen that stripped naked a young female drug user and verbally abused her in the watch house. It must have been a couple of years ago.

Ex cops seem to be treated harsher overseas – they send them to prison for having sex on the job!

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,24639431-23109,00.html

And did anyone catch ABC news re this story last night? In one of the video shots from the watchhouse it appeared the victim was in handcuffs. Can anyone confirm for my own curiosity?

He has received far more than any other person has received for this type of assault in the ACT Courts. Which incidently would be against the human rights bill to treat him any differently because of his employment.

That aside I would like to see more of this type of sentence where if they don’t go to gaol then they do plenty of hours of community service. Any suspended gaol time should automatically have community service attached.