Waleed Aly slams Victoria Police’s response to brutality videos
This week, Australia has been rocked by harrowing footage of incidences of police brutality – particularly the disturbing video of a group of Victorian officers bullying and beating a disability pensioner.
On The Project on Wednesday night, Victoria Police Assistant Commissioner Luke Cornelius appeared on the panel to discuss the police response to the videos.
“It’s important that we keep this in context,” he said. “We have an organisation comprised of about 19,000 employees. We generate about 14,000 contacts with members of the community each day. That results in about seven complaints a day in relation to police interactions with members of the community,” he went on.
But Waleed Aly took him to task, pointing out in the wake of these troubling videos of real people being hurt if it was appropriate to cite statistics.
“Do you really think it’s appropriate to be citing complaints statistics here?” Aly began.
“The whole point is that, in these cases, as far as we have been able to figure out, they weren’t even investigated.
“There are people who have said they didn’t complain because they don’t want to be traumatised again by the whole investigation and we’re only hearing about this stuff now because the media is telling us, not because you’ve been up-front with us about this?”
Assistant Commissioner Luke Cornelius agreed with Aly’s summation but appeared to be more concerned with the community reaction than the police brutality in his response.
“We have certainly been concerned about the reaction of the community to the footage that has been conveyed to the community. IBAC, our independent oversight body, has also assumed responsibility for a number of those matters and I’m here to say that myself and all of my colleagues that I have spoken to have been very concerned about what’s depicted in that CCTV footage.”
"I hope that there aren't any more cases such as these but... I certainly am very keen to hear from any members of the community who are concerned about how they've been treated by their police." #TheProjectTV pic.twitter.com/PM58HTD16N
— The Project (@theprojecttv) April 4, 2018
On Wednesday morning, Police Minister Lisa Neville also cited the same statistic on 3AW.
“Victoria Police have 14,000 interactions with Victorians every single day. Of that, there are seven complaints. Let’s keep this in proportion.”