KEY POINTS:
You and me both mate, I said to myself when I read Graeme Burton was gutted the police didn't kill him. Then again, the poor bastard who pulled the trigger would have been pilloried by the bleeding hearts who think homicidal psychopaths have rights. You know the type, they've never thrown a horse, fired a rifle, or made love to a beautiful woman, but nonetheless they bleat on about how police should use tranquilliser darts, preferably filled with homeopathic rescue remedy.
The two big issues galvanising the country this week - the role of the Parole Board and Corrections Department in Burton's supervision, and the role of justice in trying a policeman and his two former colleagues for rape - are not unrelated. The first is easily solved - no parole for violent offenders. Parole has never worked for crooks like Burton; they'll never be successfully integrated back into society. While it's expensive to lock them up for good, economics are irrelevant when you're arguing about the lives of innocents like Karl Kuchenbecker.
But the public is eager for someone to blame. Mock police recruitment posters were distributed with the words, "Then we dealt to her with a bottle... get some great rape stories". The move prompted Police Minister Annette King to defend her boys in blue; she labelled the action as unfair, ugly and vicious. King could have added gutless and cowardly, since the author hid behind anonymity.
So-called feminist Grace Miller organised a march in Wellington on Thursday protesting against the treatment of rape cases by police. Has it occurred to her that many police officers are women? Does it not enter her head that it was police who put in all the work to bring Clint Rickards, Bob Schollum and Brad Shipton to court? Rickards himself damned the police investigation, saying he'd have been ashamed to run it. Can that mean if the investigation was more thorough, the jury's verdict could have been different?
As a journalist I've spoken with hundreds of police officers in New Zealand on the subject of sex crimes. I've met dozens of cops who work in the child sexual assault units, prosecuting men who hurt little girls and boys. Many of these policemen and women go home each night to their own little kids, look at them with tears in their eyes and wonder how an adult human being can do such unspeakable things to innocent children. I've heard the anguish in the voices of these police when they talk about the near impossibility of convicting someone armed with intelligence, cunning, good legal representation and money, who has poked his body parts into the tiny orifices of children too young to even talk, let alone provide a reliable statement to police.
I don't doubt that many who turned up to march were genuinely making a statement against the crime of rape, and how women have a right to be safe from sexual predators. But I hope these same people, when their outrage subsides, take time to think about where they will run to if, God forbid, they are sexually assaulted.
Because that is what we pay the police to do - help us when we're hurt, run into danger when we run away from it, front up to the menace of gangs and P-dealers and murderers like Burton. Look at footage of police surrounding gang headquarters, being shoved, sworn at and threatened. Would we keep calmly walking forward in the face of such danger?
We publish photos of the Armed Offenders Squad marching into the Wainuiomata Quarry to capture Burton, knowing he's armed, crazy and happy to take them on. Are these the men Miller wants us to get angry about? Are these the people the gutless poster artist had in mind when he/she wrote, "then we dealt to her with a bottle"?
At least two rational women commentators got it right. The Prime Minister, Helen Clark, echoed the misgivings of most New Zealand women when she said there have to be issues around the common interpretation of consent when three adult policemen are engaging in group sex with a mixed-up 16-year-old girl.
And journalist Tapu Misa was absolutely correct in her Herald column when she said Rickards may have been an effective cop, but he was not a good cop. Clark and Misa confined their comments to the tiny number of police who've behaved exceptionally badly. It was their own colleagues, good policemen and women disgusted that such behaviour threatened to undermine the force, who brought them to justice.
We've not seen the last bad cop - more deviants will surely surface.
But overwhelmingly, especially where sex crimes are concerned, we are protected by exceptionally good men and women. We should never forget that.
