POORLY DRESS POLICY
 
So Victorian Police Chief Simon Overland has made it official.  Melbourne is a violent city. Obviously one of the most risky places in the world.  So dangerous that, to avoid being mugged, we should all dress like hobos, look like bums. Look so poor, that no self-respecting thief or basher will look twice at you. Don’t carry a mobile phone. Don’t use an ATM. Can you believe this insulting rubbish?

The Commissioner’s spin doctors have gone into overdrive and insist he was taken out of context but this is what Mr. Mushroom told Indian students at a forum on international student safety:
 
‘Don’t display your iPods, don’t display your valuable watch, don’t display your valuable jewellery. Try to look as poor as you can’.
 
And the patronising sermon went on. ‘If you can live somewhere safer, live somewhere safer. If you can avoid public transport into high risk areas late at night, avoid it. If you can avoid travelling alone, do so.’
 
He also warned the students that working as a taxi driver or in a late night 7-11 is a risky job.
 
This is the chief cop in this state telling people your trains aren’t safe, the suburbs you live in aren’t safe, the jobs you have to do aren’t safe.
 
And seeing that he also claims most of the attacks on Indian students are not racially-motivated but robbery-related that means he’s talking to everybody.
 
Nobody should take public transport, or wear jewellery, or work as a taxi driver, or live in some suburbs. ‘Try to look as poor as you can’. That sends a great message overseas.
 
I’m sure the Indian students will love that. They can stay in Mumbai and look poor Mr. Mushroom.
 
Is this what Melbourne has become Commissioner?  Is this what a decade of Nixon-Overland ‘touchy feely… let’s have a meeting’ style of policing has done to this town?
 
Get your cops out on the beat. Get a bigger, better Police presence out on the streets.
 
Yesterday you told the gay pride marchers in St. Kilda that ‘never in my life have I experienced the sort of reception and the sort of welcome we got walking down the street today’.
 
Well, don’t expect a similar reaction in other parts of Melbourne if your best advice for a safer city is for everybody to go around looking like they are not worth robbing.
 
Monday, February 8, 2010

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2010