Melbourne CBD incident. 6 dead. Many more injured.

[Culprit]

I've sat back and just watched the Hysteria explode. All of a sudden every one is an expert on police tactics and the law. The one that has the media in a frenzy is bail laws. If we change them this will never happen again. We have political parties point scoring and the media in over drive. There is no quick fix and actually I would say there is no real fix. You can limit incidents like this but you will never stop it. The coroner has to do a review and make recommendations that the Government and Police can implement. In saying that, the coroner recommended to stop police chases to limit the carnage. Yep, that's worked. There are a heap of questions that need to be answered and we will have to wait for those. The one thing I find puzzling is how come Islanders just happened to have baseball bats the city to attack this loony?

I feel sorry for all my friends in the Police Force, dammed if the do, dammed if they don't and they will be the scapegoats here.

[stui magpie]

[Tannin]

[Tannin]

Stui, it's not hard. Everyone not found guilty of a crime is and should be entitled to bail as of right, except where (a) the crime was one of non-trivial violence, and (b) there is strong evidence that the accused is indeed guilty. Pus, of course, those other things you mentioned.

Crime of violence: no bail. It's not hard.

[stui magpie]

[Tannin]

It's not about this case, Stui. It's about the hundreds of serious violent criminals who are released into the community on bail each year, and the terrible consequences this has.

It may well be that the Bourke Street Scum would have got bail anyway (if his domestic violence charges were in fact minor - we don't know that either way) but what we do know is that there are many, many others who are released and reoffend immediately. This has to stop. NOW.

There need to be safeguards in place, of course. There needs to be good, solid evidence that the accused is guilty; there needs to be a threshold of vileness to the crime below which normal bail rules apply; the determination of these things must be up to a court, never the police; and there needs to be reasonable avenue to appeal the denial of bail before a reasonably senior arbiter (magistrate or higher) within a sensibly brief time. (A week, say.)

Does this mean extra magistrates? More work for the courts? Well there are two answers. (1) Who cares? Spend the money you fools! (2) No. When you add up the cost of the reoffending - court time, police time, never mind the cost to the community - you'd probably find that it provides a net saving. But if it doesn't, no matter. It desperately needs doing. Just do it. If you won't do it, piss off and we will vote some other bastard in.

[Pies4shaw]

Are there really lots of serious violent criminals bailed every year when they are known to be serious violent criminals? Plenty get parole.

[Tannin]

By the way, one of the reasons that law enforcement works so badly is psychological. To be effective as a learning tool, rewards and punishments must be prompt. You can see this for yourself toilet training a puppy. How long would it take you to teach the mutt if you said "bad boy" and gave him a smack on the nose three or four hours after he peed on the carpet? Ans: forever. He will never learn if you don't associate the consequence with the action. Now humans are a bit better than puppies at associating things that happen at different times; nevertheless, prompt consequences are far, far more effective than delayed ones.

This is particularly the case with humans who have not properly learned what developmental psychologists call "object constancy" (the ability to conceptualise things which are not immediately visible) and related abilities. Healthy young children learn this around the age of two or three (I forget exactly when, look it up if you like), but developmentally challenged ones learn it much later, or never. Criminals, by and large, have learning difficulties of this general nature. They are not good at thinking out consequences of their actions. Their ability to rationalise delayed consequences such that nothing is ever their own fault is, on the other hand, highly developed. In short, having months consequence-free on bail first rather than going straight to jail (well, remand) only encourages the perpetrator to see no connection between his act and the consequence. This is one of the reasons who criminals re-offend. They don't see time in quod as something that they brought on themselves by (e.g.) olding up a service station, they see it as just something those bastard coppers do to them.

[stui magpie]

[Skids]

I'm reading a lot of stuff saying this bloke is a muslim and was heard screaming aloha snackbar.... is this confirmed?

Would explain why he stabbed his homosexual brother in the face before his copycat murders.

[David]

Seems unlikely, but I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who desperately want to believe that he was.

[Mugwump]

[stui magpie]

He apparently is an Islam convert but i'd say that is largely irrelevant

[Tannin]

He was a fanatic Christian. Yes, yet another deluded religious murderer.

[stui magpie]

^

he was a dickwad.

I think it's fair to say that whatever religion he claimed to follow, what he did had nothing to do with religion of any variety.