Australian top cop admits to racism in Melbourne

“Part of that (statement) is being absolutely upfront about every society having racism and racists,” Victorian Deputy Police Commissioner Ken Jones was quoted as saying by “The Australian.”

However, he said racism was not endemic in this city. “We have got murderers and rapists, but for a developed country, less than our share. We’ve got less than our share of racists, but we have got them.

“The more we can be accurate in our discussion ... the more likely are we to be able to focus on that small element of society and prosecute them,” he said. “The more scattergun our commentary and approach is, we are offending an awful lot of people unnecessarily.”

Ken said Indians are “bearing the brunt” of an upswing in violent street crime in Melbourne.

He said it was the result of the types of jobs and hours they work and how and when they travel, rather than a surge in racial tension, which he would expect to be accompanied by more activity from hate groups and by racist graffiti.

Indians, he said, should not be blamed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“The fact that we have got morons out there waiting to attack people who happen to be wandering through a park late at night is a problem for us all,” Ken, a former top cop in Britain, said.

He further said that “if we amplify the problem, we are more likely to get inaccurate policy responses as well as a fear of crime that doesn’t match reality.

“There is crime out there. We need to address it and we are addressing it. But we need to address it in a targeted way. We’re not going to do that if perception either wildly under-estimates or over-estimates the real threat.”

The immediate aim, Ken said, is to ensure his investigators find the killer or killers of the 21-year-old Indian student Nitin Garg, the Punjab-born accountancy graduate who was stabbed to death in a park in Melbourne two weeks ago. The longer term task is “closing the gap” between public perceptions and the reality of crime, he said.

Another Indian taxi driver thrashed

In the second attack in two days on Indians in Australia, a 25-year-old taxi driver was abused and punched by his passengers, one of whom spat on him.

In another incident, three Indians were among a group of six South Asians who were denied entry by a bar here in what is being described by them as “a case of racism”.
The taxi driver, who was not identified, had bruises on his body and swelling on the face after he was roughed up by four passengers in the Victorian city of Ballarat, the police said.