The Tall Man (24 page)

Most of the police officers who were to give evidence at the trial refused to co-operate with the prosecution beforehand, and did so only after receiving written orders from the Police Commissioner threatening them with disciplinary action. Even then, they were accompanied to their depositions by as many as three police-union lawyers. A Crown lawyer described to me the lack of police co-operation: “When I took statements from police in preparing the case, I experienced resistance, interference, and in one case threats.” As Robert Mulholland had once remarked in the wake of prosecuting Commissioner Lewis, “Police officers will at times, even generally honest police, turn a blind eye to the misconduct of their colleagues.”

FOR THE POLICE
union this was now war, and the war room was the palm-lined, twenty-million-dollar Brisbane Broncos Leagues Club. I followed a group of police officers through the club foyer past a lush tropical water feature with a bronze bucking horse, and walls covered with blown-up action shots of mighty men in maroon, white and gold; men whose heads seemed to be fused with their necks as they rammed one another with elbows, knees, and shoulders, their faces contorted by the effort; and the whole building rang with the whirring and clanging of the poker machines in the gambling hall, Cauldron of Champions. Up a ramp walkway, a neon sign marked a pair of double doors: auditorium.

On February 1, 2007, five days after it was announced Hurley would be charged with manslaughter, this room was filled with two thousand police officers in blue uniform, all gathered to protest his treatment. They were mainly men, white men in tight clusters, insignia on their shoulders indicating rank. What was most striking was their height. Until the late 1980s, an officer had to be at least five-foot-ten. This was a room of tall men, big men with tans or sunburn and close-cut hair. And they looked athletic. The venue was not a random choice: the Brisbane Broncos’ famous coach, Wayne Bennett, an ex-policeman, was for a long time the Police Academy’s fitness instructor; he had been when Hurley did his training.

The air was close, clammy with sweat and testosterone. The officers held their hats, some using them as fans, and chatted and laughed. More police poured in and a speaker told the crowd to get in tighter. “I’m doing my part,” said one policeman, nestling in close behind a giggling policewoman. Somewhere a baby was crying. We were in a pack. We could feel one another’s animal warmth and sweat and breath—and it made me shiver.

One sergeant, himself six-foot-four, told me that the inquest had not considered all the evidence. He repeated the now common myth that Cameron Doomadgee had been hit by a car the night before his death. He also claimed that Andrew Boe had tried to become a cop but was knocked back, hence his relentless pursuit of Hurley. This sergeant was in his early fifties and ran a suburban police station. He spent his days, he said, going to people who had been beaten and raped, telling them there wasn’t enough evidence to lay charges. “That’s our life. Here’s one of ours and suddenly the rules have changed … This is a witch-hunt … We acknowledge that he could have, there’s no two ways about it. I haven’t heard one person say, ‘Look, Chris is innocent,’ no one’s saying that. It’s just the process hasn’t followed (a) the evidence and (b) the normal conventions.”

He went on: “Let’s be philosophical—if for those ten thousand times [black drunks were arrested], 9,999 times it prevented further offences being committed …” His voice trailed off. The man was a fundamentalist Christian. He saw his role as akin to the Good Samaritan’s. “I’ve never lost my patience. I believe it’s my God keeping me that way.”

It was hard to know whether the police union truly saw Hurley as an innocent man trapped in a legal maze—Kafka in the tropics—or their stance reflected the old-style police belief that rough justice in tough conditions was justifiable.

The stage at the front of the auditorium had black velvet drapes and theatre spotlights with tinted gels. A moral drama, a passion play was about to begin. Ross Musgrove, the dapper media officer for the police union, came to the microphone. Cameras flashed; reporters were sitting at the front.

“As you know, this is the third of the mass meetings held by the union around the state,” Musgrove announced. “This is just incredible. Well done. I mean it, really well done, thanks for turning up. It’s very important that we’re all here to send a message to the Beattie government that we’re not happy about what’s goin’ on, and we want some changes made! And we want some changes made now!”

The hall filled with a radio advertisement, funded by the union, that was about to hit all the commercial radio stations on high rotation. The tagline was “Mr Beattie, our police deserve justice too!”

A few days earlier, 450 officers had gathered at a Townsville rally in support of Hurley. Detective Sergeant Darren Robinson, who had warned the Crime and Misconduct Commission investigators against “bias-ism”, urged the crowd to move a motion against “blatant political interference in the case” and for “the government to respect the separation of powers”. In a few days’ time, Hurley’s older brother, Senior Sergeant Tony Hurley, would address another five hundred police on the Sunshine Coast. The union was calling for twenty-four-hour surveillance in all watch houses, a recommendation, as Denis Fitzpatrick pointed out, of the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody that had never been implemented.

Denis Fitzpatrick now arrived on the Broncos’ stage. In his suit and police-union tie and glasses, he looked like a schoolboy with an old face. He had a tough-guy swagger and a dry, outraged manner. Fitzpatrick had spent all but a few months of his twenty-four years as a police officer in Far North Queensland. He called his fellow officers “brothers and sisters”. Some were. A lot of recruits follow their family members into the force, as Hurley had. And they often marry fellow officers. Cops know what it’s like for other cops; they can sympathize, understand, offer protection. They watch one another’s backs.

Some of the assembled officers had worked with Chris Hurley in Cape York or the Gulf country or Surfers Paradise. If you were a cop and didn’t know Hurley personally, there was a good chance one of your relatives did. There was a good chance one of your family had gone to school with the Hurleys, or to the same church, or played rugby on the same team.

“This roll-up is spectacular! Thank you for your attendance!” called Fitzpatrick. “I particularly also want to thank our minister, Judy Spence, who’s made the time to come and listen to our concerns today.” Spence, Queensland’s elegant Police Minister, was police royalty: the daughter of a cop and the great-niece of Frank Bischoff, another disgraced police commissioner. Known as “the Bagman” for his corruption, Bischoff had ended up in a psychiatric asylum. Because the minister steadfastly supported the police union, Elizabeth Doomadgee had been praying for her to be purged of evil.

Fitzpatrick stood staring at the crowd, microphone in hand:

Right across this state, Queensland, police officers are
disgusted
with the unfair treatment of Chris Hurley. Chris is being singled out for special treatment by the government in this state. He is being treated differently from any other Queenslander in our history. Legal conventions and centuries of established law are being cast aside so that Chris Hurley can be charged. All of us in this room know only too well that what happened to Chris Hurley could happen to any one of us!

Members, Queensland taxis have better video surveillance currently in them than our watch houses, that’s the truth … Well, maybe then, Premier, we should keep our prisoners in the back of cabs!

The applause was thunderous. This felt like a revivalist meeting. Just as Cameron Doomadgee had become a martyr for Aboriginal Australia, Chris Hurley was now a martyr for anyone who felt blacks got too much from the system. Hurley was Gulliver, suddenly gigantic and tied to the ground, with all “the noisy minorities”, as Fitzpatrick put it—the civil libertarians, the bleeding hearts, the blackfellas—running riot around him. This was no longer about justice in the abstract, or the law according to governments and courts—the purpose of this meeting was to establish that the police were the victims. It was they who suffered the injustice of the law, they who suffered the manifestations of dysfunction, violence and addiction. Measured against two hundred years of Aboriginal dispossession and abuse, the idea is fantastic, but no one in that hall was thinking about historical relativities. This was real-life über-Australia up against insipid, politically correct, bullshit Australia. It was North against South. It was the cops, huddled close together, against those besieging them.

Fitzpatrick’s skin had begun to shine in the heat of the stage lights. “Members!” he called. “I’m proud to report we have the majority, the vast majority of community support … Our phones haven’t stopped ringing. E-mails are flooding into the union office, and letters containing donations of support for Chris and his family … In fact, yesterday, and I kid you not, yesterday, a former Queensland police officer donated and pledged,” he slowed down for emphasis, “
fifty thousand dollars
for Chris’s legal expenses!”

There was the caterwauling whistling you hear at concerts. These people clapped with strength. They had strong arms, strong hands. They put their bodies into their clapping. Fitzpatrick’s tribe—underpaid and undervalued, perhaps—was a far more intact, more homogeneous, more powerful, and more privileged tribe than Cameron’s. And it was far more able to defend one of its members.

“The clear message for you, Mr Beattie, is the silent majority are about to get noisy. If we do need to march on Parliament, members, I predict Queenslanders in their thousands will come out and support us. They will welcome us!”

Fitzpatrick now changed his tone: “There’s been an incredible amount of pain, angst, and sorrow caused to all parties involved in the death of Cameron Doomadgee over the last two years. If there had been video surveillance at the watch house entrance on Palm Island … there would have been an indisputable record that could have avoided all that pain.” He had a point, of course—and there could hardly be a more opportune time to make it.

Trevor Pope from Traffic Branch stood to read the first motion:

“The motion is that this meeting support Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley for any form of legal assistance to defend the charge of manslaughter and any other charge that may arise.”

Fitzpatrick said, “I will now put that to the membership. Those in favour.”

“Aye!”
the crowd roared, raising their hands.

“I’d say that’s carried unanimously,” Fitzpatrick said, deadpan.

The second motion was raised by Sergeant Bill Earnshaw from the Drug and Alcohol Unit. “Might need your assistance after this,” Fitzpatick quipped, to much laughter, as the sergeant made his way to the stage.

“Motion number two,” Earnshaw read, “that this meeting support the union’s stance for the immediate upgrade of watch houses and staffing in Queensland so that the recommendations of black deaths in custody [the 1991 Royal Commission] are met.”

Again the motion was carried. When the crowd voted they didn’t put their arms straight up, but held them out at a forty-five-degree angle. It was surreal.

“This third motion,” announced Senior Constable Mick Carmody of General Duties, “is that this meeting endorse the executive to organize a mass meeting and march on Parliament!”

“Again, all in favour!” Fitzpatrick called.

“Aye!”

“And who’ll turn up and march!” he called again.

“Aye!”

“And who won’t stop marching!”

“Aye!”

The applause was tidal. All this was for Chris Hurley. His presence hovered over the proceedings though he was nowhere to be seen. Nowhere and everywhere. Around me, the man I’d watched at the inquest—tall, dressed in righteous blue—was multiplying. I was surrounded by him.

Civilians and the media were then asked to leave. I walked back through the Broncos complex and thought of Eric Doomadgee, who loved this team so devotedly that his family had buried him with maroon, yellow and white flowers on his coffin.

Outside the building, I waited until the police left the auditorium, their shirts doused with sweat. Three protesters also waited, one holding a sign saying
NO MORE DEATHS IN CUSTODY
. The other two had a painted sheet:
POLICE SERVICE NOT FORCE
. They were drowned by a wave of blue uniforms. The car park being full, many cops had parked illegally. While their colleagues stopped traffic on a busy road nearby, they swiftly made their getaways. Then the sky opened up. It rained hard and fast and the lower ranks got caught in the downpour.

I wondered how many of these officers were aware that they couldn’t in fact march in protest, that such action was regarded by the union’s own lawyers as being in contempt of court, and might affect Hurley’s receiving a fair trial. Behind the scenes, the union was working on another campaign. Before the week was out, the
Gold Coast Bulletin
’s cover showed a policewoman raising her clenched fist to display a navy blue wristband. A phalanx of officers surrounded her, all in the same pose, all with the same wristbands, which were stamped with Hurley’s police registration number, 6747. “They are a silent protest,” explained Denis Fitzpatrick in the article, “a sign of solidarity plus a fund-raiser for Senior Sergeant Hurley’s legal costs.” Soon Queensland police were selling blue wristbands on the streets, in community newspapers, and advertising them on regional television news.

The wristbands were supposed to be available for $5 at most police stations, but at Townsville Police Headquarters, a doughy young constable manning the desk told me that five thousand had sold out before they reached the north. “We get everything last in Townsville,” he complained. He intended to buy one from the next batch, for the good cause, but he’d never wear it. It was too much like a bracelet. He thought he might put it on the gearshift of his car.