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Home / police allegations / Rickards,
Shipton, Schollum vs Jane Doe Page 7 - Further Reaction to
Not Guilty Verdict |
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Whatever the rights and wrongs of
the Rickards, Shipton and Schollum affair – and almost all of us would agree
they are mostly wrongs – 20 years on it is nothing less than self-indulgent
vindictiveness to slander the whole police force because of it. I'm talking about a poster that
appeared in parts of For those who haven't seen it, it
read in large imitative type "Then we dealt to her with a bottle". In smaller type at the bottom was
the sentence: "Get some great rape stories". The implication was that all
police are rapists, an insulting echo of the "all men are rapists"
dictum of early radical feminism. Never mind that a good proportion of the
force today are women; never mind that the men and women charged with keeping
our streets safe have an increasingly dangerous and difficult job; and never
mind that it was the police themselves who brought the prosecutions against a
senior member of their own, and his two former colleagues. The poster has been described as a
"prank". But the word prank usually implies a degree of humour.
There is none on display here. As a joke it doesn't so much fall flat as fail
to get off the ground; as satire it is about as subtle as a brick shithouse –
which is to say it isn't satirical at all, since satire implies a degree of
intelligence, irony or wit on the part of its authors. Of course, in the right hands,
satire can be angry, too, and understandably anger was never far from the
parade of unpalatable events the High Court trial elicited. Certainly, the
complainant was angry. And post-trial, Clint Rickards was angry, too,
particularly with Louise Nicholas, the woman whose allegations led to the
first rape trial involving the three. "I've already said in court
that she is a liar and I don't resile from that, she is evil and
manipulative," he told the Sunday Star-Times at the weekend. "This
was a vexatious, malicious inquiry. Here was a woman who had a history of
false rape complaints and a propensity to lie and they were happy to believe
her version of events." Rickards was so angry that it was
possible to believe he had an anger problem. It clouded his judgment and
revealed, in a press conference, that he had serious ego issues, too. How
else to explain that a man who expected to retain his assistant
commissioner's job could publicly articulate the contempt in which he held
the police team that had investigated him; and who would pronounce he
believed his friends Brad Shipton and Bob Schollum had been wrongly convicted
in an earlier rape trial. That's before you even get to the
distasteful sexual history – including group sex, as a police officer, with a
vulnerable teenager; and less culpably, but equally graphically, sex on the
bonnet of a police car. While his employment expectations
may have been part of a calculated campaign to raise the stakes of an inevitable
severance payout, his other badly misjudged utterances nailed the coffin of
his police career shut. It's a coffin built out of the
abuse of power. The political response to it will sink Rickards, whatever an
employment court rules. Both Prime Minister Helen Clark
and Opposition leader John Key have made it clear they see no future in the
force for him. And, of course, the arguments,
pertaining more to Shipton and Schollum given their rape convictions, have
spilled over into the vexatious area of what juries – and therefore the
general public and media – may and may not know, or say, about the prior
history of defendants at trial. My own view is that men and woman
should be tried, each case according to its merits, on the evidence brought
before the courts, rather than on defendants' perceived propensity,
potential, or opportunity to commit crimes. After all, to one degree or
another, that could condemn most of us. Further, that while they are not
foolproof, by and large juries are not foolish; that the law courts are
sombre and sober places dedicated to, and practised in, the business of
justice; and that, by contrast, the court of public opinion is all too often
a wildly emotive and intemperate place. Witness the shameful poster campaign
that has chosen to visit the morally repugnant activities of a group of
officers in the 80s on the entire contemporary police force. |
