A former NSW police officer has come forward to reveal that he witnessed his colleagues bashing gay men in an organised manner in Sydney in the 1980s.
www.starobserver.com.au
Ex-NSW Cop Reveals He Witnessed Gay Bashings By His Police Colleagues In Sydney In 1980s
A former NSW police officer has come forward to reveal that he witnessed his colleagues bashing gay men in an organised manner in Sydney in the 1980s.
“I’m doing it because I want the people who are victims of this conduct to be validated and for them to have their stories accepted,” former cop Mark Higginbotham told Channel Nine’s true crime program
Under Investigation.
Higginbotham joined the NSW Police as a fresh-faced 19-year-old constable in the 1980s. The young police officer left the NSW police force in disgust after seeing and witnessing horrible conduct of his fellow officers. He later joined Victoria Police where he retired as a decorated police officer.
The latest episode of
Under Investigation took a look at the spate of bashings and murders of gay men and trans women in Sydney and NSW between 1970 and 2010.
Higginbotham told the program that these organised gay bashings occured multiple times during his time in the force and there were officers who protected others guilty of hate crimes.
In 1983, Higginbotham and his partner were out on patrol when a gay man approached them and reported that he had just been bashed. Higginbotham tracked down the accused, arrested him and took him to Darlinghurst police station to charge him for the crime.
“I was typing out a document that was called a fact sheet when I became aware of the presence of the shift surgeon – senior person in the police station at the time. He started to scream at me, scream abuse at me. ‘We don’t charge ‘poofter bashers’ here. What have you done?’ And he was enraged and did overwhelm me,” recalled Higginbotham, adding that he felt “powerless”.
Higginbotham, however, charged the accused and the next day the victim, who was a gay journalist wrote about it in his paper. The former police officer said it led to him being treated as an outcast in the police station.
“I was told that I had brought aggravated shame on the police station because I had not only charged a man with ‘poofter bashing’ – I am comfortable using the phrase but that’s the way it was described – but it had been reported. People would not work with me. I was labeled a “”. And people would would overtly announced that they would not work with a “”,” said Higginbotham .
“There must be people in New South Wales Police who I worked with. I mean, there were many, many young people my age, many 19-year-olds, 20-year-olds working at Darlinghurst (police station). It’s not far-fetched to think that people still work there. It was wrong. It was clearly wrong to poke with a stick, hitting someone on the head. There’s no moral confusion about that. It’s ugly, it’s wrong. It’s criminal. And it’s done in police uniform,” said Higginbotham.