"Shameful homophobia, transphobia, and prejudice." That's how a judge has described attitudes in the NSW police force as it investigated the deaths of people in the LGBTQ community. An inquiry into hate crimes has recommended fresh inquests into the deaths of several men.
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TVTranscript
00:00 These are the faces of lives cut short.
00:04 A judge has described many of the deaths as lonely and terrifying, and some of the police
00:09 investigating them as negligent, dismissive or hostile.
00:13 If someone like me, a gay man, was murdered in the 70s, 80s or 90s, it was highly likely
00:20 the police wouldn't care.
00:22 For 18 months, a special commission of inquiry investigated the suspicious deaths or unsolved
00:27 murders of LGBTIQ people between 1970 and 2010.
00:32 It closely looked at 34 deaths potentially motivated by gay hate bias.
00:37 Commissioner Justice John Sackar found there was objectively reason to suspect bias was
00:41 a factor in 21 of those deaths, and concluded bias was a factor in four.
00:46 What the inquiry has done is expose how badly handled many of these cases were.
00:51 Among the commissioner's 19 recommendations are fresh inquests into the deaths of Scott
00:56 Miller, Paul Rath, Richard Slater and Carl Stockton, and for police to regularly monitor
01:01 DNA databases for the profile of an unknown man matching hair the inquiry found on the
01:06 clothes of former ACDC band manager Crispin Dye.
01:10 A volume of the report will be kept confidential after private hearings shed considerable new
01:15 light on several of the deaths.
01:18 The commissioner has recommended it not be published for 30 years to preserve the possibility
01:22 of future criminal investigations and prosecutions.
01:26 Justice Sackar says police failed to act as a model litigant during the inquiry, criticising
01:31 them for long delays in producing materials and for being adversarial or unnecessarily
01:36 defensive.
01:37 The capacity for the police to accept their problems and do something about them still
01:41 seems to be something they're resisting very heavily.
01:44 He stopped short of formally recommending an apology from police, but urged them to
01:48 consider it.
01:49 The absence to date of an apology from the commissioner of the New South Wales Police
01:52 Force has been extremely difficult to understand.
01:56 The police commissioner did not apologise, saying she cannot undo what has occurred previously.
02:01 She says suffering from the attitudes of the past is deeply regrettable, suffering that
02:05 continues for so many families who will never see justice.
02:09 [BLANK_AUDIO]