One of the problems with giving police extreme powers is that on occasion they tend to use them badly.
Whilst APEC was on this week, a guy walking across the road in front of a motorcade was arrested in front of his 11 year old son and spent 22 hours in a cell with no access to a lawyer waiting to be freed. The basic story told like that seems almost reasonable. The police were intent on protecting the world leaders and that’s what they did.
However, on closer examination it seems they might well have stepped way over the line between caution and over reaction.
The entire story (so far) can be read here in and from reading it you can see how easy it is to fall foul of the law when simply going about your life doing nothing wrong.
This picture (from ninemsn) shows Greg being arrested and to be fair, whilst I know appearances can be deceiving, he really *does* look like an ordinary guy doing ordinary stuff.
As far as I could tell, the only crime this guy committed was to not realise Sydney had been turned into a virtual war zone where martial law was in force. I think in retrospect Greg McLeay will consider himself lucky not to have suffered the same fate as Jean Charles de Menezes in London in 2005 and have died for nothing.
Whatever else it is, was or might be… I just see this sort of behaviour as *very* unaustralian and is indicative of the way the fundamentals of our society have deteriorated under John Howard.
The Eclectic Interweb 