Opinion: Day of reckoning long overdue for police who ignored gay hate crimes
It really didn’t have to be this hard. More than three decades after a brilliant young man’s life was taken from us in a fit of homophobic rage, the killer stunned a closed courtroom with an admission: “Guilty. I am guilty. Guilty.”
Through a mutual friend, Steve Johnson contacted me in early 2007 and asked me to go to Sydney to investigate his brother’s death. Even though a 2005 coronial inquest had detailed multiple brutal attacks on gay men in the Bondi area, police steadfastly stuck to their belief that homophobic violence miraculously stopped at the Harbour Bridge.
During that first trip to Sydney in May 2007, the balance of probabilities shifted so fast it was breathtaking. Within a few hours of arriving, I talked to a straight man who had worked at the sewerage plant since the 1980s and who said that gay men met up at the headlands near Blue Fish Point area “all the time, mate”. I met a gay man who had been stabbed up there.
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