Residents of the state of Victoria as well as other citizens of Australia may have noticed a spike in certain types of violent crime in recent years.
Sadly the evil right-wing conspiracy that is the Murdoch press, and the evil racists that work for them like the noxious bigot Andrew Bolt have insisted on pointing out the regrettable fact that many of the young Australians contributing to the diversity of their new communities are doing so via carjacking, home invasions and jewellery store hold-ups.
This is of course most undesirable. Not only has mentioning the background of these misguided young people unfairly stigmatised their entire community, it also runs the risk of undermining public support for Australia’s refugee program and stirring up nativist sentiments amongst the ignorant denizens of the outer suburbs.
Heaven forbid.
Fortunately there are people in our community like Tamar Hopkins of the Kensington and Flemington Legal Service’s Police Accountability Project.
For over a decade now Tamar and her colleagues at the KFLS have worked tirelessly to stop the nasty racist Victoria Police officers from picking on the poor disadvantaged youths from a certain minority community.
In November 2007 Tamar stood up against the police and accused them of bias when they tried to arrest members of a hundred strong mob of youths who were pelting their cars with rocks.
In August 2012 Tamar accused the police of breaking the law by racially profiling African youths while investigating crimes reported to have been committed by African youths.
In early 2013 Tamar was a part of a group involved in successful legal proceedings against Victoria police for stopping and searching African youths at a higher rate than their demographics in the area. Victoria Police settled the case out of court for a confidential payout.
In June of 2013 Tamar represented two African men who were stopped by police in an operation targeting carjacking. One of the men then attacked the officers and was charged with assault. This minor fact didn’t stop Tamar from gaining a ruling from Magistrate Duncan Reynolds declaring it illegal for police in the state of Victoria to stop people to ask for identification.
In August 2013 the Guardian reported that Tamar had gained even more payouts for African youths accusing police of “racism”. Ms Hopkins declared that despite the police manual being amended at her own suggestion to outlaw racial profiling, Victoria police was riddled with “Institutional Racism”.
At the beginning of 2016 Ms Hopkins wrote in New Matilda that Australia needed its own version of the U.S Black Lives Matter movement in order to fight “the enormous and institutionally embedded racism in Australia” including the need to “mark with a monument the site where each Aboriginal person who died as a consequence of invasion and colonisation was killed”.
In March 2016 after the rioting by predominantly African youths at the once family-friendly Moomba festival, even the normally left leaning Age editorial was drawing attention to the links between the constant lawsuits by people like Tamar and the increase in African crime.
Ms Hopkins disagreed vehemently, declaring any connection between her crusade against racial profiling and increased gang activity was:
“A crazy linkage… I don’t think the changes would have impacted at all on these groups we saw over the weekend… If anything the reverse is true: genuine work to reduce racial profiling will reduce the prevalence of these kinds of things happening in the cities.”
In late 2016 Tamar and her FKLS colleague Anthony Kelly were lobbying for Victoria police to adopt a system state-wide where anyone stopped by police should receive a receipt and that racial data should be kept so that no group was ever stopped more than was merited by the crime rate and demographic makeup of their community.
In May of this year Ms Hopkins put out a public call on the ABC for more people who thought themselves to be racially profiled to come forward and sue Victoria police again for even more money, and to continue doing so until the State government and the police hierarchy agreed to continue rewriting their procedures in accordance with her demands.
In September she made the same appeal in a sympathetic article in the Guardian written by Melissa Davey which helpfully described the idea of the Apex gang being made up of mostly African youth as a lie made up by the evil right-wing media.
Tamar also spruiked her “Monitoring Racial Profiling” report in the local paper for the North Western Suburbs and even tried to sell the same idea through the Canberra Times in our nation’s capital.
Tamar’s Police Accountability Project even held a symposium in September at the University Of Melbourne so that Ms Hopkins could help educate a room full of academics in why she is right and the police, half the media and people who live in formerly safe suburbs who now get their homes invaded at night by thugs waving machetes, are wrong.
Also speaking at this “Symposium” [don’t you love that word?] was one Tallace Bissett, PhD Candidate in Criminology at the University of Melbourne. Back in her undergraduate days in 2004, Tallace was the Queer Officer for the University of Melbourne as a representative of the National Broad Left group.
As XYZ has previously pointed out, the NBL group was founded almost entirely by left-wing extremists and in particular the Democratic Socialist Party, the group that would later become the Socialist Alliance. Its purpose was to attempt to wrest control of the National Union of Students away from the various factions of the Young ALP.
One former convener of the NBL is Matilda Alexander, the activist being funded to the tune of almost half a million dollars by the QLD government to police online speech regarding the Gay Marriage debate.
But of course we can’t assume that Tallace shared her comrade’s extremist views, and after all it was a long time ago. Sure she contributed to the PHD thesis of Farida Iqbal, a Safe Schools Program supporter and Senate candidate for the Socialist Alliance.
Sure she led an illegal occupation of the Department of Immigration offices in Melbourne last year. But I’m sure she’s got it out of her system. And certainly we couldn’t infer anything about Tamar Hopkins’ personal opinions from her colleagues.
It’s not like Tamar has made a habit of associating with the most radical and violent political extremists in Australia is it?
Oh wait…
In 2012 the Victorian Police association was forced to cut ties with Trades Hall over a meeting being hosted at the large and impressive Lygon Street edifice. The meeting was being held by Socialist Alternative, the best organised, most violent and largest political extremist group in Australia, and our good friend Tamar Hopkins was the featured speaker.
The same Socialist Alternative that attacks church parishioners, Punches photographers, Blockades courts of law, gang bashes innocent bystanders and even boasted about attacking police and shutting down opposition political events.
The same group that contains Omar Hassan who led a violent leftist charge against police lines in Sydney.
The same group helped organise violence at the G20 riots in Melbourne where police vehicles were smashed and where protesters took dumpsters and used tram tracks to slide them into police, resulting in injuries including a broken wrist.
The same group that publishes articles on their website calling for repeats of the Battle of Lewisham where 56 police were injured, 11 were hospitalised and three came under such a hail of missiles that they crashed their vehicle and had to be rescued before a baying mob of leftists could tear them out onto the street and beat them to death.
In their statement of principles this group calls for violent revolution to overthrow the Australian state. They call for the destruction of the Australian parliaments, courts, the armed forces and police. They wish to abolish freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, our constitution, our flag, our borders and the very concept of the nation state of Australia.
I’m sure speaking at their event was some sort of mistake though. It’s not like Tamara spoke in front of similar groups is it?
Oh dear…
In 2015 Ms Hopkins spoke glowingly at the wake of Ray Jackson, a man whom in his time was an activist for the Communist Party of Australia, the Association of Communist Unity and the Freedom Socialist Party.
The FSP was organising the event which was chaired by Debbie Brennan. As we have pointed out at XYZ before, Debbie is the redheaded extremist lunatic well known for organising rallies at which police, journalists and bystanders have been attacked and Australian flags burned.
Debbie is so crazy she went on a Communist activism tour to Cuba in the mid-1980s and came back convinced that Castro wasn’t extreme enough. To solve this issue she helped found the FSP at whose event Ms Hopkins was an honoured speaker, welcomed by all as a true comrade. Comfortable as can be amongst some of the nuttiest anti-police nutbags in Australia today.
But that’s not all.
In June 2013 Ms Hopkins gave a speech to Ian Rintoul’s extremist Solidarity group at Melbourne University about how terrible it was that Eddie McGuire said rude things about Adam Goodes.
That’s the same Ian Rintoul who has boasted about being arrested over 60 times for his often violent and thuggish activism in the service of various extremist groups over the course of four decades.
He too was involved in organising the S11 riots in 2000 but more notoriously was also responsible for the violence against both police and attendees at One Nation meetings in the 90s. He and the groups he was a part of led an intimidation campaign against local councils to try and force them to ban One Nation meetings from Council buildings.
Any reader of XYZ knows by now this disgusting man’s disgraceful past and the influence he sadly still holds in the present.
Solidarity, much like their more successful cousins Socialist Alternative, also openly state on their website that they are against Capitalism and want to replace it with totalitarian Socialism. They also wish to abolish Parliament, the army, the police and the courts and advocate mass violence and mob rule to circumvent elections.
They consider Australia an evil imperialist power and oppose all Australian patriotism as well as any form of immigration controls. They hate our country, they hate our culture, they hate our people and they hate our flag.
And they really hate our police, whom they consider illegitimate tools of the evil capitalist system.
In fact even if she tried, Tamara Hopkins would have found it difficult to find three more fundamentally anti-police extremist groups in Australia to speak in front of.
Considering that Ms Hopkins and the groups she has been a part of have been instrumental in formulating modern police policy in the State of Victoria and are now looking to extend that influence to other jurisdictions in Australia, it really might be worth asking her just how much of her friends’ ideology she shares.
After all, if a major stakeholder in the process of formulating police policy believes that police are illegitimate instruments of social control, and that ignoring their instructions and breaking the laws they enforce is not only not wrong but morally good, shouldn’t the rest of us know?
Ms Hopkins has spent a large proportion of her life fighting for what she considers “Police Accountability”.
It’s well beyond time the public asked her and the many others like her, just who exactly holds them accountable for the damage they cause?
