Sergeant Geoffrey Steer,a former co-ordinator of the since-disbanded bias crime unit within NSW Police,told the inquiry on Monday that from his experience “a lot of police still don’t understand bias crimes ... or how to identify them”.
“From the outset,the unit was not popular,” Steer said,and its work “wasn’t what NSW Police wanted to hear”.
Sergeant Geoffrey Steer leaving the LGBTIQ hate crimes inquiry last week.Jessica Hromas
“It was seven years of trying to convince an organisation that wasn’t interested in hate crimes to take it seriously,” he said.
“There is a belief that we’re a multicultural society and everything works well. The fact that we have a unit that says people don’t get on,that there are issues,was always at odds with that police system.”
The inquiry heard Steer used 10 bias crime indicators as part of his work,including nine indicators from the US Department of Justice and Victims of Crime Bureau.
‘It was seven years of trying to convince an organisation that wasn’t interested in hate crimes to take it seriously.’
Sergeant Geoffrey Steer on his work on bias crimes for the NSW Police.
He added a 10th indicator,level of violence,to that list on the basis that his own reviews and “multiple research papers had indicated that the level of violence experienced by hate crime victims were higher than non-hate crime victims”.
after every known unsolved homicide from that period of time was reviewed,totalling more than 700 cases.
As part of that work,the inquiry is examining Strike Force Parrabell,which was set up by NSW Police in 2015 to review 88 deaths between 1976 and 2000 that potentially involved motivations of gay-hate bias.
Parrabell’s 2018 report found evidence of a bias crime in eight cases and a further 19 cases were suspected bias crimes. Two cases were excluded from the review.
Steer said in a statement tendered at the inquiry that he had “minimal involvement” in Parrabell but conducted a “dip sample” of 12 cases after he raised “concerns about the lack of consultation”.
“Out of the 12 cases ... I disagreed with the findings of nine cases,” he wrote in a statement. “This disagreement ranged from a difference of a category,eg I assessed them to be a hate crime when they had them as a suspected hate crime to complete disagreement,they assessed it as not a hate crime and I assessed it as a hate crime.”
He told the inquiry the strike force had inappropriately used the 10 bias crime indicators as a “checklist” rather than taking a “holistic approach” and using the indicators to trigger further investigation.
“It is possible to have all 10[indicators] and it is not a hate crime or have none and it is a hate crime,” he wrote in his statement.
The inquiry has heard the bias crime unit was effectively disbanded “overnight” in July 2017 and three of its four members including Steer were redeployed. The unit was subsequently realigned within the counterterrorism command.
“Why did you leave? Was your position abolished?” counsel assisting the inquiry,Peter Gray,SC,asked.
“Internal politics,” Steer said. He said a senior officer told the unit they “weren’t doing hate crimes any more;we were to do what we were told and shut up”.
Steer said he returned to general duties by choice after “reliable sources” within NSW Police and the government told him,“I was not popular any more doing hate crimes and that the intent was to get rid of me.”
The head of Strike Force Parrabell,Assistant Commissioner Anthony Crandell,told the inquiry earlier on Monday that Steer was disgruntled that he was taken away from the bias crime unit and not included in Parrabell.
He said he used Steer as an advisory resource on Parrabell but believed it would have been “extremely unfair” to include him as a member of the strike force when he was already overloaded with work for the bias crime unit and limited resources.
“His remit was far broader than just Parrabell or just gay-hate crime,” Crandell said.
The inquiry continues.
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