Consider this. A Tamworth man, a man acting for a department charged with doing his job to keep the law of the land, is gunned down and dies.
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The tragedy consumes a community across the city, across the nation.
No-one, publicly at least, questions whether the man – a father, a son, a son-in-law, part of other families, and a colleague and friend, was being heavy- handed, of hounding someone else, of over-reaching his job.
Neither the community nor the politicians question the fact the fatality was a death waiting to happen because the law was inadequate, or wrong, or too onerous, or overly restrictive or accuse the compliance officer of harassment.
David Rixon died on a Tamworth street from a shot fired by a man he’d just pulled over for a random breath test. It was March 1, 2012.
The killer was a man known to police for his flouting of laws, for his criminal background.
The highway patrolman, a senior constable aged 40, and a career cop, confronted his killer Michael Jacobs on a morning he probably never considered would be his last.
His colleagues and many in the Tamworth community described him as dedicated and as a copper who seriously upheld his responsibilities of upholding the law.
David Rixon’s death had a profound effect on his community and on his colleagues; his workmates.
About 16 local police were called to give evidence at the trial of the man who killed Senior Constable David Rixon.
A senior Tamworth policeman described their ordeal.
It had been draining. Painful. The trial had made many of them anxious.
That officer said: “It was fascinating to watch too, because cops are stoic; they stand up to things, but with this they became very anxious and in a way they have become victims as well. Cops have been the victims of crime here and that’s a bit of a different fact for us.”
Now, compare those elements, those comparative facts, to the god-awful shooting death of Glen Turner, an environmental department compliance officer, on a dusty road reserve near Moree last Tuesday.
Eerily similar; scarily the same – except for some critical differences this week.
A lesson to us all – including the politicians and the people who have stooped to describe the circumstances of the background of one compliance officer doing his job and irrationally rationalising it as a tragedy waiting to happen because of the law.
As others have already said, “there’s no justification, no mitigation, on any grounds” for the killing of Glen Turner.
So say all of us.
