Cruel & Unusual Punishment

“CRUSH THE cars! Crush the cars!” Sound familiar? How about, “Burn the witches! Burn the witches!” That’s right—it’s another round of mob idiocy, enthusiastically given plenty of air-time by A Current Affair and The Daily Telegraph.

For the second time in a few months, this story is doing the rounds. The Police Commissioner has ‘threatened’ to crush the cars of ‘hoons’. Exactly what that means and how that would work is anyone’s guess,but the papers seem to have interpreted it as “Street racers’ cars should be crushed into a cube and dumped on their front lawns.”

If you happen to find yourself on one of those newspaper webpage message boards where members of the public can contribute their opinion, it can make for interesting, though eventually tiresome, reading. Comments are generally completely for the proposal, or entirely against. Arguments like, “Crush the cars but make sure the drivers are in them,” are the usual debate-starters. Then you get a lone voice of moderation, with a comment like, “I think crushing them is a bit over-the-top.” This poor bastard is usually ‘shut down’ by the argument, “What if it happened to you? My friend was killed by a hoon; they should rot in hell!” From there it degenerates further until the forum-convenor shuts down the thread due to bad language and name-calling.

But let’s, for a minute, look at it with a bit more sanity. Firstly, Police Commissioners don’t make the laws. (Thank fuck for that—watching TV and listening to the latest police corruption investigation tapes where two senior coppers openly talk on the phone about hiding their corrupt activity is enough to make anyone lose faith in the intellectual capability of senior police!) Thankfully we as a state have set up a system of checks and balances where the executive, judicial, and legislative powers are separate. So the Police Commissioner’s threat to crush cars is hollow bullshit, unless politicians agree it’s a good idea and change the laws to accommodate it. As well as that, our judicial system can then decide that a law is unconstitutional. As it stands, if the Police Commissioner crushes my ute tomorrow, he’d be buying me a new one.

Secondly, complex problems require complex solutions. The public, and therefore the media, are attracted to sensational one-hit quick-fix solutions, particularly when the solutions are unlikely to directly affect them—most people don’t race on streets or drive powerful cars and therefore it seems like a great idea to ‘make the roads safer’ by cracking down hard on hoons.

But what about the minority who do like their cars? How much will it affect them? Well if the car-loving hoon minority group is anywhere near as mad about cars as the Ozbiker minority group is about bikes, it’ll affect them a great deal. A simple way of putting yourself in their shoes is to imagine your purpose-built custom motorcycle being crushed in front of you. Does Joe Public really have the in-depth knowledge of how much that means to you? Does he realize how many hours of hard work and passion went into your vehicle? How can the overall cost of that experience for you be accurately weighed against the offence committed? The answer is, it can’t be. Would one hoon’s restored ’69 Mustang be crushed and then deemed as ‘equal’ punishment as crushing another hoon’s 2007 Holden Monaro? Get real.

Granted, most people would say that street racing cars is more dangerous than anything us bikers could do. But that’s not really the point. When minority groups of road users are targeted negatively like this, it has the potential to fuck up what is a huge part of our lives.

To some people, ‘lifestyles’ are not things that are chosen from a catalogue. To some people, ‘lifestyles’ are actually their lives. Protecting minority lifestyles, and accommodating them in our ‘free’ society, is a bloody important thing. I don’t own a gun and probably never will but I realise there are shooters out there who are just as passionate about guns as I am about choppers. And sweeping un-researched regulations that limit these activities for the sake of satisfying a whim of the majority can really change peoples’ lives.

But let’s not kid ourselves into thinking this is a new problem. The people making the rules today had the benefits of driving stock GTHO Phase III Falcons with no RBT, drug-testing, speed cameras, radar guns, red-light cameras, or red and green P-plate systems—so they’ve had their fun—and now they think it’s a different story for the new generation.

I am by no means endorsing street-racing. But mean-spirited ill-considered punishments that to me can be described as ‘cruel and unusual’ are not the way to go. There is no quick-fix solution to this complex problem and judicial systems will always have certain limitations. But the current judicial options of car confiscation, suspensions, fines, community service, education courses and jail sentences should be more than enough options for magistrates to make a decent decision. After all, they’re supposedly pretty cluey fellows.