/PG/ Victoria [Australia] (Signal High) for BadCop.Online —– An Australian literary anthology that explores police brutality, corruption, sexual abuse, discrimination and more has hit the shelves, and may be leading many to support police reform initiatives like defunding.
When Cops Are Criminals is a compilation edited by Veronica Gorrie, a Gunai/Kurnai woman and former police officer. It offers personal reflection and opinion from a variety of well-known Australians, including Kate Pausina – a former detective senior sergeant with the Queensland Police, who writes about her twenty-three years with the force.
“I didn’t want my kids to grow up with the same intense fear that I had towards police,” Gorrie told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation News. “Growing up as a child, if my father was driving a vehicle and he said the word ‘gungais,’ which is our language for police, us kids would throw ourselves to the ground hiding. I was essentially trying to break the cycle.”
Gorrie gave up and called it quits. “I realized that my people’s fears of police were well and truly justified from what I was seeing in the police, the stuff that I was witnessing,” she said. “The stuff I was hearing was very racist and almost unbearable, and I was that sort of person that called it out each and every time, which is why I eventually couldn’t handle it anymore.” Gorrie wrote Black and Blue: A Memoir of Racism and Resilience, published in 2021 and now helps others use their voices.
Read more and see the full interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation News site.
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