Australia’s LGBTQ+ hate inquiry prompts calls for police to act
It happened more than 30 years ago, but David McMahon clearly remembers the ringleader’s words as a group of more than a dozen teenagers ambushed him and dragged him to the edge of a cliff at Sydney’s Bondi Beach. “I’m gonna throw you over the side,” the attacker told McMahon – who is one of the few survivors to have spoken out about a series of homophobic crimes targeting gay men in the Australian city between 1970 and 2010.
A recent judicial inquiry into 32 unsolved murders of LGBTQIA+ people – mostly gay men – during that 40-year period in Sydney found signs of anti-LGBTQIA+ bias in 25 of the cases.
The New South Wales (NSW) Supreme Court judge who oversaw the inquiry, John Sackar, called for police to reopen four of the cases and reexamine a fifth.
In his report, he detailed numerous police failings in investigating the crimes, saying some members of the NSW force were “indifferent, negligent, dismissive or hostile” when dealing with crimes against gay men.
