A safe place?

Another person was found not guilty of murder in Canberra today, this time a double slaying, which now makes it umpteen (a number greater than ten) who have been found not guilty of murder since a couple of lovers were convicted of the charge, back in 1998, in a crime that was very much de rigeur love triangle gone wrong.  That pair must nearly be out of gaol now, probably cursing their bad luck that somehow they didn't get off when they had their Court hearing.  The most famous case of non conviction was young Mr Porritt (who sounds like a time travelling refugee from a Dickens novel but isn't), who having stabbed his mother 57 times, had the charge downgraded from murder to manslaughter.

We have road signs in Canberra warning of dangerous roads that say 12 people killed along here since 1975, and factories (of which we don't have many), often have signs which detail the number of days since the last industrial accident.  I think in Canberra we should have a sign on our outskirts, just underneath 'Twin city with Nara, Japan', that says 'Canberra - no murders since 1998'.

Paradoxically though, while no murders (with someone convicted of said crime) have taken place over this 13 year period, many people have been killed by others, so the safety of the community isn't quite guaranteed.  But in some way the claim that there have been no murders since 1998 befits the ACT's status as the home of politicians and their art of spinning the facts - as I say, there most definitely has been a range of grisly and gruesome slayings, just an absence in the scorer's column of convicted murderer's.  In terms of homicide and its pre-eminent role in crime waves, it's been so long since a good old fashioned murder, we wouldn't know a crime wave if one came gift wrapped with blue and white check police ribbon.

It has to be said there was a case involving an unfortunate girl who was the victim of foul play and somehow found herself dead in Lake Burley Griffen.  It looked like a murder and no one has yet been charged with the alleged crime.  Even if they did find someone to 'pin it on', it's likely that there would be some bizarre explanation for how she expired in the lake.  After watching Jeremy Wade's program on ABC 2 about freshwater monster fish that are waiting to kill people in our inland waterways, the poor woman's demise seems a likely candidate for piscatorial bludgeoning.

No wonder the good citizenry of Canberra love their Friday and Saturday night crime on the ABC, with its 'Wire in the Blood' and 'Midsumer Murders' - no home grown variety, so they lap it up on the idiot box.  To adapt a phrase out of the Lerner and Lowe's songbook, "Homicide hardly happens here".

I have heard on the underworld grapevine that it is so easy to get off a murder charge in Canberra that hitmen offer discounts.  Of course the upshot of all these 'not guilty' convictions is that some of the Canberra populace, inclined to paranoia, think maybe they aren't as safe as they should be in the ACT, an apparent 'killers'; idyll'.  Thus people are going to bed with anything dangerous they can lay their hands on to protect themselves with, from kitchen knives to large dogs.

There may be an upside to our apparent recently untarnished record: we could mentor troubled cities throughout the world, where murder is a daily occurence - of course our lack of persons being 'rubbed out' may be cold comfort to those on mean streets of cities in 1st, 2nd and 3rd world countries.  We could however, follow in the footsteps of what has been done with Education and Schools, and develop a 'My City Murder rate web site' so we could proudly boast of our wonderful record, and this benchmark might serve as an inspiration to other places so they might strive to better their own sorry murder stats.

Despite all this, things may be about to change; a lot of people have their fingers crossed that an apparent alleged drug execution style slaying, in a fashionable inner south suburb of Canberra, may break the 13 year convicted murder drought.