Journal Archive
An outstanding display of devotion to duty brought no accolades to
Constable Gary Batty. Instead, he was relentlessly pursued by
authorities who sought to convict him of a crime he didn't commit.
By Brett Williams
Gary Batty never expected to be falsely accused of assault after rescuing a woman from an armed male abductor in 1996.
He and other police risked their lives to effect the woman's release and arrest her abductor.
One would think that senior police management would commend Batty for his actions. But only weeks after the incident, Internal Investigation Branch (IIB) officers demanded that he attend their Adelaide office to be interrogated.
At the time, Batty scarcely guessed that he was about to be thrust into a 22-month period of stress and uncertainty.
The story began when he and his then partner, Nicole Hutchinson, went to a Magill house in response to the incident. They intended to obtain information from a witness who had seen the woman abducted at gunpoint.
Before they could speak to him, however, the abductor, a huge man weighing 96kgs, drove into the street and stopped alongside Batty and Hutchinson's patrol car. Sitting in his front passenger seat, weeping and clearly distressed, was the abducted woman.
"I'm standing on the footpath and Nicole was half out of the car," Batty remembers. "He yelled out to us: 'I'm the maniac you're looking for.'
"Nicole and I were in a dangerous situation: we were both standing there, not expecting to confront this guy, and around the corner he comes. Anything could have happened.
"We knew he had guns, but we didn't know where. If he wanted to use them, we were 'gone', (because) we were both 'sitting ducks' at that point."
Despite the life-threatening danger they faced, Batty and Hutchinson held their ground and ordered the abductor out of his car. But this perilous stand-off was only momentary: he defied their order and drove away.
In a scene reminiscent of the O.J. Simpson pursuit, a slow-speed chase began through eastern suburban streets for about four kilometres. "We had the sirens going," Batty says, "but he just refused to stop.
"He was going off to the wrong side of the road on a couple of blind bends and hanging out of the window yelling abuse back at us."
But whether by accident or design, the abductor drove into a dead-end road in Skye. The chase was over.
Batty and Hutchinson stopped about 40 metres behind him, while a supporting police patrol, Constables Sean Clarke and Peter Thomas, stopped behind them.
Before stepping out of their car to face a second, more volatile stand-off, Batty and Hutchinson reminded each other: "Don't forget, he's got a gun".
"We thought he was going to kill her," Batty says.
So Batty and Hutchinson drew their revolvers and took cover behind each of their open car doors. All four police watched and waited. Within a minute, the woman emerged, seemingly unimpeded, from the passenger side of the abductor's dilapidated, early-model station sedan.
She was disoriented and intensely fearful. The police were all she had to guide her from what may well have been her life's most desperate hour.
Thinking with remarkable clarity amid extreme tenseness, Batty beckoned the woman. She followed his direction and reached a position of safety behind police lines.
Seeking some advantage in the impending battle to arrest the abductor, Batty immediately asked her about the quantity and position of his firearms. She replied that she thought they were in the back of his car but wasn't sure.
If, at that very moment, they weren't in his hands - which the officers couldn't see anyway - were they somewhere within his grasp? It was vital information which they didn't have; and the abductor was already reported to have fired a shot when he seized the woman.
Nonetheless, with guns drawn, Batty and his colleagues made a slow, careful advance on the abductor's car from behind. They could see him inside - he hadn't moved. From about 10 metres away they yelled: "Get out of the car". He didn't respond.
"He turned his stereo up full blast, so I don't know if he could hear us," Batty says. "He was ranting and raving, saying: 'Shoot me' and 'I want to kill myself.' And he was pointing his finger at his mouth like he was going to blow his own head off."
Placing himself in ever-increasing danger, Batty moved even closer and tried to open one of the passenger-side doors. Both were locked. The abductor still refused to respond, so force remained the only means of entering the car.
So, in a bid to end the potentially-explosive stand-off, Clarke smashed the driver's-side rear window with his baton. Another officer reached inside the car and unlocked and opened the driver's door.
The abductor took a defiant, white-knuckle grip of his steering wheel as the officers converged on him. He continued to refuse their commands to alight. But with spontaneous, well-executed teamwork, the officers managed to pull him out of his car and overpower him.
As violent, intractable prisoners do, however, the adductor continued to resist by stiffening and tensing his limbs. His size and resistance required the officers to use two sets of handcuffs to secure his arms behind his back.
As he lay on the ground, watched over by Batty and Hutchinson, his demeanour underwent wild fluctuations. At one moment he would shout the foulest obscenities at the officers; at another moment he would lapse into unrestrained sobbing and total submission. At one point he even claimed to be suffering amnesia.
With the situation seemingly under control, Batty left Hutchinson with their charge while he moved a few metres away to use his radio. Then he heard another obscenity shouted, turned and saw the abductor "trying to get up off the ground".
Those unschooled in police work would see that as an ambitious move. But police officers know exactly what emotional, aggressive lawbreakers are capable of - even when they're restrained.
Batty was a cop who, during his career, had been both kicked and bitten by handcuffed prisoners. So, he had no doubt that this one, although semi-restrained, was quite capable of manoeuvring himself to his feet.
And that was precisely the manoeuvre which Batty saw him trying to execute. From where he lay, face-down and handcuffed, he began a sequence of movements which included:
* Rolling onto his left side.
* Bending slightly at his waist.
* Raising his right thigh toward his chest.
* Pushing his right foot onto the ground as leverage to raise his torso.
With the abductor's right shoulder and upper torso now off the ground, Batty ran back toward him and Hutchinson.
The abductor was a man of great size and strength; he was 20cms taller than Batty and outweighed him by nearly 40kgs. To prevent him from rising to his feet, and to assist Hutchinson, Batty's action had to be swift and decisive.
He placed his left hand on the abductor's head which he turned away so as not to be bitten. Then, with his right palm, he administered three rapid pushes to his right shoulder.
Batty's actions worked: his charge was forced back to the ground and was now under total control again. And risk of injury to both police and their prisoner was removed.
Within minutes, detectives arrived and took custody of the abductor. They escorted him to police headquarters to be charged.
The public - and any operational cop - would have delighted in the result: the woman was rescued; the offender was arrested; and the community interest had been served.
Even Batty's then inspector expressed his delight in a letter to the officers' sergeant. It read:
Please pass on to Constables Batty, Hutchinson, Clarke and Thomas my commendation on a job very well done... The professional manner in which the officers conducted their duties made me feel proud to be associated with such dedicated officers. What may have turned into a dangerous...incident was handled in such a manner which defused the situation.
But that wasn't the way IIB saw the incident. Its investigators scrutinized a video tape of the stand-off supplied by a television news crew. Extraordinarily, they saw something sinister in Batty's conduct.
In February - only a month after the rescue - an IIB investigator directed Batty to present himself for questioning at police headquarters.
In response, Adelaide barrister, Bill Morris, was assigned to Batty's case by the Police Association.
IIB intended to pursue a criminal charge against Batty, as opposed to a breach of police regulations. This allowed him the right to remain silent when questioned. And Morris gave him some unmistakable advice on exercising that right.
"Just let the video do the talking," he told Batty. "You don't have to make a single explanation - they've got it on film."
So, Batty attended IIB's offices with a Police Association official. Totally innocent of any wrongdoing, he dutifully faced up to the indignity and embarrassment of a false accusation of criminality.
His crime, according to the investigator, was "punching him (the abductor) to the head on at least three, maybe four occasions".
"Have you anything to say?" the investigator asked. As advised, Batty refused to answer any questions. The humiliation was over - but only temporarily.
"When I was interviewed, he (the investigator) said: 'I won't be interviewing you regarding a breach of regulations at this stage.'
"So," Batty explains, "I thought they would let the criminal charge run its course, and then have a go (at me) under regulations."
But within only a few days, Batty received a telephone call from the investigator. It seemed that the breach-of-regulations interview that wasn't going to take place "at this stage", was now to occur only 66 hours after the first interview.
"He ordered me to attend the interview," Batty says. "I said to him: 'I'm hardly not going to turn up.' I hung up the phone and shook my head. I couldn't understand why I was ordered - it just wasn't necessary. They know where I live."
Answers which the investigator couldn't previously draw from Batty, could now be elicited under orders.
With the Police Association official, Batty returned to IIB to face a demeaning and intensely arduous interrogation of 252 questions.
And whether simply unintentionally, or perhaps to disadvantage Batty, it was a long time before the investigator came to the point. After 189 questions, he finally asked: "Did you punch ---- (abductor's name withheld) that day?"
Batty's answer was unequivocal: "No".
His simple answer didn't suffice, however. The investigator persisted: "I have footage which...identifies you as the person who, at least three times, deliberately punches [sic] ---- to the head, or to the upper body in full view of the camera."
But the investigator's assertion was totally wrong. The camera view of the entire incident was severely obscured by an open police car door. It was simply impossible to see where Batty's pushes had connected.
As the interrogation continued, Batty would be forced not only to watch the video but also re-enact those moments in which he restrained the abductor. And the investigator, whom he regarded as overbearing, often prevented him from completing his answers.
Batty found the whole experience an ordeal. "I felt that I was treated pretty badly," he laments, "(and) they say we all wear the same uniform. I was really disappointed."
Five months later, another wearer of the same uniform served Batty with a summons. He was to face a charge of common assault. The prosecution case was referred to the DPP (Director of Public Prosecutions).
In the meantime, Morris - who never believed the prosecution had a case - conducted a thorough, frame-by-frame viewing of the video tape. He discovered crucial evidence which clearly supported Batty and, until then, had gone entirely unnoticed.
"When you freeze it down to about one frame at a time," Morris explains, "you see his (the abductor's) body twist and a little white dot appear from under the car, which is his foot (in a white shoe) disappearing behind the driver's-side front wheel."
This split-second appearance of the white dot hadn't been visible to the naked eye at normal speed. But it was now indisputable evidence of the abductor's resistance and attempt to place his foot on the ground for leverage to rise.
"This guy was doing exactly what Batty said in his interview," Morris says. "It was only then that Batty struck three really rapid blows, and you can't see them hit the guy's head at all."
Morris prepared a submission for the DPP, Paul Rofe, and supplied him with photographs taken from the video tape. "I invited him to look at it again," Morris says. "He looked at it and decided not to prosecute - that it didn't have reasonable prospects of success."
For Batty, the August withdrawal of the charge was "a weight off my shoulders". He'd only recently bought a home and was fearful of mandatory sacking for a criminal conviction. And his anguish affected his family. "They found it to be very unfair that I was going through it," he says.
"I just had to explain to them that: 'That is the system - hopefully it will work for me.' I got sick of having to talk about it all the time - it 'dragged me down'."
Morris was similarly pleased with the DPP's decision and thought: "Well, that's it".
But that wasn't it: others still saw scope to convict Batty. The Police Complaints Authority (PCA) recommended that he be charged under police regulations with using undue force - and charged he was, in May, 1997. Morris was "flabbergasted".
"All they had to do," Morris says, "was look at the record of interview and look at the video critically, against the background that the DPP didn't agree that there was a criminal charge there."
"A breach-of-regulations charge was just bound to fail. There were so many strong points in the (defence) case."
Morris's confidence, however, didn't dissuade Batty's pursuers. A hearing proceeded before the Police Disciplinary Tribunal. But he was right - the prosecution case failed. "After Batty gave his evidence, it was pretty much just a 'walk-up'," he says.
"And the magistrate made a very adverse comment about the investigator - that he entirely disagreed with the investigator's assessment of what was shown on the video."
So, finally, Batty was completely exonerated. But it was now November '97, and the drawn-out investigation process had caused him immeasurable suffering.
"It took two years and it never went away," he says. "I felt degraded and just couldn't believe it was happening to me.
"I don't think you realize it's affected you until it's over. I was certainly stressed about it, and I probably suffered in silence.
"What they were alleging was just totally out of character. I just felt sick that it was happening, and the system made it worse."
Batty, then 26, even questioned the very occupation to which he'd been committed since 1990. "I remember breezing through the papers thinking: 'What else could I do?' It did make me wonder if it (the job) was all worth it," he says.
For the unnecessary trauma Batty endured, Morris believes that "he had an apology coming to him". But no one among IIB, SAPOL (South Australia Police) management or the PCA has ever offered one.
"He should have got a commendation for his conduct," Morris insists.
PCA boss, Tony Wainwright, declined to be interviewed by the Police Journal, but said: "I accept the judgement of the tribunal in Batty's case."
IIB chief, Commander Geoff Edwards, issued the Police Journal a statement in which he wrote: "...I am not in a position to comment upon the investigation."
Batty's experience has left him disillusioned. He says he would never speak to an IIB investigator without a Police Association official by his side. "Issues can be so distorted that you've just got to watch out for yourself - all the time," he says.
"People have called me 'twisted' by the whole experience, but I think my feelings are pretty normal. I just wish it never happened to me."[End]