AUSTRALIA: GOOD POLICING PENALIZED

A triple murderer was driving through Paddington at 3am in December 1998 with three mates and a car full of semi-automatic weapons. A police patrol car from Rose Bay drove slowly by. The men panicked, turned into a side street, then another, and wound up in a dead end. Knowing his patch well, one of the officers in the patrol car was suspicious when the Toyota Camry didn't continue on the back route to Kings Cross. He did what all good police officers do - or used to do. He and his partner followed the Camry. When the men ran, they chased them through the White City tennis complex. The triple murderer fired at them with his CZ 9mm self-loading pistol, hitting the junior officer three times. The senior officer shot back at the muzzle fire he could see in the dark.

After 25 shots were exchanged, one of Sydney's most vicious killers, Michael Kanaan, then 23, lay bleeding on the ground from seven bullet wounds that would put him in a wheelchair for three years. Constable Chris Patrech had injuries to his wrist and ankle, which still plague him as a sergeant in Manly. And what of the hero of the night, Senior Constable John Fotopoulos, whose smart police work had finally stopped Kanaan's rampage, and who had probably saved the life of his colleague?

Well, Fotopoulos became a pariah, left the police service and lived as a virtual recluse in a caravan on the South Coast, unmarried, in fragile mental health, trusting no one, reportedly living on workers' compensation of less than $300 a week. He was frightened for his family when he realised he'd grown up near Kanaan's Belfield home. It was only Crown Prosecutor Margaret Cunneen who managed to coax him out to give evidence at last month's trial. At first he wouldn't even shake her hand, because he felt so let down by the legal system.

That fateful morning in 1998, Fotopoulos had his hand shaken by then police commissioner Peter Ryan, who took time out from turning the police force into a farce to turn up at dawn at White City. Fotopoulos was traumatised by the gunfight but for a little while he was the golden boy. Then came the results of his urine test, with a trace of marijuana he admitted smoking at a party three months earlier, so tiny a trace that a police pharmacologist testified it could even have been from environmental exposure and could not have impaired his faculties. At 28, his career was over, even if he didn't yet know it.

So was Kanaan's. Just 10 days before Fotopoulos stopped him, he had murdered his boss, Kings Cross drug dealer Danny Karam. A month earlier, on November 1, Lakemba police station was sprayed with bullets from a semi-automatic weapon. Kanaan and two other men were later acquitted of the attack. Four months earlier, on July 17, Kanaan shot dead two strangers, Adam Wright, 23, and Michael Hurle, 25, outside a Five Dock hotel. He is now serving three consecutive life sentences.

And last week, Supreme Court Justice Megan Latham gave him another 12 years for maliciously shooting at Patrech and Fotopoulos, after a jury had acquitted him of the more serious charges of attempted murder. But when the case first went to magistrate Pat O'Shane in 1999, she poured scorn on the officers and let Kanaan go free. Fotopoulos and Patrech had been "stupid, reckless and foolhardy", she said. Fotopoulos had "no cause" to chase Kanaan. "This case is an object lesson," Latham said, with unintended irony. ". . . We need to protect good officers, and encourage them in their necessary duty."

Indeed. What happened to good officer Fotopoulos was that the police service hired barrister Stuart Littlemore to monster him in court to avoid paying a personal injury claim he filed in 2001 and dropped in 2005, having lost heart. The police service's costs, reportedly of $250,000, were awarded against him. Will Commissioner Ken Moroney send debt collectors to hound him in his caravan?

It took seven years for the officers to achieve some sort of justice from the courts, but Fotopoulos seemed happy after the verdict last week and hugged Cunneen before going to ground again. Contacted in Europe yesterday, Patrech said it felt good to be "acknowledged, as John and I did the right thing . . . I am, however, once again disappointed with the sentence as I believe that any person who attempts to shoot or shoots a police officer should receive the maximum penalty to set an example".

Fotopoulos and Patrech deserve a huge vote of thanks from all of us. But what are the lessons young police can draw from their experience? Do not approach anyone who looks like a crook. Stick to harassing law-abiding citizens. If you suspect a crime might be occurring, turn a blind eye. Oh, and if you have ever smoked a joint at a party, make sure you never, ever use your police issue weapon.

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