VIC Complaint to Police Ethical Standards - Waiting for Response?

[rjm]

I'm wondering what's a reasonable amount of time to wait for a response from Vic Police Ethical Standards. A complaint was made on the 9th of Jan. I've made one polite follow up call between then & now. Was told they're very busy due to bush fire crisis?

I would have thought they'd be different police working on the two very separate issues. I was told it would be looked into shortly, that was now a couple of weeks ago.

I'd be more patient however I've been the victim of some pretty nasty harassment for nearly 3 years.
The most serious incident was a problem with our gas main. It was leaking. The fire department attended. Only one firefighter approached & inspected the gas main, the rest of them & myself were several meters away. He said very loudly & clearly "Call investigations".

Another of the firefighters responded by saying "There's no need for that, I'll talk to you about it back at the office". This second man had not looked at the gas main & didn't ask his colleague what was wrong with it. He then proceeded to single me out away from the group & told me there must be a small leak somewhere along the line & that I needed to get a gas fitter to perform a nanometer test on it.

Very politely I asked him to write it down, as I was worried I'd forget what to ask for. Strangely he became agitated with me & gruffly insisted that I needed to know what was going on. As he was in the middle if berating me for I don't know what, I walked back to the other fire fighters so that other people could hear the conversation.

As soon as I did this he shut up & went back to being friendly. They left. A couple of hours later I had the same strong smell of gas, despite the gas main lever being in the off position. The cap was warm to touch & vapour could be seen rising from it. I call the fire department again. Same thing happens, they insist it's not the main. Then they offer to light the hot water service which I had turned off due to the danger of having the pilot light on with a gas leak. They couldn't get it going. They left. 30 minutes later someone from the gas company turns up & tells me the fire department had sent him around to light the hot water. Because of the odd goings-on I declined his offer.

I rang a private gas fitter to come & check the main. It was not secure in the ground, you could rock it back & forth & it was leaking. He rang the gas company on my behalf & sternly told them that they needed to come & fix it. He got a reference number off them for the phone call. When he got off the phone he was laughing. He said they'd told him something that he'd never heard in all his years working. They said that they wouldn't come & fix it unless they had 3 meters of clearance around the main. I got the pruning equipment out & complied.

When I asked the police to investigate the matter they refused. Would not take a statement, would not take the gas fitter's phone number or the gas company's reference number for the job. This was the start of 3 years of sustained harassment. If you can get away with tampering with someone's gas main obviously that's a green light to continue harassing them & that's exactly what's been happening.

 

[GlassHalfFull]

OK... I followed your story all the way to the end, but who exactly from the police is harassing you? It sounds like half the story is missing here? We have a story about how you found the gas leak and all the services who let you down in trying to resolve the issue, but where's the harassment? What tampering?

 

[rjm]

The police aren't harassing me. My issue with them is their failure to investigate. There is no satisfactory excuse for the fire department leaving me with an unsafe gas main twice. They pretty much made out like there was no issue with the main & that I was some sort of paranoid nut job. The private gas fitter / plumber who finally got the gas company to acknowledge the problem is my expert witness. The police refused to speak to him.
I've listed this as the main issue because it was the beginning of the harassment. And also because unlike a lot of the other goings on I have the plumber as an independent person who can back me up. The house could very well have burnt down, quite possibly with me in it. So we're talking about attempted arson at the very least.
In the last 3 years I've had 2 dogs die with symptoms of being poisoned. My horse crippled with laminitis from being fed foods that cause that condition. Horse rug stolen from locked car. Horse rug straps cut. Horses neck sliced open. Fuel poured over a pallet of wood in our shed. I've lost count of how many flat tyres. 4 punctures, one so bad that the tyre had to be replaced. The one new tyre then got a puncture. When I took it to be repaired it was damaged where it meets the rim. As the tyre business explained that's very dangerous, because the damage can't be seen from the outside. The steel structures of the tyre rust & you don't find out about it until the first time you have to slam your brakes on, at which point the tyre disintegrates. Oh & I've had 2 phones hacked. Calls don't come through, emails don't go through & when I've tried to use the camera on my phone to record evidence of the goings on it promptly turns itself off. Because of the lack of interest from police I'm looking at having to pay $1400 to have my phones forensically examined.

 

[GlassHalfFull]

Okay... So you've described two very different situations. One is a potentially unsafe gas problem, the other is potential harassment. Are you treating them as related?? I'm unsure about what you're actually implying here... you think that a gas leak may have been deliberately caused by someone who has then gone on to harass you for three years in various ways without ever being caught? And that the authorities are perhaps somehow in cahoots because they're not investigating it?

The only thing I would add is that the symptoms of your phone sound much more like a dodgy phone than it being hacked. Hacking phones (especially remotely without you handing over the phone) is extremely difficult and not in the realm of possibilities for any normal run of the mill person. There's no way any normal person would have any ability to do anything to your phone remotely. The kind of exploits used to hack a phone like that require state intelligence service level (think ASIO/CIA etc) know-how and capabilities and unless you're a terrorist or spy something, they wouldn't waste their time on you, especially because they don't want to use it more than they absolutely have to because each time it's used, there's a chance that someone will find out what they did and the phone companies (Google, Apple, Samsung etc) would promptly patch it on all models so it couldn't happen again. And even if they DID hack your phone, chances are it wouldn't stop phone calls coming through or turn itself off because the whole point of hacking phones is to be undetected - as soon as your phone starts misbehaving, you're likely to be suspicious that there's something wrong. A hacked phone would most likely never seem any different to you. I'm not in a position to say whether any of the other stuff happened exactly as described but it sounds like one hell of a conspiracy if it is... My advice is don't waste your money on phone forensics because there's more than likely a much less interesting explanation...

 

[rjm]

Glass I respect your opinion, we seem to have a similar view on various topics so please don't think I'm dismissing your opinion on the matter. I do however think the gas leak & the harassment are linked. And I appreciate your dodgy phone suggestion but if that's the case I've had 4 dodgy phones in 3 years. There's a lot more to the story, but if I told it I would indeed look like a nut job, that's the idea. This all started when I found out that my GP had taken x-rays of my spine without my knowledge or consent. They documented a problem with my spine that several orthopaedic surgeons had been denying for 13 years. They include an associate professor. My now previous GP is Chinese. Now if I were racist I wouldn't have had a Chinese GP for 10 years, or a Vietnamese partner for 18 years for that matter. The fact is though that they tend to band together when the reputation of one of their own is on the line. The Chinese community in Box Hill where we lived most likely make some pretty generous donations to foundations like Blue Ribbon.