The Police Seem to Have No Interest in Protecting Australia’s Regional Communities

Shôn Ellerton, March 10, 2026
When senior cops are more interested in charging a teenager for riding a bicycle without wearing a helmet rather than pursue a violent drug criminal, something is deeply wrong.

There’s something very wrong when the police ignore someone in a small community who takes illegal drugs, intimidates and terrorises those in the neighbourhood.

I’ve seen this firsthand in a small town of around seven hundred people north of Adelaide in South Australia.

Australia has a major problem with drug crime, and it has not taken it very seriously as far as I can see. Or certainly not being very effective with eradicating it.

One or the other!

Having once worked in the justice system as a database administrator here in South Australia, I can vouch that most of the heinous crimes committed here in South Australia stem from the use of illegal drugs, notably from a substance known as ice, otherwise known as crystal methamphetamine. It’s public knowledge and there’s nothing secret or suppressed about it. The Courts are open to the public, apart from suppressed cases, of course.

Australia has some of the world’s strictest policies on what one can bring into the country specifically with foodstuffs, animal and plant products. And justifiably so. We don’t want to introduce invasive species or diseases, although, saying that, I think we’ve let the genie out of that particular bottle! Cats, foxes, fire ants, cane toads, cacti, and the demonic skin-puncturing seed of the weed called Caltrop (Tribulus terrestris), which is a menace to livestock and extremely painful when stepping on with bare feet.

Australia has a real issue with illegal drugs. I’m not talking about the ‘soft’ drugs like marijuana and resin, but the serious ones which are so addictive that it strips the humanity out of humans leading them to kill if necessary to get the drug. There are whole communities almost existentially wiped out in regional areas in Australia because of rampant use of highly-addicted drugs.

And yet, the police seem loath to do anything about it. It’s as if they are powerless and afraid to take action.

But, to be fair, I empathise with them for being afraid to use common sense and take action. The bleeding liberal hearts which have destroyed Australia’s justice system have all the blame. Look no further than the Human Rights Law Centre who wants so-called justice for Kumanjayi Walker who was shot in self-defence by Zachary Rolfe, a policeman, in 2019 because Walker was about to stab him with a knife as Zachary approached him for failing to show up to Court for a series of violent crimes. Because Walker claimed he was Aboriginal, the State decided to throw the case against Zachary Rolfe instead!

This is insane.

Fuck the bleeding heart liberals I say.

Now, take this small town in South Australia in which I know quite a lot about as I have a house there. I won’t name the town for fear that I become targeted, maybe even by the police themselves who may not appreciate what I write about.

Imagine a town with only two police to monitor it. For seven hundred citizens, to all intents and purposes, that is probably only what is needed. By and large, most small regional towns are peaceful communities where everyone knows each other, either through community clubs like the bowling club, the cafes and the shops, or the local pub. They’re great places because most of those living in these communities helps each other out.

It all works hunky dory.

The police, in this small town, are a duo, one older one being the more experienced, while the younger one acts as the assistant. It’s almost like a sheriff and his deputy sort of arrangement. They live in the community and, unlike those police working in the metro areas of larger cities, I think they have a fairly cushy lifestyle.

Unfortunately, they get bored from time to time and decide to patrol around the outlying council area and spend their so-called ‘fruitful’ time trying to catch speeders on the road. Probably driven by KPIs and quotas, there are no grey areas to think about. No thinking about the context of a potential crime or, dare I say it, no need to physically get out of the car. If someone goes 59 kph in a 50 kph zone, it is black and white. It is chargeable and very unlikely to be challenged by the wrongdoer in court. Australians are over-compliant in so many ways and reluctant to be renegade challengers.

In fact, I was caught by the more senior of the policemen when I, unknowingly, went too fast when he was parked stationary with blue and red flashing lights fining a speeder on the open road. I was under the speed limit of the road, but I was unaware of the law that I had to be travelling at 40 kph or less when passing an emergency vehicle with his lights flashing on and off. Oh, and by the way, South Australia further reduced this to 25 kph, which is madness because New South Wales once tried this policy only to find that it caused more accidents and since reverted to 40 kph. But, despite the findings, those who introduced the 25 kph limit in South Australia, obviously mindlessly stupid politicians who don’t understand statistics, didn’t get the memo and did it all the same.

Such is the utter stupidity of our politicians.

After driving a couple of minutes away from the cop and its speeder, I learn to find that he was behind me flashing his lights to stop. Perhaps one of my trailer lights aren’t working because I have had some problems with them in the past.

I stopped and he pulled up behind me with his flashing lights on of course. The annoying thing is that I know this cop. He regularly takes his dog out for a walk along the same street I live on! But just like Ralph and Fred in the old coyote and sheepdog cartoons of yesteryear, he threw his official hat on and warned me of the 40 kph rule and then has the audacity to breathalyse me. Now, there’s one thing which really irritates me about Australian police. They have the power to hold up roads and pull up random people to be tested for alcohol. Sure, if someone had committed a road offence and then get breathalysed, that isn’t a problem. But not here in Australia. The police will actively disrupt everyone driving down a road hoping to catch someone who might have been drinking too much the night before.

Possibly to the cop’s disappointment, the device didn’t register anything, but he gave me a stern warning never to exceed 40 kph when passing a stationary vehicle with its emergency lights on.

Returning to the little town, there is one resident that everyone in the town wants to get rid of.

Imagine this.

A small sleepy town of seven hundred residents but only one resident is causing disruption. A resident that lives only a couple of houses down from me. Moreover, this resident is taking highly illegal drugs which are delivered to him in the small hours of the morning. He lives in a quite nice house owned by one of those low-income housing trusts, which I will keep anonymous, housing low-income and needy people. This housing trust is acutely aware of this resident and his disruptions to the community, but they are powerless to do anything about it because anything the resident does outside the property is outside their scope of attention. Moreover, despite the resident terrorising and intimidating the community near to him, he maintains the property to a high standard. Therefore, the housing trust that supplies his rent-free home are not particularly keen to see him go. After all, those running the housing trust are not living anywhere near, so why should it concern them?

So now, most of the shopkeepers in the community have barred this resident from entering their premises. And for good reason. He’s mentally unstable, unpredictable, and potentially dangerous. He walks around with a dagger concealed in a picture frame. He rucks up to random houses in the middle of the night, knocks on their door to see if anyone’s home, and if anyone is home, he will find some excuse as to why he’s there. For example, that he broke down somewhere, or he found some letters lying in front of the house which the owner might have forgotten or dropped. That sort of thing.

The local policeman does not want anything to do with this disruptive resident. He seems more hellbent on charging a sixteen-year-old girl for riding a motorbike down the usually empty streets without a helmet. In fact, the other day, I was driving down to the nearest largest town of thirty-thousand people, only to find no less than fifteen cop cars pulling people off the main highway to be randomly breathalysed because of the long holiday weekend.

This senior cop was also there, well outside the town he is supposed to keep an eye on!

What a fucking waste of resources!

The sad thing is that this cop seems amiable enough when not in duty and appears to be a nice guy, but it is sad, even frightening in a way, that the community does not have his backing when things go seriously wrong. It may not be his fault but rather, the system the cop is made to work in. After all, what is the point of policing the community with common sense if those in command do not back up their officers!

I think this is what happened. And it is reflective as to what happened with Zachary and Walker in that 2019 case in the Northern Territory.

Sadly, many of Australia’s high-ranking police officers are so embedded with the insane policies enacted by some of our worst politicians and lawmakers, that they would rather send their inferiors to the chopping block rather than push back with common sense.

However, there is hope.

Some do push back.

I can’t forget the immortal speech by Victoria’s Police Commander Wayne Cheeseman who threw the entire loony left-wing Jacinta Allan establishment under the bus, when he blamed the left for being solely responsible for being violent and throwing bricks and assaulting police during the anti-immigration protest in Melbourne.

The State-controlled media giant, ABC, was probably not very impressed, but being live on TV, they could do nothing to edit or censor his speech.

These brave senior policeman are rare indeed, but we need more of them.

Which leaves me to wonder?

What happens when police ignore crimes of small towns?

This is an interesting point, because I remember once doing a survey job for Optus in a remote opal mining town called Andamooka in the heart of South Australia. It is a small ramshackle little town near to the shores of the usually dried-up Lake Torrens. It only recently has been given a permanent connection to the electricity grid from the nearby town of Roxby Downs.

This is the sort of town that people want to escape to and be forgotten. Justice in these communities is enacted by the people who live there. I spoke to the mayor and his secretary back in 2008 during an Optus site visit. I asked if there was any crime here.

He said, we don’t have much crime per se, because, we have our own local ways to enforce it. After he left on other business, leaving with me alone with his secretary, she said to me, you may be surprised as to what you find at the bottom of all those opal mining holes scattered around the town.

I got the message.

If police don’t attend to the problem, the locals will.

Much can be said in the small town I have a house in.

Denizens of the local pub often talk about ‘disappearing’ undesirables if the law doesn’t. A collective vigilante spirit at will, so to speak. But, it’s all idle talk. Not everyone is a Charles Bronson so-famed in his Death Wish movies.

Ultimately, the residents will have to put up with the nefarious antics of one individual and neither the law nor the housing trust that homes this character free of charge to the taxpayer, will do anything to move him away.

Such is our weak-minded and ill-constructed justice that serves Australia today. A society that prefers to lock up those who commit hate speech rather than actual violent people who have the ability to terrorise and intimidate entire communities.