By Anthony Benbow
PERTH — Philip Vidot died in November 1995. The 14-year-old and his 17-year-old friend Tyron Williams were picked up while hitchhiking by three young men. The three drove them to a park in Perth's southern suburbs, bashed them with a cricket bat until they were unconscious and stole their running shoes. The three attackers then got into their car and ran over the youths several times before driving off.
The establishment media's unrelenting coverage of violent crimes has dulled many people's reactions, but this attack was so brutal and senseless that it generated enormous outrage.
The three attackers were tried in July and found not guilty of murder, but guilty of manslaughter, grievous bodily harm and theft. Vidot's family and friends were outraged. They called for a far tougher sentence and organised a protest march which took place on August 22.
A similar scenario was played out here in 1991, when a stolen car driven by three youths, with police in hot pursuit, ploughed into another car at a set of traffic lights. The driver of the second car was seriously injured, and his wife and infant son (Margaret and Shane Blurton) were killed. A protest march was also organised then.
Tragic instances like these are the staple of commercial news bulletins — terrible crimes and outraged families protesting against "justice denied". Surely this is just another unfortunate example?
Not this time. Back in 1991 the youths in the stolen car were Aboriginal, and the media had a field day. At the time "redneck radio" talkback king Howard Sattler, speaking of a similar chase in which Aboriginal youths died when their stolen car crashed, said: "They're dead, and I think that's good".
Sattler's radio show whipped up a storm and in the resulting "rally for justice" 20,000 people converged on Parliament House waving nooses and placards proclaiming "Hang 'em high".
It was an exercise in vigilante politics that the Ku Klux Klan would have been proud of. Carmen Lawrence's Labor government panicked and introduced harsher laws for "juvenile offenders", a foundation on which Liberal Premier Richard Court built 18 months later.
The deaths of the Blurtons in 1991 were tragic. But stealing a car and accidentally hitting another car while being pursued by police is not in the same league as bashing people senseless and repeatedly running over them. So the community outrage around the latest deaths should have been even stronger, right?
Wrong. The August 22 march for Vidot and Williams — both of them black — was small, around 150 people. The white attackers were led away to jail with none of the hype that was present in 1991. Howard Sattler was nowhere to be seen, and the media gave it scant coverage for less than a week.
If three Aboriginal youths had bashed two white boys senseless, would the verdict have been the same? Would the community response have been so muted? In the current climate of escalating overt racism, probably not.
The other question that is raised by this case (and those prior) is whether harsher penalties will solve the problem, or even help.
Harsher punitive measures will not solve the major contributing factors in such crimes — mass alienation, the absence of social solidarity, racism, rising unemployment and poverty, and cuts to social support and crisis services.
There's little to be gained by punishing individuals when the system forces thousands of people to live in conditions that drive them to commit crimes.