Gay bashing thugs were police - Sydney

Saw this yesterday in the Star Observer, but I didn't have my glasses to read it so looked it up online today. It tells the story from 25 years ago of a gay man who was bashed whilst on his way home through Moore Park. The thugs who bashed him it turns out had gotten out of an unmarked police car; a member of the public wrote down the number plate. The police were never investigated. It's only now that the police are taking these allegations seriously and inviting people to come forward with information. 

Rosendale was only saved when a local gay man – Paul Simes – who happened to be driving on South Dowling Street flashed his headlights at the assailants and slowly drove past before taking down the registration of a car he had seen them leap out of. Simes quickly called the police from a nearby payphone on Cleveland Street and upon returning to the scene found the attackers had disappeared and Rosendale, who had been taken to St Vincent’s Hospital, was nowhere to be seen. Up until this month, Simes believed Rosendale may have been killed – another victim of Sydney’s gay hate epidemic that had been silently culling members of the city’s burgeoning gay community. 

For a quarter of a century, Rosendale lived with the belief he was lucky to escape with a savage beating after being randomly picked on by a group of youths who had gone “poofter bashing” – an activity which a series of recent articles in the Star Observer, as well as the Sydney Morning Herald, have suggested was rife across Sydney from the 1970s to the 90s and led to the deaths of about 80 gay men in the space of a few decades. 

“It was at a gay beat and it was at about one o’clock at night,” Rosendale recalls matter-of-factly. “I had just left the Taxi Club and I was probably half-pissed to be honest. I lived in Surry Hills – and it was on the way home – so I just popped in to see what was going on, and that [gay bashing] was what was going on.” 

Then a 32-year old hospitality worker employed as a front-of-desk staffer at the Waldorf Apartments on Liverpool Street, Rosendale told the Star Observer he has been in a state of shock for the past week after happening across Simes’s account of the attack in an article published in the Sydney Morning Herald earlier this month. 

“I’ve walked around for 24 years thinking that I was bashed by thugs, and then you find out one Saturday morning you weren’t bashed by thugs but by cops,” he says. “It’s amazing.” 

The licence plate number Simes had noted down and given police matched the registration of an unmarked police vehicle. Simes was called in for a meeting with senior police weeks after the incident and told his report would be properly investigated, but was informed soon after that the officers from the ‘unassigned response unit’ allegedly responsible for the attack had been disbanded. 

“The information that came out is that I was never interviewed and the only time I had contact with police was when I was being admitted to St Vincent’s Hospital,” Rosendale tells the Star Observer. “It was uniformed police and according to the incident report they put down that I had been bashed by a gang of skinheads. End of conversation. 

“I gave my statement for what happened in 1989 on Tuesday of last week because no police ever interviewed me before then.” more

Perhaps this sheds some light on the police bashing of a man at Mardi Gras for crossing the road. The police involved I think were bought in from areas outside Surry Hills.