00:00 These are the faces of lives cut short.
00:04 A judge has described many of the deaths as lonely and terrifying, and some of the police
00:09 investigating them as negligent, dismissive or hostile.
00:13 If someone like me, a gay man, was murdered in the 70s, 80s or 90s, it was highly likely
00:20 the police wouldn't care.
00:22 For 18 months, a special commission of inquiry investigated the suspicious deaths or unsolved
00:27 murders of LGBTIQ people between 1970 and 2010.
00:32 It closely looked at 34 deaths potentially motivated by gay hate bias.
00:37 Commissioner Justice John Sackar found there was objectively reason to suspect bias was
00:41 a factor in 21 of those deaths, and concluded bias was a factor in four.
00:46 What the inquiry has done is expose how badly handled many of these cases were.
00:51 Among the commissioner's 19 recommendations are fresh inquests into the deaths of Scott
00:56 Miller, Paul Rath, Richard Slater and Carl Stockton, and for police to regularly monitor
01:01 DNA databases for the profile of an unknown man matching hair the inquiry found on the
01:06 clothes of former ACDC band manager Crispin Dye.
01:10 A volume of the report will be kept confidential after private hearings shed considerable new
01:15 light on several of the deaths.
01:18 The commissioner has recommended it not be published for 30 years to preserve the possibility
01:22 of future criminal investigations and prosecutions.
01:26 Justice Sackar says police failed to act as a model litigant during the inquiry, criticising
01:31 them for long delays in producing materials and for being adversarial or unnecessarily
01:36 defensive.
01:37 The capacity for the police to accept their problems and do something about them still
01:41 seems to be something they're resisting very heavily.
01:44 He stopped short of formally recommending an apology from police, but urged them to
01:48 consider it.
01:49 The absence to date of an apology from the commissioner of the New South Wales Police
01:52 Force has been extremely difficult to understand.
01:56 The police commissioner did not apologise, saying she cannot undo what has occurred previously.
02:01 She says suffering from the attitudes of the past is deeply regrettable, suffering that
02:05 continues for so many families who will never see justice.
02:09 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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