Flower murders have blamed a “broken system.” Where did it go wrong?

Ariel Bombara’s devastating leadership to the WA Police contained a rhetorical question that should serve as a government attention call.

WARNING: This story contains details that can distress some readers

Where would we be today if the murderer Mark Bombara had broken through a different door last May?

“The sad reality is that if my father had come to the correct location and murdered my mother and me, we would have become another statistic of domestic violence that disappears with little more research,” Bombara said on Friday.

Charging…

She was responding to the findings of an internal investigation into the actions of WA police officers in the weeks that Bombara would kill her wife’s best friend, Jennifer Petelczyc and her teenage daughter Gretl.

Bombara was looking for Ariel and her mother, who for weeks had been trying to warn the police that it was a real and imminent threat.

On Friday, the WA Police Commissioner Col Blanch said that an internal investigation had found that eight officers did not fulfill their duties, even not issuing a protective police order against bombara and seizing their firearms.

Disbelief or apathy?

This means that less than nine months ago WA had such a broken system that Ariel Bombara, a woman who is surprisingly balanced and articulated, was not taken seriously by warning that her father had weapons and was dangerous.

“This report identifies all the risk factors that communicated to the police, their history of incorrect abuse, access and storage of firearms, including hidden guns, which was climbing, which had a recent stroke,” he said.

“We told you that I was going to kill us.

“The red flags that seemed so obvious that it baffles me that real police officers, whose work is to protect people, did not take this risk seriously.”

After receiving “innumerable messages” of women who speak of not being taken seriously, Mrs. Bombara was not ultimately surprised by the result.

She puts this fatal tragedy to a perfect storm of apathy and compassion fatigue of officers, combined with poor quality systems, obsolete policies and insufficient training.

Systemic failures

Commissioner Blanch said that no agent was fired, partly because it was the system that failed.

“They (the officers) made the wrong decision here at various times, in several degrees of seriousness, but I believe in the officers,” he said.

“One of the things I did not provide them was a system in which they could make a correct risk assessment.”

This failure occurred despite the fact that the WA Labor Government has family prevention and domestic violence (FDV) as one of its main priorities, was WA’s first government to appoint a minister of the cause and has spent more than half a billion dollars in the prevention of the FDV. .

He also acted rapidly in response to flower murders, even reinforcing new firearms laws that already restricted license holders between five and 10 firearms, as well as the requirement of mental health controls and mandatory safety training By automatically eliminating weapons as soon as a complaint of domestic violence is presented.

The work continues to get better results

But as Mrs. Bombara points out, this is more than weapons.

“We know that most homicides of domestic violence do not involve weapons. Women are stabbed, drowned, burned to death,” he said.

“I hope that the recommendations of this report are a good first step to fix a broken system that failed in several families and eight police officers, and continues to fail women and children today.

“Everyone knows that I will continue to be a pain in the ass until you begin to see better results for the victims.

“I hope everyone can learn from this horrible crime, because it is not only in the police, it is in our government and our communities and in us as individuals help address this.”

Despite all the money that has been spent and the undeniable progress made, the message of Mrs. Bombara is simple: to believe women.

“Because if we have learned a thing from this horrible case, it is that anyone could be a victim of domestic violence, without even having anything to do with the author,” he said.

Charging