Charlton Hart: WA Police not bothered hunting masked man carrying gun near popular northern suburbs beach

Imagine it’s 4.45am on a Monday. You’re walking your dog along Ocean Drive in Quinns Rocks, taking in the salty air listening music, completely unaware that stroll is about to take a sinister turn. That’s how my week started. Standing off to the side of the path was a man up ahead - I wasn’t paying attention, I probably thought he was another person out exercising. I passed within two metres of the bloke and suddenly realised what I’d just walked-into. He was dressed head-to-toe in black. His face was completely covered. There was something long stuffed up under his arm, it was partly wrapped in a jacket, but enough was exposed for me to know exactly what I was looking at. It was a rifle, and the barrel was pointing straight in my direction. It was at this point that my arse was completely clenched. In the back of my head, I was praying this wasn’t some delusional nutcase about to blow my brains out for no reason in a random attack. Then, I bolted - the fear was petrifying, and it was very real. I rang Triple-0, while looking back - I could see Peter, a local retiree who was about to walk into the path of danger. He was lucky, just like me, it appeared the armed gunman was on another planet and didn’t care for us. To be entirely fair to WA Police, their immediate response was fantastic. They were on the scene, lights blazing, before I had even hung up the phone. They patrolled the area like greyhounds out of a trap. But then the sun came up, and the media team clocked in. When one of our journalists initially asked WA Police Media about the gunman on the loose, the official response was baffling: “I don’t have any jobs for Quinns Rock this morning”. Why the sudden amnesia? Well, after some prodding, it turned out the police system couldn’t find the confronting incident because the journalist asked about Quinns “Rock”, forgetting the ‘s’ at the end. Thank goodness the administrative pedantry is working flawlessly while masked gunmen wander the coast. Once police finally acknowledged the incident, they claimed to have spoken to a male in the area who didn’t match the description. Yes, they spoke to a homeless man sitting outside a cafe — about two kilometres in the opposite direction from where the gunman was actually walking. How do I know? Because I was standing there watching. Crack detective work, that. When I confronted the media unit with this fact, I received the ultimate bureaucratic brush-off. WA Police boldly declared that: “all investigative lines of inquiry have now been completed”. Fascinating. If all lines of inquiry are closed, why hasn’t a single officer bothered to follow up with me? The actual eyewitness who called them? Why haven’t they spoken to the other bloke who saw him? There are more than a hundred homes along that stretch of Ocean Drive. The gunman walked directly past two businesses. Are officers actually checking the area for CCTV? Or does “completed” simply mean “put in the too-hard basket before morning tea”? We deserve a police force that treats a masked man with a rifle as a serious, ongoing threat, not a typo to be dismissed before lunch. Oh, and when the Police Minister Reece Whitby was approached for his comment on this fine police work, a spokesperson from his office told me: “We’re not commenting on this one, it’s an operational matter for police.” What an utter light weight. Charlton Hart is a senior reporter at The West Australian