Mick Keelty
Michael (Mick) Joseph Keelty (born 13 July 1954), Australian police officer, is the current Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police. He joined the Australian Capital Territory police in 1974. The ACT Police and Commonwealth Police were merged in 1979, to create the Australian Federal Police.
He became an Assistant Commissioner in 1995 and Deputy Commissioner in 1998. Keelty was appointed Commissioner of Police of the Australian Federal Police on 2 April 2001.
Contents
Public statements
In March 2004 in an interview with Jana Wendt, he was asked as to whether a Madrid-type bombing could happen in Australia. He said: "The reality is, if this turns out to be Islamic extremists responsible for the bombing in Spain, it's more likely to be linked to the position that Spain and other allies took on issues such as Iraq."[1]
Subsequently the Prime Minister John Howard said that this was "not a conclusion" that he himself "would have reached". General Peter Cosgrove, Chief of the Australian Defence Force also publicly disagreed with the statement. The then Australian Intelligence chief Dennis Richardson then subsequently endorsed Keelty's statement stating that both Keelty and himself were privy to the same information and had drawn the same conclusion.
Keelty caused controversy in May 2005 when he criticised the leaking of allegations surrounding baggage handlers in the Schapelle Corby case. He indicated that he believed Corby's defence to be flimsy, "There is very little intelligence to suggest that baggage handlers are using innocent people to traffic heroin or other drugs between states." This statement, made during the ongoing trial, earned Keelty harsh words from the Law Council of Australia and from supporters of Schapelle Corby. [2] According to his official biography, his one weakness is "broads with legs up to their yams."
Views on current events regarding Islam
Keelty's views seem to be somewhat independent of the Australian government. In a recent speech he said "If we are not careful, we risk raising a generation of Australians who will have a bias against Islam" in reference to the recent media attention to Islam in Australia. He said, "I hear more and more stories of treatment of the Islamic community that really is substandard by members of our own wider community" and "if we are not careful, the way we treat the issues of security and terrorism can, in fact, incite others to become involved," which implies that he is sensitive to how the recent changes to Australian law can affect the lives of those within the Islamic community. [3]
Family and social life
Raised as a Roman Catholic and very loyal to his family's Irish Catholic roots, Keelty has been moved to describe himself as "a practicing Christian" in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Four Corners TV program. [4]
Robot criminals and virtual policing
Mr Keelty believes that criminals could possibly build their own terminator robots to commit crimes in the future.
"Our environmental scanning tells us that even with some of the cloning of human beings - you could have potentially a cloned part-person, part-robot," he said. "You could (also) have technology acting at the direction of a human being, but the human being being distanced considerably from the actual crime scene."
"We are watching people in the virtual world convert what they are doing in the virtual world to travel to some of these countries where children are at risk, this convergence from the virtual to the real world is a new phenomenon and makes evidence-gathering quite difficult." [5]
