Last week, a policewoman was bitten by an injured African man she was trying to assist while a policeman suffered a broken nose in a rock-throwing incident…
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22495010-661,00.html
The policewoman has to wait three months for a result on whether the Sudanese bloke who bit her - his second bad contact with the law in his first three weeks in Australia which foolishly let him in as a refugee from a war torn land - but the bloke who bit her doesn’t have to undergo any tests to see if he has any blood borne diseases and the hospital which is treating him can’t release any information about him to his cop victim or her doctor because his medical information is protected by privacy laws.
There’s a possible way around it, but the fact remains that this is one of far too many instances where laws made with the best intentions protect people least worthy of good intentions and expose people most worthy of good intentions to appalling mistreatment.
Some cops do some appalling things too, but most of them don’t when they’re working a lot of the time with people the rest of us don’t want to know exist and, if we know they exist, know they’re the last people we want to come into contact with.
I’m a civil libertarian at heart, but there’s a limit to everything and denying that poor bloody policewoman a quick result by giving her doctors access to the blood tests that have already been taken from her attacker in hospital to protect the ‘privacy’ of the bloke who bit her is just bullshit.