In defense of the exhausted police who knowingly prosecuted an innocent man

I was enjoying a perfectly adequate vintage at the Commonwealth Club with a dear friend—a prominent Australian who sits on several corporate boards and possesses extremely delicate sensibilities—when the distressing news arrived from the Downing Centre local court. The police had finally dropped their case against Michael Agzarian. My companion nearly choked on his quail egg. For almost a year, we had rested easy knowing this rogue artist was being hounded by the state for daring to depict high-profile citizens in military uniforms adorned with Nazi symbols. Now, he was walking free.

The chattering classes are, predictably, up in arms. They are hyperventilating over the revelation that police pursued this prosecution for eleven months despite possessing internal legal advice explicitly warning them that the images constituted political satire and were therefore perfectly lawful. The media has painted this as a scandal. They call it a malicious abuse of state power. They say it is a terrifying overreach by authorities.

But what these armchair critics fail to understand is the sheer, grueling administrative toll it takes on a police department to knowingly prosecute an innocent man for a year.

Think, for a moment, of the frontline officers involved. It is easy enough to arrest someone when you believe they have actually broken the law. The adrenaline flows freely; the moral clarity is sharp. But to look at a memorandum from your own internal legal department, read the words stating that a prosecution will inevitably fail because the conduct is protected political speech, and then boldly decide to drag a citizen through the criminal justice system anyway? That requires a special kind of stamina.

Week after week, these brave officers had to wake up, put on their uniforms, and meticulously maintain a charade. They had to file paperwork they knew was doomed. They had to stand before magistrates and keep a straight face while pretending an obvious piece of anti-authoritarian political art was somehow a literal hate crime. The emotional labor alone is staggering.

We demand so much of our police. We ask them to direct traffic, to solve burglaries, and, most importantly, to serve as the armed customer service wing for the ruling class. When a prominent Australian feels a bit miffed by a satirical poster, they expect the state to crush the person responsible. The police simply answered that call.

And how did they do it? With brilliant, innovative jurisprudence. The officers charged Agzarian with displaying Nazi symbols without a lawful excuse. This law, as you may recall, was designed to stop actual neo-Nazis from intimidating minority groups. To take a legislative tool meant to protect marginalized communities and smoothly repurpose it to protect wealthy elites from being compared to fascists is, frankly, breathtaking. It is the kind of creative problem-solving we should be rewarding in our public sector, not punishing.

Unfortunately, the internal lawyers—always the wet blankets of any government enterprise—had to weigh in. Lawyers are obsessed with trivialities like statutory definitions and fundamental democratic rights. They pointed out that satire is a lawful excuse. They noted that comparing a politician to a fascist is a time-honored tradition, not an endorsement of fascism. They completely missed the point of what the justice system is actually for.

I myself was once the victim of a rather crude satirical cartoon in a university newspaper. The artist had the audacity to depict me with an exaggerated overbite, standing atop a pile of foreclosed residential properties. I immediately called the local command center and demanded the student be charged with domestic terrorism. The desk sergeant, hampered by bureaucratic red tape, informed me that drawing a picture of a landlord was not technically an act of terror under the federal criminal code. I was forced to pay a private intelligence firm to ruin the boy's credit rating. It was exhausting, and it is exactly the kind of burden taxpayers should not have to bear.

This is why the Agzarian prosecution was such a breath of fresh air. It showed initiative. It showed that our police are willing to stretch the very fabric of reality to ensure that the people who run this country do not have to endure being laughed at.

Sir Reginald is entirely correct. The tragedy of the Downing Centre court dropping this case is not that an innocent man spent a year burdened by the threat of imprisonment and the stigma of a hate-crime charge. The artist will be fine. He can go back to drawing his little pictures.

The real tragedy is the wasted effort of the state. We had a police force willing to go above and beyond, willing to toss their own legal counsel into the paper shredder, all to ensure that prominent Australians never have to experience a moment of self-reflection.

If we allow artists to freely mock the powerful without facing a year of baseless, state-sponsored legal terror, where does it end? Today it is a satirical poster. Tomorrow, someone might write an impolite op-ed about a mining magnate. The next day, a bank chief executive might be asked a slightly aggressive question at a press conference. The very fabric of our polite, deferential society is at risk.

It is time we apologize to the police. They did their absolute best to ignore the law in order to enforce the vibes. They tried to protect the feelings of the important people, and they kept up the ruse for as long as they possibly could. Instead of investigating them for malicious prosecution, we should be giving them a budget increase so that next time, they can afford to ignore their lawyers for two years.