Tom Bentley is a self-confessed petrol head with a “need for speed” – and he’s the north’s new top traffic cop. He rides a motorcycle hard and fast and, being in his 50s, he’s been doing it for decades and “loving it”.
Years behind the handle bars of big bikes mean he understands the thrill of racing, but he has no tolerance for hoon bikers and drivers who are laying tyre rubber on streets throughout the northern suburbs.
“I am a petrol head, but I ride on [racing] tracks like Phillip Island and I do everything I am not allowed to do on the roads,” he says.
“Hoons are cheap. They don’t pay to use tracks, they don’t wear helmets, they have no concerns for anyone.
“Hoons are just anti-social. They can’t drive, they have no skill, they are just ‘look-at-me’ wankers who are hurting our community.”
Senior Sergeant Bentley, officer in charge of the Epping highway patrol unit, is targeting the “hundreds” of hoon drivers in the north with a new system designed to trap them before they get a chance to offend.
He has a good reason: saving lives.
Over a 37-year police career, Bentley has seen road carnage first hand. Witnessing more than 300 dead bodies tangled in car wreckages and beside mangled motorcycles has left its mark.
“We [police] all suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome. We see so many bodies, so many tragic things that I never want to see again,” he says.
Attending his first fatal motorcycle accident in Preston’s Bell Street as a young police constable still affects him. “After that shift, I had to go home on my own motorcycle; I felt vulnerable,” he says.
“That was in 1977. Then in 2010 I went to another motorcycle accident only 100 metres from my grandmother’s home. There was blood on the road – I had flashbacks to the 1977 incidents.”
Bentley says hoons don’t see the blood; they don’t even realise they can’t really drive. “These people have no skill, they lose control of their vehicle and let it go,” he says. “It’s extremely dangerous, to the drivers, passengers and bystanders; people get killed.
“They do wheel spins, doughnuts; there’s lots of smoke and their cars are out of control, it’s a very dangerous pastime.”
It’s a pastime getting plenty of attention on social media, with a hoon called Black Bandit posting clips on YouTube and others using Facebook and other internet sites for boasting.
While Bentley says the video clips are “highly offensive”, and performed and posted by “morons”, they are vital evidence in a pending sting. “I am going to get him and the rest,” Bentley says of the Black Bandit. “When I get him, I will go to court and set a precedent by asking for his black Commodore to be forfeited on a first offence [normally, cars are seized only after a third offence] because I will show [through the videos] his constant offending. “I won’t stop there.”
Bentley plans to charge Black Bandit with a criminal offence of reckless conduct endangering life and ask the court to make sure the offender serves jail time.
“And it’s not just him.” The person filming the stunts, the passengers and bystanders are “complicit” in the crime and will be charged “as if they are driving the car themselves”.
“Everyone involved will be charged as a principal in the crime,” he says.
Tough talk? “No, it has to stop,” he says. “The biggest risk for ordinary people is being on the same roads as these hoons. Around 2010, there were three hoon-related fatal accidents in Mill Park that killed seven people.
“In one accident, five young people died on Plenty Road, Mill Park, and if the drink driver had survived he would have faced serious charges.”
A coroner found Steven Johnstone, 19, had a blood alcohol level of 0.19 and was driving at about 150 km/h when he slammed into a large oak tree on January 17, 2010, killing himself and four passengers. The coroner found Mr Johnstone had engaged in many high-risk behaviours in the lead-up to the crash, including drink-driving, speeding, using his mobile phone, driving an overloaded car and ignoring red lights.
“I’ve been to 300 fatal crashes in my time,” Bentley says. “Hoons don’t have to deal with the consequences; I do.”
More than 900 people died on Victorian roads in 1977, the year Bentley started on the beat. The toll has now been significantly reduced, with 282 people killed on our roads in 2012, but the figure is still too high, he says.
“It’s all very tragic and I have never got used to seeing dead people in cars.”
Although the profile of a hoon is usually a young male, Bentley says some older males are offenders. He says the driver of a utility that spun out of control into a house in the north recently was in his 30s and married with children.
In the past, police targeted late-night hoon hotspots where hundreds of people gathered, but it was labour-intensive.
“Now if we see someone driving what looks like a hoon car, we’ll stop them. They buy rear steel wheels and fit nasty, cheap tyres to do burn-outs,” Bentley says.
The offenders will be slapped with unroadworthy certificates for sub-standard tyres, and become part of the police watch-list, he says. “Our job is to make roads safe so we will keep pulling these guys up and get the message across to them.’’
His unit, with five sergeants, 38 police officers, 12 patrol cars and two motorcycles, will check suspect cars for modifications such as super chargers, nitrous oxide injectors and other gadgets to make cars faster, while red-plate drivers will be routinely pulled over because they are over-represented in crashes.
“We don’t have accidents, we have collisions. A meteor hitting you is an accident but a kangaroo jumping in front of you is a collision. It could well have been a drunken pedestrian or a toddler.’’.
Bentley says hooning is rife in the northern suburbs, especially in Mill Park, Thomastown, Lalor and South Morang, and people travel from other areas to spin their wheels in the City of Whittlesea.
Whittlesea council’s acting manager of engineering and transportation, Louie D’amore, says: “Hoon driving is widespread across the municipality. Council has been assisting Victoria Police with hoon drivers for many years by referring specific incidents and locations of hoon driving.”
D’amore says residents who complain about hoons are mailed a “hoon hotline” fridge magnet, which can also be picked up from the council’s South Morang office.
