e car and in the light fittings of a prostitute's home. The cameras caught one senior policeman being handed wads of cash by another, allegedly his cut of a drug deal, and a third policeman accepting drugs from a prostitute and asking her if she could obtain child pornography. When television news programs showed the video clips, the public was predictably outraged.In the last months of his inquiry, Mr. Wood confronted allegations of a police cover-up of child sex abuse. The chief casualty here was David Yeldham, a retired Supreme Court judge, who gassed himself to death last November within hours of being interviewed by commission officers. Mr. Yeldham denied being a pedophile, but admitted having homosexual sex in public lavatories while he was still serving as a judge. Since his death, there have been allegations that policemen had protected Mr. Yeldham from investigation, and that the judicial system might therefore have been tainted.But the high profile nature of recent corruption cases has kept the issue in the headlines, while the increasing, and often successful, use of civil law to overturn internal decisions on officers' behavior is also adding to the pressure for change. Due to the great increase in the public demand to know what is going on and the great political influence the needs of the public have, politicians began to crack down on this issue in order to get positive attention. The politicians began to advertise the problem once they found out it was on peoples minds and turned what was a low-key issue into a nationwide interest; thus causing the public to demand knowledge of the facts and change where it is needed.The Police Federation reacted angrily to these demands and accused those of whom were making a big deal of the issue of "seriously undermining the civil and human rights of all police officers" (McCormack, p 243). It is currently balloting its 12,000 members on whether they would support an independent b...
