Instead, he says, a better exercise would be to pull every police file on every death near a gay Sydney meeting place from the 1970s to about 2000 and ask: was this case properly investigated? Steve Johnson tells Guardian Australia that applying the FBI hate bias criteria is unlikely to uncover gay hate crimes because the stringent checklist requires cases to be solved, perpetrators to be identified and their hatred of victims to be proclaimed. A new SBS investigation has uncovered “serious mistakes” were made in the initial investigations, including the misspelling of one dead man’s name. Many cases were marked suicide or cause unknown, but past police conclusions are now being called into question. NSW police have formed Operation Parrabell, a team of eight detectives who will apply an FBI measure of hate bias – criteria to determine if a crime is motivated by bias against, for instance, sexual orientation – to see if as many as 88 Sydney deaths dating from the 1970s onward, including 30 unsolved cases, were gay hate crimes. In 2012 the New South Wales deputy state coroner Carmel Forbes overturned the suicide finding but could not determine how he died. His naked body was at the bottom, and his death was ruled a suicide the following year. Police found Johnson’s clothes folded at the top of a 50-metre cliff. In the past year we have heard from a lover who believed he went to look for companionship.”
“In all likelihood, he went to go celebrate,” says Steven, his older brother by two years and a Boston-based IT entrepreneur.