so the police finally got me on the telephone on the 2nd of january, and i agreed to go in for an interview that afternoon at melbourne west police station, where i was charged with criminal damage.
apparently the cops had been calling me since shortly after the event, they even visited a place i had been known to reside trying to track me down. if they just left a message i would have called them back and they would have saved themselves a lot of trouble, i just don’t often pick up random numbers due to all the spam calls you tend to get these days.
so at the time of the interview they did not have a “quantum” of “damage”, only later did they call to say the ad company “ooh” is claiming some $242,000 worth of “damage”, and as the “damage” is over $100,000 it means the case cannot be heard in the magistrates court, so a committal process for a county court trial is underway.
i had a filing hearing on the 22nd of february, and my next court date is a committal mention on the 1st of may. it will probably be 2024 before the case is heard.
the billboard itself is still covered in paint and completely failing to project unwanted advertising images into the eyeballs of commuters. at the filing hearing i was able to have my bail condition not to attend flinders street station removed, arguing that there are ads all across town, and if i was of the mind to re-offend i would be in breach of bail conditions anyway.
so now i can pop into the station and take a little selfie:
the billboard has now been out of action for nearly four months, which is not what i expected. kinda crazy that these boards are apparently worth so much yet they have no protective cover. what if some rowdy teens spilled their slurpee onto the billboard? or if a drunk person projectile vomited onto it? would they wind up in the county court for a quarter of a million dollars “criminal damage”?
another curious thing to note is that i sent out press releases on the day of the action, and again some weeks later, to every media organisation my little brain could think of… no one touched the story, even though the corporate media usually loves a chance to hate on “mindless vandals”… of course my theory is that the press release made it impossible for the media to run a story that didn’t talk about my extremely sensible objection to a corporate media system in a corporate-controlled democracy, and they very much don’t want to talk about that.
if they ran a story after receiving the press release that didn’t mention the reasons behind the activism, their clear bias would be in evidence. here is the second media release i sent out:
