Recent reports state that the Victorian Police made edits to a Wikipedia page about the fatal police shooting of 15-year-old Tyler Cassidy, in order to paint themselves in a more favourable light.
To bring you up to speed (because the death occurred seven years ago), Cassidy was shot by police in December 2008, when he threatened them with two knives and – according to police reports – didn’t back off when told to. It sparked a national conversation about whether the police overreacted, and debates over police investigations by their peers.
The Fairfax investigation uncovered that the Wikipedia page had been edited at least 17 times. Wikipedia records the IP addresses of anonymous edits only, meaning the real number of edits could be even higher.
Editing a Wikipedia page in itself isn’t dodgy, but if the page in question brings up police heavy handedness and misconduct – and is edited by staff members from those same police stations – it becomes suss as fuck.
The edits follow a pretty similar theme – that is, to paint the officers involved in this controversial killing in a favourable light.
One of the edits changes “Three police officers fired ten shots, and five of those shots struck Cassidy” to “Officer Dods fired a warning shot in the ground then two shots at Cassidy’s legs. As Cassidy continued to advance whilst ignoring directions to discard his weapons, three police officers fired a further 7 shots, five of which struck Cassidy when less that four metres’ distance to Officer Dodds.”
Another comment, which blames the incident on lack of training and information gathering by the police, was completely removed.
There’s now a flag at the top of the Wikipedia page highlighting that it might be inaccurate:
The Victorian Police have since confirmed that the edits were made from within it’s own network, but that they weren’t trying to distort the truth.
A spokesman said that they were considering developing a policy over Wikipedia edits.
Considering. Not yet developing. Just thinkin’ about it. Okay, that’s cool. 
Via Fairfax
Image credit.
