Justice must be served for Luke Davies and Jesse Baird. How NSW Police achieve it will be heavily scrutinised

The bodies of Luke Davies, left, and Jesse Baird, right, were discovered at a Bungonia property on Tuesday.  (Instagram)

2024’s Mardi Gras will be remembered as the year of pain.

Not for the first time, the spectre of violence hangs over the parade. This time it allegedly comes from a police officer and one of the community’s own.

While two families are grieving, a spontaneous memorial continues to grow at the Paddington terrace, where police allege constable Beau Lamarre-Condon murdered former Channel Ten reporter Jesse Baird and Qantas flight attendant Luke Davies.

As one written message in a bunch of flowers left for the young couple says: “End domestic violence. Justice must be served.”

The timing of this couldn’t be more critical for New South Wales Police.

The murders come two months after Justice John Sackar lacerated police in his final report of the Special Commission into LGBTIQ hate crimes late last year.

The report found failures in the way they investigated gay hate killings between the 1970s and 2010.

But worse still, according to Justice Sackar, they minimised the extent of the problem, with some officers “indifferent, negligent, dismissive or hostile”.

Transparency, he found, was not a police strong suit.

Not only did Justice Sackar find NSW Police had been adversarial during the inquiry, there was quiet frustration that the Minns government released the report just before Christmas. Some in the community felt the report was buried.

NSW Police then released a statement.

Two months later, on Sunday, Police Commissioner Karen Webb apologised through The Daily Telegraph, then later that morning in a media release.

“I recognise that the investigation failings highlighted by [the inquiry] have resulted in enduring hurt for many. They do not represent the standards the community expect of us, and we expect of ourselves,” she said.

So when Commissioner Karen Webb’s leadership came into question this week, that was the context.

‘Haters like to hate’

Critics accused Commissioner Webb of hiding from scrutiny over the murders.

Police are treating the matter as a domestic violence incident not a gay hate crime.

On Thursday it was revealed that Beau Lamarre-Condon was a police officer but the commissioner did not appear before the media until Monday. Police released a statement the day before instead.

Then on Tuesday, Commissioner Webb went on breakfast television quoting Taylor Swift: “There will always be haters, haters like to hate, isn’t that what Taylor [Swift] says?”

But it was her choice of words that the killings were “a crime of passion”, that rankled domestic violence advocates who felt those comments trivialised the brutality of the alleged crimes.

Commissioner Webb has apologised for those comments but defended the Taylor Swift comparison.

Words count, so does striking the right tone, but what’s likely to be remembered is the outcome of this case — the murder of two gay men allegedly by a police officer.

How police conduct the case against Jesse and Luke’s alleged killer will be heavily scrutinised. Their prosecution arguments will need to be faultless.

Police cannot be seen to be protecting their own.

On Tuesday, Commissioner Webb heaped praise on the officer in charge Detective Sergeant Sasha Pinazza who was able to locate the bodies. The discovery “did come with the assistance of the accused”, Commissioner Webb said.

Result.

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