Speak up and bring cowards to account

A $ 100,000 reward is a lot of money.

It’s a sign of how seriously police take coward- punch attacks.

It’s been a decade since now Senior Constable Tenelle Luscombe was attacked on Flinders St but police are still searching for the person who did it.

Such crimes are a scourge on our community and their impact can reverberate for weeks, months or even years.

Such sickening, cowardly attacks on the men and women who commit their lives to protecting us reflect very poorly on the community and our night- time venues.

Those incidents are a large part of why our nightclub strip is now one of the most heavily policed areas of Queensland – and thankfully now one of the safest, with a drastic reduction in violence in recent years.

As we can see from Sen- Constable Luscombe’s experience, a single moment can change a life forever.

It seems right to keep searching for information when it comes to attacks like this.

Why should the victim’s life be forever impacted while the attacker gets to keep on walking around the world unencumbered?

As a community, Townsville needs to be committed to stamping out this kind of alcohol- fuelled behaviour.

Intoxication is no excuse and the community would like to see justice served.

Our police do a fantastic job but they can only work with the information they have. Too often things go unreported. Someone sees something suspicious and they decide to mind their own business or, worse, they know that the information is important and stay silent out of fear of the consequences.

We need people to be vigilant, to watch out for each other and to report information.

You never know if your tip is the missing piece of the puzzle needed to solve a crime or the last piece of evidence needed to convict someone.

There are too many unsolved crimes out there and it’s incredibly hard on victims and their loved ones.

Without justice, how can there be peace of mind? How can there be closure? Quite simply, there can’t. It’s time that we all think about what we can do to improve things in our own backyard.

Someone in our community knows who is responsible for Sen- Constable Luscombe’s horrific injuries.

It is sad it has come to offering a reward, but hopefully it will lead to the culprit being found.