MICHAEL USHER: Why cops say sovereign citizens are almost as dangerous as child abusers

They hate government, believe police are fair game, clog our courts with vexatious argument and believe you and I are puppets who’ve had our souls stolen by a corrupted society.

I’m describing sovereign citizens. Better than you and me, in their eyes, because they’re free and we’re trapped, living in shells created for us at birth by some unseen force in the world that operates a conspiracy to control the world.

They are hypocrites, haters and very dangerous. Ask any law enforcement agency around Australia, and they’ll say sovereign citizens come a close second to child abusers when rating crimes and activity that gives them chills, and pose real threats to the community, and the safety of police officers.

For far too long, this group has been dismissed as existing on our fringes or largely underground. Truth is for the past five or so years, they’ve come out of their burrows and are empowered, better organised and more dangerous than ever.

We’ve just finished two major reporting projects on sovereign citizens. A one-hour feature on 7NEWS Spotlight, and a six-part podcast and vodcast called Dezi Freeman — The Hunt just launched this week. In those sessions I’ve interviewed 7NEWS Victoria crime editor Cassie Zervos who lived and breathed the Freeman story, and exclusively reported the breaking news that he’d been found and killed.

Her insight is fascinating, especially Freeman’s final days. Cassie had given Freeman up for dead, much like many senior Victorian police officers. He’d been seven months on the run after killing two police officers, and seriously wounding a third. While a skilled bushman, not even senior investigators believed Freeman could survive extreme temperatures and conditions in the very harsh and remote alpine landscape around Porepunkah from where he fled, to close to the Victoria/NSW border where they thought he’d fled. After such a long time, and the largest, most expensive Victoria Police operation ever, few thought Freeman would be found alive let alone living in a shipping container on a ramshackle plot of farmland where dumps of busted equipment and junk were concealing Australia’s most wanted man.

When Cassie got an encrypted message from a trusted contact on March 30 reading “Dezi found, dead” she was cradling her newborn bub at home on maternity leave. I can safely report Cassie didn’t drop her bundle of joy and bolt for work, but she did gently pass her on to safe hands and performed one hell of a handbrake from nursing mother to crime editor, getting on social media and Zoom from home to break the news across Australia.

Her insight and trusted information are quite extraordinary which you’ll hear in our longer conversations, but we also explore the world of sovereign citizens and its poster boy Dezi Freeman.

Turns out they are well supported with international links, even subscriptions to legal advice and playbooks about how to take on police and the legal system. They’re also very tricky if you try to pin them down on exactly what their platform or beliefs are. If they don’t like our laws and believe government over-reach is out of control, then what laws do they want or what time in recent history is the ideal space they’d like to replicate or re-model society around?

On those points there just isn’t consensus. Professor Harry Hobbs, a legal expert from the University of NSW, told us he’s even found cases where sovereign citizens have had some wins in court, but then the view those victories as a conspiracy. He’s spent years studying the origins of this movement, and his edition of the podcast is intriguing. I learned a lot interviewing him.

He says the movement is growing and not isolated to bush blocks a long way from cities and society. COVID planted a seed of anti-authority anger, and this movement has bloomed ever since. Most are aggrieved, but the worst like Dezi Freeman are weaponised and violent. As he so menacingly forecast some years before all this, a good cop is a dead cop.

And now we know so tragically, he meant that.

But the big questions are these. How many more people think like Dezi and have his conviction to kill? And who helped him? Police are confident he wasn’t acting alone and undoubtedly moved him around and delivered supplies during his seven months on the run. A lot more is to be revealed about the network that kept cop killer Freeman a free man until one tip-off from someone with a conscience. Or someone with a taste for the $1 million reward.

Episode 1 of Dezi Freeman: The Hunt is available now on 7plus, LiSTNR, and wherever you get your podcasts, with new episodes dropping every Tuesday and Thursday.