It’s commonplace these days to hear the ever-increasing practice of strip searching the public likened to a form of state-sponsored sexual assault. And the thing with this sort of violation is perpetrators get off on it.

State police watchdog the LECC has been conducting inquiries into what’s now become a routine practice for NSW police. And it’s documented numerous incidents of officers not only strip searching teens, but on occasions, doing it in a potentially illegal manner.

The hearings into LECC Operation Gennaker – just one of its strip search investigations – were released last week. It involved inquiring into the strip searching of a number of young people at the Lost City music festival in February this year.

And one incident that’s drawn a great deal of attention, involved an armed officer ordering a 15-year-old boy to pull down his pants, and allegedly saying to the naked boy “hold your dick and lift your balls up and show me your gooch”.

Now, one has to ask, could a trained officer of the law get off on this?

Monkeying around

Admittedly, I wasn’t sure what a gooch was. But, the LECC explains that it’s slang “for the space between the testicles and the anus”. So, the next obvious question is whether this grown man wearing a NSW police uniform could be aroused or otherwise gratified by directing a teen to show him his gooch.

So, I googled ‘gooch fetish’. And guess what, a “gooch monkey” is “an individual with a fetish for gooches”. And, don’t get me wrong, gooch monkeying around between consenting adults sounds fine to me.

It’s just that, if this armed officer of the law is a gooch monkey or otherwise gets off on degrading children, he may be seen as exercising his power over this defenceless boy to gratify his own desire for either power or arousal in an inappropriate manner. But, of course, this is all conjecture.

Dusting away the cobwebs

There was also another incident at the same event involving a second 15-year-old boy and a grown uniformed male officer packing a gun. This time, the officer told the boy to pull down his shorts and grab his penis and lift it up.

It’s alleged the officer then placed his hands inside the boy’s underwear, “making contact with his testicles”. But, that’s not it, it’s further claimed he inserted his hands into the back of the boy’s shorts and rubbed them over his bare buttocks in a circular motion apparently trying to find drugs.

So, while it seems this officer is no gooch monkey, if these allegations are true, there’s a good case to be made that he’s actually a rock spider or otherwise gets off on degrading kids. And even though this officer, and his colleague, say they ordered the young boys to strip off to find illegal drugs, it’s important to note that none were found.

Copping a gander

But, in reality, these officers are just some regular guys, carrying out their duties and trying to protect the community from harm. Just like some others officers, who allegedly ordered a 22-year-old woman to lift up her shirt and undo her bra outside a St Marys hock shop recently.

Surely, it couldn’t be the case that these two male NSW police officers would abuse their authority to such an extent that they breached almost every protocol afforded under the law, just so they could aggressively assert sexual power over a woman on the side of the road for their own titillation.