Our ever-smart coppers have made a shock revelation in the Sydney's red light district. The sex shops there sell porn!
Australia's film classification system allows for a bunch of different ratings, with R being the highest allowed in the states and X being the most explicit and only legally sold in the territories (ACT and NT). So legally the X films aren't supposed to be sold in NSW but they have been openly on sale for decades.
I used to work in the porn industry back in the early 90s. At the time I'd never been into a Kings Cross sex shop and when I first visited one on business, I was quite shocked to find they stocked X-rated videos and displayed them quite openly. I figured (as we sold them wholesale X porn from Canberra) they were available but under-the-counter or using some other sleight of hand. So I was quite surprised by them being available.
Thing is, the cops can't avoid knowing about this, so there has to
be some level of official corruption. Yet you get them coming over
all innocent with statements like:
Information from this case led to police conducting
undercover operations in the shops to determine the type of material
that was being sold.
and:
Despite the stores openly displaying the apparently X-rated
material, worth millions of dollars, on their shelves, Ms Hayes said
the sale of the material had been going undetected for some
time.
Yes I'm sure it would have been hard to work out. It would have been impossible for them to have noted down a couple of titles from the films and search for the title in the OFLC database. I mean, searching for one of the titles we used to sell took all of a minute to confirm it's rated X.
Yet more evidence that the NSW Police are institutionally corrupt. Not that this should be news.