I think this story is a great victory for the authorities against people making false complaints against the police.It could of ended very differently if not for Sen.Constables in dash camera capturing the whole event, sound and all. My personal opinion is these niqab (full veils) type attire should be banned in our country. To me being a non religious individual it is a form of disguise, and suppressing the woman inside them. But who is to say they could be used for criminal purposes, with anyone underneath them. This is why the cop asked her to remove it so he could see her face and check her identity against her license. She made false statements he attempted to remove her veil(which was shown to be a lie in video)She made false claims against in and has ended up with a jail term for her troubles.Tough, but a stance must be taken on the racist excuse that gets pushed around when it suits rather than when warranted. It also placed a stain on all the good police doing there job, as she stated all police are racist. Well the veil is all about her faith not race, so how it was ever anything close to racist is crazy anyway.

here is an article from the Herald Sun on the matter, a good read

Liar ... Carnita Matthews leaving Campbelltown Court House

THE crucial point about Carnita Matthews, the niqab-clad motorist who falsely claimed a police officer tried to remove her face covering, was made by the magistrate who sentenced her to six months in jail last week.

“The system would collapse, of course, if people are making false and wrong complaints to authorities,” said Magistrate Robert Rabbidge in Campbelltown Local Court.

In fact, the system has been under severe stress for years because of official cowardice and the sort of political correctness that tolerates deliberate, malicious and ruthless (Rabbidge’s words) claims such as Matthews’.

This time, the good guy won. But the odds are usually stacked against him. Sen-Constable Paul Fogarty was just lucky there was a police video camera recording his encounter with Matthews that night five months ago in Sydney’s southwest.

It was dark at 6.10pm in the southwestern Sydney suburb of Woodbine when Fogarty pulled over the black Honda Odyssey driven by Matthews, a 46-year-old mother of seven wearing a black niqab – the traditional Muslim head-to-toe covering with a narrow opening for the eyes.

He asked for her licence and gestured for her to lift her veil so he could verify her identity. She showed him half her face. She would swear in a statutory declaration three days later that he then insisted on seeing her whole face, and touched her veil in an attempt to take it off.

The police video of the conversation shows her allegation to be false.

It also shows Fogarty exerting considerable self-restraint against a barrage of angry words.

Things turn ugly when he gives her an infringement notice for a partly obscured rear P-plate – an offence, he tells her, that carries a penalty of two demerit points and a $197 fine.

“I see what you are doing now,” she says. “Sorry, I’m not accepting that. This is clearly now racist.”

“Sorry?” says Fogarty, taken aback. “Firstly, I don’t appreciate being called racist . . . just listen, please. Don’t call me racist.”

She replies: “You are racist. I will not accept (the ticket). I’ll take you to court. I don’t care what you say, you’re not going to give me that ticket because I’ve got my P-plates on.

“You want to give me the ticket for rubbish. I’ve got seven kids.”

It’s hard not to feel a little sorry for Matthews, just a few moments from home, rushing to get dinner on the table for her large brood, being caught by a police officer determined to apply the letter of the law, unmoved by her distress, and with that passive-aggressive patient reasonableness highway patrol officers around the world have perfected.

But, rather than accepting, as the rest of us do, that this is the way of things, and that it is pointless arguing, she chose to play the race card.

For 20 minutes she abuses Fogarty and repeatedly calls him a racist, at points waggling her finger in his face.

“You know you are giving me ticket for crap,” she says. “OK. OK, go back and sit in your car,” he says.

“If you choose to take matters forward you would be wasting the court’s time. OK. Bye bye.”

She could have left it at that, or taken a legitimate avenue to dispute the fine.

But she chose to take umbrage and, even worse, to find succour with Australia’s chief Muslim umbrage-taker, Mamdouh Habib. The Egyptian-born former Guantanamo Bay detainee alerted Channel 7 to her good story of police brutality, made representations to police on her behalf and, with his wife, accompanied her to court.

The one time Socialist Alliance-backed independent NSW election candidate has become something of a cause celebre among the “moral panic”-obsessed chattering classes. Habib has made an art form of playing the racism victim, and so have others around him.

Matthews’ case could have been swept under the carpet and Fogarty left with a blemish on his record, if not for the pursuit of the story by the media.

They would have toasted Fogarty, says former detective Tim Priest. She signed a stat dec. The ticket would have been ripped up. He would have been subjected to a cultural awareness program. He was on a hiding to nothing except for that video.

Matthews is appealing against her conviction. Harsh as it may seem to lock up a mother of seven whose initial offence was a badly displayed P-plate and bad judgment in friends, it is about time someone was called to account for abusing the complaints system.

It does more than tie up court time. It damages our system of justice, increasing racial tension and leading to ever more draconian laws for the law-abiding.