Robert Stephen James Elphick jailed for stalking Albany police officer after assaulting him

An Albany man has been jailed for more than a year for stalking an off-duty police officer in the days after he was found guilty of assaulting him. Robert Stephen James Elphick, 33, was sentenced to 18 months prison in Albany Magistrates Court on Friday. The jail time comes after Elphick received a 12-month suspended prison sentence in March for assaulting the police officer while he was off-duty. Elphick denied the charge, arguing during a trial that he had been the victim of a brutal and unprovoked attack on the afternoon of August 13 which left him needing facial surgery. The off-duty officer said he had been responding to a report of domestic violence when the confrontation occurred on the side of Lancaster Road in McKail, but Elphick rejected any suggestion of domestic violence, during and after the trial. Convicting him of the assault, Magistrate Dianne Scaddan found he lunged at his victim, punched him and tried to throttle him after learning that he was a police officer. Elphick was then charged with stalking the same victim less than a week later outside his home in Warrenup on March 23 and 24. He was set to stand trial on the charge on August 3, but changed his plea to guilty at the start of the trial. About 2.30pm on March 23, Elphick drove a motorcycle past the victim’s home, stopping about 50m away. He took out his phone while facing the home, where the victim’s parents were standing in the front yard. After driving slowly past the driveway of the house then stopping down the road, the victim’s father asked him, ‘do I know you?’ and Elphick replied ‘you probably don’t want to’. Elphick then said, “do you think I’m scared of going to prison?. . . I know where you live”. He returned to the street the next day about 5.30pm, this time driving a Nissan Patrol past the house before parking nearby and taking photos of the house. He then got into a verbal altercation with the police officer, who was standing outside with his parents, and started to record the interaction on his phone. After his arrest, police found photographs and videos of the victim, his family and the home on Elphick’s phone. Speaking in court on August 26, defence lawyer Elizabeth Hamilton argued it would not be in the public interest to trigger Elphick’s suspended prison sentence. Ms Hamilton said he had travelled to Perth about 14 times in the past year for medical treatment after the initial confrontation and had a permanent metal plate “holding his eye socket together”. Although the injury had not affected his sight “to any high degree”, it had caused his eye to sink into the socket, she said. Ms Hamilton said the stalking offence stemmed from comments made by the police officer’s father on one of Elphick’s Facebook posts, prompting him to “set about” finding where the complainant or his parents lived. She said since the incident, Elphick had stabilised his medication which had made “a significant difference” to how he viewed his actions. She urged the magistrate to allow him to “continue with his positive efforts in the community”. However, Magistrate Steven Malley said Elphick had put himself in a “near-on impossible situation”. He said Elphick had “fully understood” his obligations not to offend when he was handed his suspended sentence for the assault.. Yet “within days” he committed an offence which carried its own term of imprisonment, he said.