With NSW Police being the subject of negative media reports this year concerning conduct while on duty, perhaps now is the time to look at how matters concerning allegations of police misconduct are handled by government agencies.
•
furnished
11 reports to the NSW Parliament;
•
assessed
2547 complaints;
•
conducted
207 investigations, comprising 85 preliminary enquiries, 73
preliminary investigations and 49 full investigations. The number of
full investigations almost doubled for the financial year, up from 28
in 2017-18;
•
conducted
78 private examinations;
•
monitored
32 new NSWPF critical incident investigations, of which 27 critical
incidents were attended by Commission staff. Commission staff also
continued to monitor 31 existing critical incident investigations
from the previous financial year;
•
reviewed
1221 and monitored 16 misconduct matter investigations as part of the
Commission’s oversight function;
•
visited
Dubbo, Nowra, Forster, Taree, Kempsey, Maitland, Port Macquarie,
Casino, Broken Hill, Wilcannia, Newcastle, Wagga and the greater
Sydney region as part of the Commission’s community engagement
program; and
•
presented
to solicitors and community organisations at a range of forums
including the Law Society of New South Wales, Gosford Court open day,
the Aboriginal Legal Service, Community Legal Centres quarterly
conference, multiple domestic violence services, Red Cross Young
Parents program, Koori interagency meeting and Legal Aid Cooperative
Legal Service Delivery groups around the state, amongst others.
In
2018-19 there were 1,384
(93.7%) complaints
received from the general
public,
94 (6.3%) from people identified as police
officers,
4 (0.2%) from the NSW
Crimes Commission
and 63 (4.07%) from the NSW
Independent Commission against Against Corruption.
During
2018-19 the LECC
worked on 207 investigations, comprising 85 preliminary enquiries, 73
preliminary investigations and 49 full investigations. Of these, 104
matters were completed and 103 were ongoing at 30 June 2019.
Of
these full investgations 2 were referred to the Office of the
Director of Public Prosecutions for consideration of prosecution, 5
resulted
in a dissemination of information to the NSW Police
Force and 2 that resulted in information being disseminated to other
law enforcement agencies (LEA).
According
to The
Sydney Morning Herald
the 49 full investigations last financial year only represented
2%
of the 2,457 assess complaints received.
One of these 2,2457 assessed complaints became the subject of an ABC News online article containing distressing footage of a young mother being arrested after a traffic stop.
On
23 September 2019 the LECC issued
a media
release
announcing a public hearing with regarding the strip search of an
underage female at the Splendour
in the Grass music
festival at North Byron in July 2018 by NSW Police, and strip search
practices more generally.
A
report
from a formal investigation into strip searching is not yet
available.
In
October 2019 the LECC published a
Report
in relation to its investigation in Operation Trieste
which
dealt with the stopping of a vehicle being driven by a 24 year-old
woman with her stepmother as the only passenger. Body
cam video footage
formed part of the evidence and
it was found that 2 police officers “engaged
in serious misconduct during the relevant traffic stop in that they
breached s 7 of the Police Act, breached the NSWPF Code of Conduct
and Ethics and breached the provisions of LEPRA.”
The
LECC recommended
“that
consideration be given to the taking of action against Officer 1
pursuant to s 173 of the Police Act...”
The
Commission’s investigation has established that there have been
problems with the Register for 17 years. Significant errors in the
application of the CPOR Act started occurring as early as 2002. These
errors have included incorrect decisions by the NSW Police Force
about which persons should be included on the Register, and incorrect
decisions about how long persons were legally required to make
reports of their personal information to police under the CPOR Act
(their ‘reporting period’).
Some
of these errors have resulted in child sex offenders being in the
community without being monitored by the NSW Police Force as required
by the CPOR Act. The Commission reviewed one case in which a person
reoffended while unmonitored. Other errors have caused the NSW Police
Force to unlawfully require people to report their personal
information to police for a number of years. As a result, people have
been wrongly convicted, and even imprisoned, for failing to comply
with CPOR Act reporting obligations, when in fact those obligations
did not apply to them at the relevant time. Two persons were
unlawfully imprisoned for more than a year in total.
The
NSW Police Force has been aware for a number of years that there were
significant issues with the Register. In 2014 the NSW Police Force
Child Protection Registry (the Registry), the specialist unit in the
State Crime Command responsible for maintaining the Register, started
filing internal reports warning of systemic issues causing
inaccuracies in the Register. Multiple reports from the Registry
prompted the NSW Police Force to review 5,749 Register case files.
This review was started in 2016 and took two years to complete. In
October 2018 it concluded that 44 per cent (2,557) of those Register
case files had contained errors.
