By John Tognolini
SYDNEY — Police corruption has long been a central theme in New South Wales. Ian Temby's last report, on Operation Milloo for the Independent Committee Against Corruption, delivered in February, revealed police involvement in the franchising of armed robberies.
Since then, independent South Coast MP John Hatton has forced the state minority government to set up a royal commission into the NSW Police Service.
The Milloo report, according to Dave Brown, associate professor of law at the University of New South Wales, "was a useful report in that it gave the status of an organisation like the ICAC to a lot of the stories that have been floating around and which a lot of people have known for a long time but which have never been formally accepted".
However, Brown also criticises Temby's report: "I do think, in relation to police corruption as against other fields of inquiry, they certainly could have gone lot further. I think they shied off in some of the recommendations in relation to even the evidence that was heard before them ...
"They could have taken a lot of different sorts of evidence into account. For example, there is a tendency all the way through not to treat certain kinds of police malpractice, such as police verbal — the fabrication of evidence by police — as a form of corruption ...
Brown rejects the "rotten apple theory", saying that what exists in NSW is "relatively institutionalised corruption, particularly in certain specialist squads".
ICAC's media manager, Mark Davis, defends the Milloo report: "... contrary to what a lot of people have made out, it was not meant to be an all-encompassing police corruption inquiry. It was limited quite specifically to areas that had been raised initially by Neddy Smith, and the commission took the attitude that the hearings weren't going to become a forum for Smith to raise allegations against any number of police officers."
On police manufacture of evidence, Davis said, "Presumably the royal commission into the police service will look at a number of those areas as well".
However, many long-time critics of the NSW police system are not overly optimistic about what the royal commission will achieve.
On the royal commissioner, Justice James Wood, Brett Collins from Prisoners Action Group has attacked his appointment: "Wood was the choice of the NSW government and clearly it was because they knew that he would supply the answers they wanted. This was the inquiry that was forced upon them. I have very poor expectations of what's going to happen with Justice Wood. Wood has been involved in so many really bad cases."
Wood was the judge for the Alister, Dunn and Anderson inquiry in 1985 which eventually overturned their frame-up conviction for a non-existent bombing conspiracy. His counsel assisting submitted that there was "evidence to suggest" that the NSW Special Branch officers:
- concealed "police non-acceptance of [informer Richard] Seary's assertions about the involvement of the Hilton bombing";
- edited and dubbed tapes of conversations with Seary and gave false evidence about the tapes;
- "gave Seary tuition in lock picking and encouragement to join planned criminal activity and ... interfered in the exercise of a police officer's discretion as to the granting of bail and gave false evidence to the inquiry about these matters";
- gave false evidence to the when Seary was debriefed;
- tried to dissuade Seary from giving evidence to the inquiry;
- "knowing that Seary was both untruthful and unreliable as an agent, suggested to ASIO and to the government of NSW that Seary was both truthful and reliable";
- "knowingly permitted or encouraged Richard Seary to steal a car";
- concealed documents supportive of the defence case by falsely asserting that they had been passed on to ASIO.
Justice Wood's finding was no misconduct by Special Branch.
Collins says, "After a long investigation, the best that Wood could do was to recommend the release of the three without even a finding of misconduct against Special Branch police. It was patently obvious that the evidence had been manipulated. He wouldn't make a proper criticism of what was openly believed to be a police verbal."
I asked Tim Anderson if he would take the issues surrounding his second frame-up by the police in 1989 to the royal commission. His answer was, "I wouldn't bother. There are more important issues. The issues in my case have been aired pretty well; I've written a book about them. I'm not interested in going back to a judge I consider to be weak and compliant on police issues to say — Here, have a look at this case again — when the issues have already come out.
"I'm not a fan of a royal commission for the sake of a royal commission. Inevitably you end up with very conservative people, creatures of the establishment."
Anderson draws a comparison between Temby's report and the royal commission. "Temby at the beginning said — I want to have a report that will expose some police corruption and re-establish confidence in the police force. They had their final objective in mind before they even started. This judge, I have no doubt, will have done the same thing.
"The things that I'll be putting to the royal commission will be the issues of structural corruption. That is to say, things that police are trained to do routinely, as opposed to chasing down a particular cop who has taken a bribe somewhere. Structural corruption is far more important to pursue, and there are some very good prospects of pursuing it with people who have already talked.
"Structural corruption is a whole squad of police being trained to take bribes or commit perjury. The particular areas CEFTAA [Campaign Exposing Frame-ups and Targeting Abuses of Authority] will be concerned about are the ways in which police have been trained for several decades to fabricate evidence in court.
"A lot of lawyers and police have been saying these things don't exist any more. The fact is, young police are still being trained in those techniques."
Anderson sees the exposure of police verbals as having far-reaching implications. "If you can find how and when and over what period of time police have been trained to collaborate on putting their statements together, the way in which they give evidence, you get at the root the police culture of covering up everything from petty arrests to murders, and that has to be fundamentally important."
Brett Collins says of his own experience: "I was given a sentence of 17 years based upon a police verbal. I was accused of a capital offence and was very lucky to have a jury find me not guilty because it was so obvious that the police were telling lies.
"The practice of police verbals as they were then presented are no longer acceptable these days, but there are other forms of police verbal that still come before the courts."
Dave Brown raises the issue of the police hierarchy appointing individuals investigated as part of the Milloo inquiry to sensitive inquiries such as the one into the shooting of David Gundy. "It seems to me highly inappropriate given the question marks that were hanging other those officers at the time ... I think that in some senses [police commissioner Tony] Lauer is very vulnerable to the claim that he had failed to take the proper action in relation to particular officers under suspicion and indeed, beyond that, appointed them to very sensitive inquiries."