In March last year Lucy Moore, then 19, was forced to strip naked, squat and cough during a strip search, in contravention of police guidelines, at the Hidden music festival in Sydney.
At the time, NSW police said it had launched an internal investigation into the search amid growing concerns about the use of the controversial police power.
In response to questions from Guardian Australia, the police said the investigation had been concluded in November, and one of the officers had subsequently resigned. But Moore and her family were never told about the outcome.
Her mother, Nicole Moore, told Guardian Australia the delay had left her family “frustrated” and unable to move on from the incident.
“All we’ve ever really wanted was for them to admit that they didn’t follow their procedures, and that what they’d done wasn’t what they were supposed to do,” she said. “That was pretty much it. We just wanted an outcome. It shouldn’t have taken 15 months to deal with a complaint. If I did that in my business I’d be shut down.”
The officer, a constable, has been placed on restricted duties following the incident, and police have launched an internal investigation.
But critics say investigations handled by the force’s professional standards command lack transparency, are frequently delayed, and often lack oversight from a critically overstretched police watchdog.
Sam Lee, a lawyer from Redfern Legal Centre who has handled Moore’s complaint, told Guardian Australia complaints often dragged on much longer than the standard timeframe of 45 days, sometimes well beyond a year.
“It is an excruciating process for the complainant who has to wait an unacceptable amount of time to seek an outcome and in some cases, this outcome will just be a letter that says ‘unsustained’.”
Lee said that because complaints operated through a triage system “a large number of complaints fail to even get beyond this first hurdle and reach the professional standards command”.
While Lee said professional standards took complaints seriously, “there is one crucial aspect that is missing from this process, that being independence from the NSW police”. “Police investigating police presents some major procedural fairness issues, in particular, where personal allegiances by police to their employer are concerned,” she said.
Read the full article here: NSW police took more than a year to complete investigation into 2019 strip-search (The Guardian, 8 June 2020)
See also: RLC and Slater and Gordon announce NSW Strip Search Class Actions Investigation
