July 2015 - ABC PM
Angela Lavoipierre, Mark Colvin
Transcript
Mark Colvin: A review of the police oversight system in New South Wales has been handed recommendations for sweeping changes.
The Redfern Legal Centre's made a submission, raising concerns that the existing watchdogs are essentially toothless. It argues that the nature of modern police misconduct has fundamentally changed and that the system needs to adapt.
Angela Lavoipierre reports.
Angela Lavoipierre: On the matter of police oversight in NSW, everyone agrees that there are too many cooks - seven, to be precise.
David Porter: We see a lot of combative attitudes between the police force and complainants, the police force and the Ombudsman, the Ombudsman and the Police Integrity Commission, the Police Integrity Commission and the police force.
Angela Lavoipierre: That's David Porter. He's the senior solicitor at a state-wide police powers clinic at Redfern Legal Centre. Like most of the voices in this debate, David Porter is pushing for a single oversight model.
David Porter: We're proposing either a new agency or, perhaps more efficiently, the Police Integrity Commission could be expanded, given more responsibility.
Angela Lavoipierre: He says the current system isn't working.
David Porter: You can have allegations of excessive force, you can have someone accused of assaulting police and in their complaint, they can make allegations of false testimony by the officers or collusion in their evidence.
Now those are quite serious allegations, but they don't make it up the chain of investigation in the current oversight context. A lot of them go missing. It is the exception rather than the rule which gets picked up by the Police Integrity Commission at the moment.
Angela Lavoipierre: Under the Police Act, officers have the unconditional power to choose not to investigate a complaint. Of those they do investigate, the majority are dismissed, and when one is upheld, there's nothing to ensure the police force takes disciplinary action, even in serious cases.
David Porter: Pretty much the only situation where the police are bound to recognise, admit that misconduct has occurred, is when there is a criminal conviction against a police officer. We don't think that's good enough.
We think that the public interest needs better protection and that what the oversight body should have is the ability to make findings that misconduct has occurred.
Angela Lavoipierre: David Porter says one such example of the breakdown of police accountability is the case of Adam Salter. The 36-year-old was shot and killed in the kitchen of his Sydney home in 2009 after police responded to a call that he was stabbing himself with a knife.
David Porter: The deputy state coroner in that instance found that that critical incident investigation was primarily concerned with avoiding embarrassment to the police force. From there, the Police Integrity Commission can - was forced to conduct its own operation because clearly you had issues with the quality of the internal police investigations that were occurring.
Angela Lavoipierre: David Porter says since the last review of the system almost 20 years ago, the nature of misconduct and corruption has changed.
David Porter: The integrity questions that need to concern the state as a whole, they're not about money in brown paper bags anymore.
It's about the length that people may be willing to go to, to secure a conviction or the willingness that they'll have to lock somebody up for no particular reason. These are the things that we need to be concerned about.
Angela Lavoipierre: The review is due to recommend a new police oversight model at the end of August.
####
Listen to the interview on the ABC website.
