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The Age - Melbourne, Australia
12 November 2005

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Christine Nixon and George Bro

Crooked cops in dread of secre

Coercive powers are taking corruption investigators where they could not go before, reports Gary Hughes.

THE corrupt policeman was one of the old school. He had brushed aside previous attempts by internal investigators to catch him, confident he could bluff his way out of trouble with protestations of innocence.

But this time was different.

As he took the witness stand at the secret Office of Police Integrity hearing and was put under oath, he knew that the organisation's power to force him to answer questions, even if the answers incriminated him, left him with nowhere to run. Under repeated questioning, he eventually rolled over.

"He admitted his guilt and the involvement of others in the crimes," says OPI assistant director of investigations Graham Ashton. "That officer had been through previous encounters within the force and had been maintaining his innocence all the way, implausible as it may seem."

Later, members of Victoria Police's Ethical Standards Department admitted to the director of Police Integrity, George Brouwer, that in the past their investigation "probably couldn't have gone very far".

"They found it refreshing that we were probing and pushing and pushing the police officer into a situation where it became more and more untenable for him to maintain his credibility because of the hearing process."

This week The Age was allowed inside the secret hearing room, which has been built within the OPI's headquarters in Collins Street. It is protected by the latest high-tech security, including a metal detector and a palm print reader.

So far the OPI has held 24 secret hearings, using Mr Brouwer's coercive powers to force witnesses to answer questions. If they refuse, they can be marched straight down to the Supreme Court, where they can be jailed indefinitely for contempt. During the hearings, lawyers for the witnesses are not allowed to interrupt the questioning.

The entire proceedings are videotaped so that the OPI's overseeing office, the Special Investigations Monitor, can ensure the coercive powers are being used responsibly.

But sometime early next year the OPI hopes to hold its first public hearing into corrupt police.

Mr Ashton said he was expecting opposition, including a possible legal challenge to opening the hearings to the public. But he said open hearings were important in cases where the OPI wanted to generate public debate on certain corrupt activities. "There are currently a couple of matters on the books that we think lend themselves to that," he said

In most cases, however, secrecy was vital to avoid tipping off corrupt police that the OPI was closing in. People who are summonsed to appear at an OPI hearing cannot tell anyone, apart from their lawyer. Nor can they reveal the subject of the summons.

So far the OPI has issued 136 summonses, some delivered to financial institutions such as banks and credit card companies to obtain records to help build financial profiles of suspected corrupt officers.

Financial profiling is just one of the tools being used by the OPI as it moves to more proactive targeting of corruption within Victoria Police.

"We are able to draw up a profile on whether their lifestyle is legitimate or not," Mr Brouwer said. "We're looking at the lifestyle of police. We are looking at their financial transactions, their bank records, their credit card transactions, their property dealings and all the rest of it."

In some cases, the financial profiling has cleared officers who have been under suspicion of corruption. "Sometimes you get allegations falsely lodged against police and when you look at the facts through this type of mechanism you find the allegations are unfounded," Mr Brouwer said.

Other weapons in the OPI's arsenal include computer experts, who are targeting the increased use of computers by corrupt police, covert surveillance teams and undercover operatives using false identities.

The OPI also has new telephone tapping powers, which were finally granted by the federal Attorney-General in September after a drawn-out political brawl between Spring Street and Canberra.

The first covert operations began about six weeks ago. The identities of the covert operatives, who work from a secret location, are not known even by other OPI staff.

Over the past 12 months the staff at the OPI has grown to 85 at a cost of about $10 million to the taxpayer. Mr Brouwer said he expected to eventually expand his staff to about 100, with an annual budget of $16 million, putting the OPI on equal footing with the Police Integrity Commission in NSW. He said the OPI's powers now equalled or exceeded those held by interstate anti-corruption bodies.

A yet-to-be released, three-volume study by the OPI into the history and nature of police corruption in Victoria shows that governments and the police force have historically failed to find a long-term fix to the problem. Instead there has been a "crisis" on average every decade, leading to a limited inquiry and a short-term solution.

"They (the inquiries) come up and identify certain problems. Then you find because they are short-lived, the royal commission goes out of existence, you get political compromise setting in, there's no effective follow-up action and everything falls into the sand and bubbles along for another 10 years until another drama erupts," Mr Brouwer said.

He said the OPI was now engineering structural changes, including a program to identify management issues at police stations where corruption was a problem and to incorporate the results in the training of future senior officers.

The office also had helped fund a Victoria Police review of the crime department, where certain specialist squads had been prone to corruption.

"The crime department is in a very difficult situation with all the pressures on it," Mr Brouwer said. "You need that expertise of the squads, but you get that tribalism and other things that come into play which can distort the operations of particular units."

Mr Brouwer said he had received full backing from Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon, who had initially been in favour of a crime commission but recently declared the strengthened OPI "a very good partner in terms of protecting Victoria and the community from corruption in policing".

If previous police commands and state governments had set up a permanent body like the OPI, problems like those that led to the disbanding of the drug squad in 2002 could have been avoided. "It's a bit naive for people in the past to have said there wasn't anything to worry about," Mr Brouwer said. "That wasn't quite the case."

NEED TO KNOW
THE Office of Police Integrity was set up in November 2004 to replace the former Police Ombudsman.
The move was in response to calls for an independent crime commission to battle police corruption following links between the disgraced drug squad and drug rings.

The OPI has recruited investigators from the AFP, interstate anti-corruption bodies, and former senior Victoria Police officers.

The OPI is overseen by the Special Investigations Monitor, who is a retired County Court judge charged with ensuring it does not abuse its powers.

NEED TO KNOW MORE?
www.opi.vic.gov.au

THE OFFICE OF POLICE INTEGRITY
STAFF: 85*
INVESTIGATIONS UNDER WAY: 61
SECRET HEARINGS HELD: 24
SUMMONSES ISSUED: 136
BUDGET: $10 million**
* EXPECTED TO RISE TO 100
** EXPECTED TO RISE TO $16 MILLION

"I think it's (the OPI) a very good partner in terms of protecting Victoria and the community from corruption in policing."
CHRISTINE NIXON, Chief Commissioner

"We're looking at the lifestyle of police. We are looking at their financial transactions, their bank records, their credit card transactions, their property dealings and all the rest of it."
GEORGE BROUWER, Office of Police Integrity director

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Article sourced from

The Age - Melbourne, Australia12 November 2005

Crooked cops in dread of secre

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The Age - Melbourne, Australia
12 November 2005