Law Enforcement and Conduct Commission says budget cuts mean it is being forced to ‘do more with less’

This article is more than 10 months old

This article is more than 10 months old

The New South Wales police watchdog says continued cuts to the organisation’s budget means it is only able to investigate a tiny proportion of the “firehose” of serious complaints levelled against officers.

On Thursday the Law Enforcement and Conduct Commission released the findings from a series of investigations into individual officer conduct as well as wider systematic issues in the police force.

They included finding that two officers engaged in serious misconduct after they racially abused and belittled two Afghan women at a traffic stop and the revelation that police had mismanaged the child sex offender register for almost two decades, resulting in more than 700 incorrect decisions.

At the same time, the commissioner of the LECC, Michael Adams QC, has revealed that the state of the watchdog’s budget means it was only able to fully investigate 2% of the more than 2,547 complaints it began an initial assessment of.

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“We are, so to speak, drinking from a firehose,” Adams wrote in the forward of the commission’s annual report.

Adams revealed that the previous 3% cut to the organisation’s budget had been increased to 5% for the next four years. It means the commission will be forced to find another $6m in budget cuts over the next four years.

“Our budget position is challenging,” he wrote in the report.

“Like most other public service organisations, we are consistently required to do more with less.”

The report reveals that the LECC began an assessment into 2,547 complaints in 2018-19, compared to 1,464 complaints received by the former Police Integrity Commission in 2015-16.

In total, it conducted only 49 full investigations in the last financial year. As of June, it had 103 “ongoing investigations” including allegations of money laundering against a senior NSW police officer with financial associations to a criminal entity, allegations of “excessive and invasive bail compliance checks” and a number of potentially illegal strip searches.

Last month, the LECC held public hearings for its investigation into the allegedly illegal search of a 16-year-old girl at the 2018 Splendour in the Grass music festival. During the inquiry, a senior constable admitted that all 19 strip searches he performed at the festival may have been illegal.

In its annual report, the LECC revealed that in 2018 it began six separate investigations into the use of strip search powers by police, and is also reviewing a NSW police investigation into allegations of unlawful strip searches at four different music festivals.

Another investigation involves allegations of the unlawful strip searching of protesters in police custody, and an allegation of a sexual assault during a strip search at a Sydney police station. While no evidence of a sexual assault was uncovered, “numerous breaches ... were indicated including the use of force to effect a strip search”.

It is not the first time Adams has spoken out about the NSW government’s funding of the organisation.

Last year, he wrote that since the LECC was established in 2017 to replace the Police Integrity Commission, the ombudsman and the NSW Crime Commission it had been forced to take on a “far broader” jurisdiction than its predecessors while operating with a smaller budget and many fewer staff.

At the time, Adams wrote the agency had been forced to make make “brutal” and “arbitrary” decisions about whether to investigate allegations of serious misconduct by police, and revealed the agency had ignored more than 50 integrity complaints that “warranted investigation”.

Adams, a former NSW supreme court judge, said the higher rate of required savings would “sadly” hamper the commission’s ability to do its job.

“This will continue to impact the number of serious misconduct complaints we are able to investigate, research projects that we undertake and NSW police force misconduct investigations that we oversee,” he wrote in the report.