An off-duty police officer was "showing off" when he drove a marked car at speeds up to 160kmh with three colleagues before crashing into a concrete barrier after leaving Canberra's Summernats festival, a prosecutor has said.
The former police officer, Ben Robert Wager, appeared in the ACT Magistrates Court for a sentence hearing after pleading guilty to one count of aggravated furious, reckless and dangerous driving.
While the exact date of the crime was not disclosed during the hearing, the court heard the group was driving home from Summernats after the officer had finished a 12-hour shift.
Prosecutor Andrew Chatterton said the 32-year-old officer reached speeds of up to 160kmh before slowing down by the time the police vehicle collided with a concrete barrier under Melbourne Avenue.
Chief Magistrate Louise Taylor said the officer slowing down was "consistent, in my view, with the defendant coming to realise he was losing control of the vehicle".
The prosecutor said it was ironic that the officers were driving from the car festival and argued the officer may have been showing off to his colleagues.
"If I'm not satisfied it's that, there was certainly an element of entitlement in the conduct because of the cloak of legitimacy that the police vehicle otherwise gave to the speed in which he was driving," Ms Taylor said.
David Healey, who was representing him in court, said the officer had just completed a 12-hour shift and was fatigued when driving back from the festival.
"His judgement was absolutely lacking," he said.
Mr Healey also said the offending was out of character and Wager was "pretty embarrassed" by his actions.
The court heard he had served with the police for seven years, lost his job following the crime and now works at the US embassy.
The magistrate accepted the former officer was genuinely remorseful but said a non-conviction was out of the question when it was raised by Mr Healey.
Instead, Ms Taylor said she was considering whether to send the man to jail or allow him to serve his sentence in the community.
"This is aggravated not just by the fact that he was a sworn police officer, but that the offending was facilitated by his use of a police vehicle," the magistrate said.
"The use of the vehicle allowed his conduct to be cloaked in legitimacy and it reduced the risk of him being caught because any member of the public seeing him drive at [speed] might have reasonably inferred that a police officer was driving like that because they had a legitimate purpose to do so."
She said it was in her view that he engaged in the offending because "the prospect of him getting caught was reduced by the fact that he was wearing a police uniform, he was driving a police vehicle and in that vehicle were three other police officers".
"None of whom appeared to me to take any steps to suggest to him that he slow down, but they're not before me," she said in respect of the other police officers.
Ms Taylor accepted there was no evidence the officer was affected by drugs or alcohol at the time, and that he had no prior criminal record.
However, describing the crime as "an enormous fall and a significant abdication from the standard the community expects police officers to uphold", the magistrate reserved her decision on a sentence.
