Two people have been shot dead by Victorian police during undercover operations in the past three years, prompting a senior officer to remind detectives to properly accompany covert officers in the field, the coroner’s court has heard.
Coroner Jacqui Hawkins is holding an inquest into the death of Troy Van Den Bemt, who was shot and killed by an undercover police officer during an attempted armed robbery of a bottle shop in Melbourne’s outer east in 2018.
Counsel assisting the coroner, Paul Lawrie, said that in April this year a Victoria Police acting commander sent an email to senior officers spelling out the obligations of investigators working with the State Surveillance Unit (SSU).
The SSU contains undercover officers who monitor suspects as part of investigations led by other squads.
Lawrie told the court the April email mentioned there had been two fatal shootings in the past three years where the SSU had been deployed, but he provided no further information about the second death.
The first paragraph of the email, Lawrie said, mentioned that: “Investigators have an obligation to be in the field with the respective SSU team.
“In essence it says investigators will be in the field in support while SSU are maintaining a surveillance operation,” Lawrie told the court.
“It makes it clear you’re meant to be out there supporting them, you’re meant to be mobile.”
The email goes to a central issue being examined in the inquest: how undercover officers and armed crime squad detectives – who were running the operation – interacted during an operation that unravelled spectacularly in the space of little more than an hour.
Van Den Bemt, 48, was being monitored as part of an armed crime squad investigation which involved the SSU.
He had been suspected of involvement in a series of armed robberies committed with a double-barrelled sawn-off shotgun. Armed crime squad detectives have given evidence that they had planned for the Special Operations Group (SOG), a heavily-armed tactical unit, to arrest Van Den Bemt if he or another person of interest were seen in a stolen Toyota Kluger linked to previous offences.
But an SSU officer, known as operative 129, has told the inquest that when communication and logistical challenges beset the operation, he decided to enter a bottle shop that appeared to be a target for Van Den Bemt’s crew.
Shortly after, Van Den Bemt entered and attempted to rob the store with operative 129 inside. When a shop attendant tried to fight off Van Den Bemt, operative 129 previously told the court he shot Van Den Bemt dead because he feared the attendant would be killed.
The court has heard the operation became fraught when it became clear an armed robbery was imminent, but the SOG was not close enough to arrest Van Den Bemt, and the armed crime squad was not close enough to “disrupt” the offence.
The court has previously heard from armed crime squad detectives that disruption techniques could include setting up a fake roadside breathalyser site or crime scene close to the possible armed robbery target in a bid to dissuade offenders.
Armed crime squad members have repeatedly given evidence that the final option was for the SSU to let an offence take place, but continue to monitor the offenders as they left the scene so they could be arrested later.
SSU members have told the court they dispute this, saying they would never have let something as volatile as an armed robbery occur while watching on, because of the threat to life, and that the armed crime squad had given operative 129 no choice but to intervene because they were too far away from the bottle shop.
On Tuesday, detective sergeant Robert Ormerod, who was the leader of the armed crime squad team on duty the day of the shooting, said he had not seen the email sent in April about how to work with the SSU.
But in his evidence he also gave what Hawkins called “the first concession” anyone had made during the four days of the inquest.
Ormerod said the operation centred on finding the Kluger, and then having either Van Den Bemt or another person of interest being inside.
It became clear, he said, that once this had occurred there were too many variables about where the suspects could go, how they could be stopped, and the way in which armed crime squad detectives and SSU operatives could communicate.
“Our mission statement was: find the Kluger. From that point forward it became somewhat unplanned ... we didn’t prepare for every possible contingency. I wish we had of.”
Ormerod also said he had not been asked to be involved in an internal critical incident review of the shooting. The court has previously heard that multiple armed crime squad members considered the review report contained several inaccuracies.
Ormerod said he did not even know the review was taking place, and that he did not know who had decided he should not be involved.
When Lawrie asked whether he had made his displeasure known, Ormerod said: “I’m not sure displeasure would be the word I’d use. [It was] frustration. Or unfairness.
“I don’t underplay my role on the day as it was very significant, as was [SSU team leader] operator 145’s.
“He was given an opportunity to provide some explanation as to what had happened and I was not.”
Former superintendent Charles Allen, who led the critical incident review, told the court on Wednesday that he did not make the decision for Ormerod to be excluded.
Allen said he contacted the managers of the SSU and armed crime squad about the review and had relied on them to inform their members.
His 27-page report released in June 2018 found that some officers who were involved in the review were “implicitly defensive despite reassurances” and “other members declined to take part in the review, limiting the review team’s ability to gain individual perspectives”.
Allen confirmed that multiple armed crime squad members had not participated, and that operative 129 and his partner 116 had been excluded because of welfare concerns, given the review took place within weeks of the shooting.
Among his key findings were that the plan for the investigation was not in a format that complied with the Victoria police guidelines for an operation order and that the disruption strategies within that plan were “ineffective”.
But he agreed that it was not necessary for the plan to contain language that would have allowed SSU officers to break cover and intervene if they felt a person they were monitoring was about to endanger life.
Operator 145, who was the team leader of the SSU on the day of the shooting, disputes that he was told by Ormerod or anyone else within the armed crime squad that under the plan the SSU were to let an offence run if the SOG could not arrest the suspect and the armed crime squad was unable to disrupt them.
Lawrie described operator 145 as “emphatically” denying an exchange with Ormerod about the details of the operation, saying that “someone is obviously right and someone is obviously wrong”.
“I’m emphatic,” Ormerod responded.
The armed crime squad’s rationale for recommending that the SSU “let it run”, he said, was that it was impossible to predict how Van Den Bemt could react if challenged.
Hawkins heard that armed crime squad units who were supposed to be within striking distance of the SSU were caught out when Van Den Bemt was on the move in the stolen car.
One of the two units in the field was about three kilometres away, but did not know the exact location of the bottle shop. Ormerod agreed that the other car, which contained him and his partner, also did not know the scene of the crime and was even further away.
He told Hawkins that it could be difficult to find the perfect spot - close enough to intervene if needed, but not so close that they were “in the way” of the SSU.
But he agreed with Lawrie that their positioning on the night of the shooting made the prospect of implementing a disruption “vanishingly small”, as they were not close enough.
They were relying on using Google maps on their phones to navigate, while also receiving phone calls, and did not know exactly where they were going as they had not wanted to interrupt the SSU radio channel to clarify their location.
Victoria Police has since provided tablet devices which can be used by detectives to see the location of SSU operatives in real time, the court has heard.
The inquest is not set to hear from any more witnesses, but submissions will be made to Hawkins on Monday.
