A New South Wales police officer unlawfully arrested a man, choked him, made offensive comments and tried to delete the man’s recording of the incident, an investigation by the police watchdog has found.
It recommended that two police officers involved be dismissed from the force, and said it would seek advice from the director of public prosecutions about whether they should be charged.
In 2021 the man, referred to in a report on the investigation by the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC) as Civ1, had gone to a police station to make a report about a car accident, but the conversation became heated and he was arrested and charged with several offences.
When the matter went to court two years later, the defence played the audio from Civ1’s phone overlaid with the station’s CCTV footage, which contradicted the police statements to create a “false narrative”, the investigation found.
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The report by the LECC said the magistrate in that case said he held “grave concerns” about the officers’ behaviour, which prompted an internal inquiry described in the report as “inadequate”. That inquiry was followed by the watchdog investigation, dubbed Operation Somnus, which resulted in a finding of serious misconduct over two police officers including the officer in charge.
“The investigation revealed that the officer in charge had unlawfully arrested the man, choked him and made offensive comments towards the man,” the LECC said in a statement.
“Officers then claimed that the man had sworn at them during the arrest.”
Civ1 “had a recording of police conduct on his mobile phone, which he had managed to retrieve after a police officer attempted to delete it”, the statement said.
It added the officer in charge “fabricated statements in the police fact sheet, improperly shared his evidence with other officers and deleted the police CCTV footage which showed him removing the phone from the custody table”.
The internal inquiry found only that the second officer had copied quotes from the other first officer’s statement. The LECC recommended the officer responsible for that internal inquiry be disciplined.
Commissioner Anina Johnson said “honest and accurate police statements are fundamental to the proper functioning of the criminal justice system”.
“Thirty years ago, the Hon Justice James Wood [who presided over a royal commission into corruption within the NSW police in the 90s] said that acts such as collusion between officers and making untrue witness statements ‘constitutes a gross distortion of police powers, and is destructive of the good reputation of the [force]’. The same is true today,” she said.
“Without corroborative evidence, it is very difficult for defendants to prove that a police statement is false or misleading. The deception in this case only came to light because the man had recorded the conduct of police and that recording was able to be retrieved after it ‘disappeared’.”
The LECC report, released on Wednesday, found the initial arrest was unlawful; that the officer known as Som1 took Civ1’s phone, deleted the recording, then cut out six seconds of CCTV footage from the brief of evidence to hide his deletion of the recording; that Som1 fabricated statements about Civ1’s offences; and that officers Som1 and Som2 fabricated evidence and gave false evidence under oath in the court.
The commission will ask the DPP about criminal offences including perjury, fabricated evidence, tempering with evidence and common assault.
The officer who conducted the internal inquiry accepted he could have been more thorough and said he “lacked the resources he needed to conduct an investigation of this kind” and was ill-equipped to do things such as seizing the mobile phone.
According to the report, the investigation “raised significant concerns about some current practices within the NSW police force around the preparation of statements, review of criminal briefs and the use of privacy squares on CCTV within police stations”.
