3th January 2018
The Community Advocacy Alliance recently had cause to expose underhanded Victoria Police tactics by a senior officer, acting under a false name in what can most charitably be described as an unbecoming manner. The Chief Commissioner of Police has refused to take any action and has thereby supported that poor conduct.
Unfortunately this is just part of a pattern indicative of deep malaise within that organisation, and particularly within the “Professional Standards” section of it.
The Chief Commissioner has also refused to take any action in a case where detectives knowingly charged a citizen on the basis of documents they knew were not just unreliable but were also completely inadmissible in court – yet they put those unreliable documents forward in court.
This gross abuse of power was ruled fully acceptable by police Professional Standards!
The same detectives produced to the citizen another document which fully disproved their allegations against him – but that document was NOT put before the court and has never been seen again. Professional Standards approved that too!
The Chief Commissioner has been told about the detectives inserting in a witness statement material they knew was false – just as Andrew Rule exposed in the Herald Sun (November 26, 2017). And yet the Chief Commissioner has done nothing but refuse to act.
CAA has other correspondence from a head of the police Professional Standards command which incorporates not merely dishonesty but abuse of the very law the police are supposed to enforce.
Nothing has been done despite complaints having been lodged, just as CAA has reported the most recent abuse.
None of this is new. Andrew Rule also reported (Herald Sun October 3, 2015) how Professional Standards covered up a straight out theft by a detective who has since “progressed smoothly up the promotional ladder.”
Something stinks at police headquarters, and it is not the drains.