NSW police unlawfully arrested and choked man then tried to delete footage, watchdog finds | Australian police and policing

An investigation by the police watchdog has found that a New South Wales police officer unlawfully arrested a man, choked him, made offensive comments and tried to clear the man’s record of the incident.

It was recommended that the two police officers involved in the incident be dismissed and that the prosecutor’s office would be asked for advice on whether these people should be charged.

The man, referred to as Civ1 in a 2021 report into the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC) investigation, had gone to the police station to report about a car crash, but the conversation escalated and he was arrested and charged with various offences.

The investigation found that when the matter went to court two years later, the defense played audio from Civ1’s phone along with the station’s CCTV footage, creating a “false narrative” that contradicted police statements.

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The LECC’s report said the judge in that case said he had “serious concerns” about the officers’ conduct, which led to an internal investigation described in the report as “inadequate”. This investigation was followed by a follow-up investigation called Operation Somnus, which resulted in the detection of serious misconduct against two police officers, including the officer in charge.

“The investigation revealed that the officer in charge unlawfully arrested the man, strangled him and made offensive comments towards the man,” the LECC said in a statement.

“Officers later claimed the man swore at them during the arrest.”

The statement said Civ1 “had a recording of police behavior on his mobile phone and managed to retrieve it after a police officer attempted to delete it.”

The report said the officer in charge “made fabricated statements on the police information form, inappropriately shared his evidence with other officers and deleted police CCTV footage that showed him removing the phone from the custody desk.”

The internal investigation found only that the second officer copied excerpts from the other first officer’s statement. The LECC recommended that the officer responsible for this internal investigation 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, Your Honor Judge James Wood [who presided over a royal commission into corruption within the NSW police in the 90s] He said actions such as collusion between officers and giving false witness statements constituted a ‘gross distortion of police powers and brought the police into disrepute’. [force]’. “The same situation is valid today,” he said.

“Without corroborating evidence, it is very difficult for defendants to prove that police testimony was false or misleading. The deception in this case was revealed because the man recorded the police’s actions and that recording could be retrieved after it was ‘lost’.”

The LECC report, published on Wednesday, found that the initial arrest was unlawful; that the officer, known as Som1, took Civ1’s phone, deleted the recording and then cut six seconds of CCTV footage from the summary of evidence to conceal the fact that he had deleted the recording; Som1 made fabricated statements about Civ1’s crimes; and that officers Som1 and Som2 fabricated evidence in court and gave false statements under oath.

The commission will ask the DPP questions about crimes such as perjury, fabricating evidence, tampering with evidence and common assault.

The officer conducting the internal investigation acknowledged he could have been more thorough and said he “didn’t have the resources he needed to conduct that type of investigation” and was ill-equipped to do things like seize his cellphone.

According to the report, the investigation “raised serious concerns about some current practices within the NSW policing force regarding the preparation of statements, the review of criminal complaints and the use of privacy frames on CCTV at police stations”.