by James Morton
Recent reports of police officers hobnobbing with bikie-gang members in rural Victoria and at high-end city functions suggest that the lines between the gang in blue and those they pursue may be blurring. Just as organised crime has put moles in place in both business and government, it will be interesting to see when, rather than if, the first motorcycle-gang mole planted in a force is unearthed.
16
CONTROLLING CORRUPTION: WHERE TO FROM HERE?
Whether it is possible to safeguard officers from corruption will be the big question for the twenty-first century. An officer at the 1972 Knapp Commission on the New York police made the definitive statement:
There are three kinds of men in the department … I call them the birds, the grass eaters and the meat eaters. The birds just fly up. They don’t eat anything, either because they are honest or because they don’t have any good opportunities. The grass eaters, well they’ll accept a cup of coffee or a free meal or a television set wholesale from a merchant but they draw a line. The meat eaters are different. They’re out looking. They’re on a pad with gamblers, they deal in junk, or they’ll compromise a homicide investigation for money.
So how and why does a young constable become bent? If you assume there is any scanning process on entry to eliminate potentially corrupt officers, corruption can be seen to begin after the recruit has signed on. Obviously there will be exceptions, such as the children of previously corrupt officers—Monkey Fergusson and his son Don are a fine example—who already know the ropes. But it seems clear that officers are generally corrupted after they join the force.
Nearly 150 years ago barrister Howard Vincent, assisting the 1877 inquiry into Scotland Yard’s CID, wrote:
I am also of the opinion that it is impossible for the majority of men to be in contact for any length of time with all the worst features of human nature, in its most repulsive aspects, without incurring the most enormous danger of moral contagion. Proofs of this are unfortunately not wanting.
More recently, about forty years ago sociologist William Ker Muir Jr argued that all police officers faced a basic conflict. No matter what, sooner or later a recruit would find themself in a situation from which they could not exit without corrupting themself. A former New Scotland Yard detective puts the situation rather sourly. He is, of course, speaking specifically of England, but it might just as well be Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia or New South Wales—or Detroit or Paris, for that matter:
If Bill Bloggs joins the Met and goes to Hendon [training school] even at the early stage he may see that the Job is very much a closed shop; there may be hints that minor forms of impropriety will be overlooked, that what was referred to as being ‘institutionally racial’ is in real terms nothing but the harmless canteen culture and that the lily can always be gilded—so long as it is not over-embellished.
Arriving at his first station, this will come home to him even more and in those first weeks he has the choice to stay (and forcibly become part or it) or go. There is no middle ground: if he decides to stay but to be aloof, he will be so unpopular and shunned that life will be misery and, without doubt, the day will come when he will be required to play some part in something which will offend his principles—‘noble cause’ stuff.
So he stays. There will be a few ‘noble cause’ matters perhaps, but he will be one of the lads, part of the great spectrum. Time passes and he is promoted, perhaps even to high rank—but those who remain beneath him back at the station will know that he is far from white and in the event of problems he can be relied on to help. And those above him (who have done it all before) will also know that he is ‘to be trusted’.
You ask how it can be stopped: in a word, it can’t. Power corrupts, doesn’t it, in no matter what field! Many [policemen] feel that Mark [the commissioner who took over the Met police after the scandals of the flying, porn and vice squads in the 1960s and 1970s] did irreparable damage. Okay, the CID was bent to some extent, but they did the job. The villains went to gaol, serious crime was sorted out, the gangs sent away—probably screaming ‘fit-up’ as they went—but all was seen to be in order; the price for what was excellent policing being turning a blind eye to a degree of naughtiness along the way. That, many feel, is better than today where no-one does anything, the copper is scared of being sued, political correctness rules over all and if the WPC is referred to (in jest) as ‘the station bike’ she can sue for God knows how much.
Did not the public have a better crack of the whip pre-Mark? Today, do not the public have the policing they richly deserve?
He could have added the fear that when the non-cooperator is in a dangerous situation his calls for aid will not be answered as swiftly as calls from those whose feet are under the canteen table.
One former Victorian officer thinks that the induction into corruption is not so swift but that when it occurs it is deadly. ‘For the first two years, your head goes up with power. That’s when they decide to go one way or another. It’s about power rather than the money. But once a copper puts a wad in his pocket he’s gone forever.’
So a senior officer who is now trying to eradicate corruption is highly likely to have experienced it at first hand in their younger days and at the time they may have participated or turned a blind eye. If the former, they are at the mercy of their colleagues. If they lean on them too heavily they have a perfect response and the officer, because of their senior position, has more to lose. They may be able to cut a plea bargain by naming the officer. In turn he or she may not have an officer senior to them to name.
It is the whole police culture that lends itself to corruption. For a start the possibility of serious injury promotes a high degree of solidarity within the work group—as it does in other professions where there is a similarly high risk of injury; for example, among fire fighters and steeplechase jockeys—and encourages bonding. For the most part loyalty is to the group rather than to the wider entity. In a paper for the Queensland police department in relation to the Fitzgerald inquiry, Harrison, Hohenhaus and Pitman set out the characteristics that supported a belief in ‘solidarity through secrecy’. In turn, that bonding can lead to a willingness to cover up. ‘Straight’ detectives may well know of incidents of dishonesty or violence, but because of the close links they have with the offending officer they are less likely to dob them in than are people faced with dishonesty in other occupations, say a supermarket manager who discovers that a cashier has been stealing. ‘Secrecy is loyalty: secrecy is solidarity.’
One sociological explanation that has worldwide support is the sub-culture theory. It runs that a sub-culture is a group inside the host group. So in policing the host group stands for discipline, law and order, integrity and social harmony, while the sub-culture, or canteen culture, stands for drinking, whoring, excitement, fighting, racism and so on. Sociologist Maurice Punch has argued that the police organisation is not a harmonious integrated entity with a comforting consensus but ‘is rather characterised by a deeply divided pattern of semi-autonomous and often conflicting units’.
A second explanation is that policing is full of strain and contradiction: police are set very difficult targets to achieve and because of the controls and hurdles they have to jump, bending of the rules is the only way to achieve them. In their paper for the Fitzgerald inquiry, Harrison, Hohenhaus and Pitman wrote, ‘The demands made on the police are so diffuse and contradictory that the police task is unworkable and this leads to an atmosphere of “duplicity and hypocrisy” and of methods bordering on “trickery and stealth”’—in other words, the Machiavellian concept of the end justifying the means. In this police are aided by the public’s complicity. Provided that someone is arrested and convicted and the streets are, for the time being, safe, the general public does not mind too much if it is not the right person. One example of this is the convictions of Darryl Beamish and John Button in Western Australia when the real culprit who had been terrorising post-Second World War Perth was Edgar Cooke.
If the wrong person is convicted the police can justify this internally with the argument that it was the fault of lawyers, juries, judges. If convictions are quashed then it is the fault of appeal judges in allowing these people back on the streets. There is also a tendency within police to close ranks. If a conviction does not follow an arrest, again it is not the fault of police but of corrupt defence lawyers, incompetent prosecutors, fools on the jury and weak judges.
A third suggestion is that of control, which in police work is difficult to establish. More than in any other work, discretion is exercised in the public interest. The officer can take action or not; they might make further inquiries or not. There is no sensible way of reviewing this discretion, but it has the potential for corruption.
In the 1970s in a European conference on policing, London Detective Chief Superintendent John Simmonds advanced six reasons for officers becoming corrupt and they still ring true. The first is frustration with the court, which the officer in the case believes has dealt too leniently with the accused. Next time they will deal with the criminal themselves—perhaps a few biffs, such as those New South Wales’ rugby league–playing Bumper Farrell would hand out in the city’s Kings Cross area to show who is the boss and to induce a bit of respect. What’s so bad about giving a career criminal a bit of a hiding? The result can be mutually beneficial: the officer feels good that they have administered summary justice and the ‘defendant’ does not get another conviction logged against them. However, the drowning of Dr Duncan, who was thrown into Adelaide’s Torrens River, is another—extreme—example of this kind of thinking. Homophobic officers were punishing gay men because the courts generally did not deal with them in the way the officers wanted. Sections of the public felt that Victoria’s armed robbery squad also displayed this sort of attitude when some eleven young men suspected (in one case almost certainly wrongly) of serious crime were shot dead between 1987 and 1989. This led to reprisals and the execution of two young officers, who were ambushed and shot to death on 12 October 1988.
The second is greed—bent for self. There are signs that forces such as Queensland’s are looking at officers with problems such as debts, excessive drinking, gambling and so on, and are setting up early-intervention counselling to reduce the temptation to take bribes to feed such habits.
The third is very low-level corruption: chance temptation, such as not handing in all the money found in a lost wallet. Integrity testing is now being used more extensively worldwide to weed out suspect officers. In the United States in one post-Knapp sting in Brooklyn’s 77th Precinct a drug dealer who complained that the police were stealing cash and drugs from him was wired and obtained evidence against two officers. In turn they dominoed, dobbing in their colleagues until thirteen officers were suspended. In Los Angeles it turned out that members of the burglar alarm response unit were looting the stores after answering calls. Integrity officers then set up a fake alarm in a store where expensive electronic equipment left a mark on anyone who touched it. The final haul involved a number of officers and a truckful of electronic equipment.
In one of New South Wales’ first integrity tests after the Wood Royal Commission, Senior Constable Gregory Joseph Sweeney stole cash in a pre-arranged trap. In a scenario reminiscent of the ‘long’ con in which a variety of players act out a pre-arranged script, a Nissan car was reported stolen to Sweeney, who was told that there was a missing vanity bag in the car. Sweeney found the car and in turn was filmed pocketing $270 from the bag. He received a two-year good-behaviour bond. In 1997 more than twenty officers in New South Wales failed various other integrity tests set up by Deputy Commissioner Mal Brammer. These often involved fellow officers, disguised as members of the public, putting temptation in the way of the targeted high-risk officer. Commissioner Peter Ryan bravely explained that since the men being tested were suspect anyway it was likely that there would be a high percentage of failures.
The fourth of Simmonds’ reasons was coercion, which he rightly considered the most insidious form of police corruption. Officers are placed by their peer group in a position where they are suborned into corrupt practices. Often it takes a basic test to establish the strength of the individual and find out how far they will go. If the officer shows strong character, the matter will be laughed off and the corrupt core of officers will ensure that he or she is not in a position to inform on them. An example of this is straight officers who are not used in raids on gaming clubs when cash will be swept into the raiding officers’ pockets. Coupled with coercion is the fifth explanation—misguided loyalty to the group, and not the force and the public.
The last occurs because of mistakes that have to be covered up. One example is where a murder takes place, but before the body is discovered a beat officer finds a hammer in a hedge nearby and takes it home. He later realises what has happened and tells his sergeant, who tells him to put the hammer back where he found it, to be discovered later by detectives.
It is common to think that police corruption is a thing of the past—that, surely, with all the safeguards in place, all these alphabet committees and boards such as PIC, NIC, ACC, CMC and so on, things really are back to rotten apples rather than rotten orchards. If so, good: this book will then serve simply as a historical document. But, as humourist Damon Runyan wrote, ‘It is not the way to bet’. In March 2013 it was announced that there would be an inquiry into corruption and cover-ups in London’s Met police going back over the last twenty years. Asked how he thought deviance could be contained, journalist and former policeman CH Rolph said:
I don’t think it can. It’s universal and endemic. It invades every level of administration and government in every country. If ever ‘social ethics’ became an educational subject which had a firmer basis than mythological religions, which themselves eat away at the communal importance of truth, I mean simply telling the truth, the chances would begin to improve.
The key words in eliminating corruption are education and supervision. Professor David Dixon of the University of New South Wales said that, though things had improved substantially:
Police corruption also has to be seen not as deviance but as the way things used to be done. There has been a broader change in police culture. Formerly the recruits were young men in a working class job that wasn’t very different from any other working class occupation. The influence of women in the police is significant and Christine Nixon must be thanked for that. Now effectively in New South Wales a degree is required for entry and there are links between Charles Sturt University and police college.
Of course there will be resistance. Old timers, seen as dinosaurs by reformers, resent seeing what was once their force—now service—turned into what they see as something resembling the Salvos. They may change, but it will be in the Marxist way of maintaining the status quo.
The general, if perhaps optimistic, view is that Australia will never again see the systematic corruption of the Askin and Bjelke-Petersen years. ‘The massive corruption of whole sections couldn’t happen now. There are too many whistleblowers. You couldn’t have it where a man like Krahe could run for years’, as journalist Richard Hall wrote in 1986. Much will also depend on the press. In the past journalists were protective of their sources, whom they would praise to the skies. Bill Jenkings, who worshipped Fred Krahe, is an example. The Sydney and Melbourne editions of Truth were at least critical of the police, but Queensland’s edition was protective of the corrupt Bischof. What will not help is the courts’ current attitude to suppression orders, which can last for years. ‘Secrecy is solidarity.’
Report after report to a large extent lays the blame for police misconduct on lack of management supervision. Of course, a chief commissioner cannot be expected to know if a constable breaks wind in the bush, but his superior ought to know, and in turn that man’s superior should know and so on.
Whistleblower Simon Illingworth believes that a three-pronged preventative campaign against police corruption must be maintained:
Ethi
cal decision-making must be taught and reinforced until it becomes second nature. Focus should be on ensuring the culture is correct across all ranks from senior officers down to new recruits so they can ‘buy in’. That way corrupt employees will fear the honest employees, not vice versa. This will increase the risk of reporting and sanctioning less than honourable conduct.
While Professor David Dixon believes:
If there is to be further corruption it will not be the kind of corruption of the past. We have a more politically sophisticated society today. The corruption will no longer be the brown bag variety but harder to define as criminality.
And Queensland lawyer, writer and lecturer Chris Nyst thinks:
At the moment, all is quiet on the Western front. But politicians of all persuasions know getting tough on crime is good politics. And unfortunately unqualified support for ‘our boys in blue’ historically has meant turning a blind eye to police misbehaviour. Once the rules go out the window for the sake of political expedience, it’s only a matter of time before corruption takes a foot-hold.
The days of corruption on the heroic scale of Queensland in the 1980s, New South Wales from the 1960s and Victoria over the decades are probably gone, but that does not mean that the plethora of integrity boards and intervention schemes to help officers with drink, gambling and other problems have won outright. No one will be foolish enough to say that corruption in the police or any other public service can be eradicated. At best it can be managed. But there are again signs that there are troubles at the top. On 4 May 2014 constitutional lawyer and commentator Eric Dyrenfurth, writing in The Age, slammed Victoria’s new Independent Broad-Based Anti-Corruption Commission as a ‘puny toothless tiger’ shackled by ‘chicken hearted legislation’. In 2014 in New South Wales the police minister stood down over allegations of non-police related corruption. There have also been allegations that Operation Mascot, which investigated over 100 New South Wales officers in 1999, was founded on false information and a perjured affidavit. It is alleged that its flawed basis was covered up for over a decade. Whether a full inquiry will follow remains to be seen.