For Victoria Police the closing decades of the twentieth century and the nascent years of the ensuing century were action packed. An era of untold violence, it was also a time of significant industrial and social upheaval. The 1980s witnessed the beginnings of bloodshed of a kind not seen before in Melbourne, as the gangland killings extended into the 1990s and the next century. It was an era when the policeman’s lot became the policewoman’s lot, too; when Victorian forensic scientists led the world with developments in DNA research; when, on many fronts, police leaders were challenged by accusations of systemic racial profiling, underscoring the multicultural and socio-economic mix of the world in which they worked; when rampant rates of domestic violence and crimes against women confronted all Australians, demanding that police do more; and when child pornography and child sexual abuse shocked and disgusted a nation. And when a ubiquitous, toxic drug nicknamed ‘ice’ wasted young lives and was anything but cool. It was also an age when citizens took to the streets in their thousands, reclaiming public space and the city after dark: creating a paradigm shift that heightened community symbiosis and witnessed an unprecedented focus on criminal justice and public policy, notably on the parole system.
Chief Commissioner S. I. ‘Mick’ Miller led the way and was the genesis of much of the police response to this change. Arguably the most influential Australian police commissioner of the twentieth century, he not only consistently set new benchmarks for others to follow but spawned the new centurions. A cadre of Victoria Police officers at the top of their game, they were selected to head police departments in South Australia, Western Australia, Queensland, Vanuatu and Tasmania. Other Victorian police were appointed to senior positions in the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence (ABCI), NCA, National Police Research Unit, Queensland Criminal Justice Commission and Queensland Police Service.
Always in a state of flux due to workforce attrition at command level, the policing landscape changed frequently. Kel Glare, one of Miller’s acolytes, replaced him as chief commissioner in 1987. Neil Comrie was enticed back from a stint in post-Fitzgerald Queensland to replace Glare in 1993. He in turn was succeeded by New South Wales assistant commissioner Christine Nixon. Appointed in 2001, she was the first woman to head a police service in Australia. And this was a harbinger of things to come. Nixon was succeeded in 2009 by Simon Overland, whom she had initially head-hunted from the Australian Federal Police after a chance meeting in Alice Springs. His short stint in office ended prematurely in a bitter political imbroglio in 2011. In a populist return to the status quo, Overland was succeeded by Ken Lay. Nixon’s former chief of staff and a career member of the force, Lay was a beneficiary of the ‘Bradbury factor’. In a clear indication of the demanding nature of the role of chief commissioner on incumbents and their families, Lay, like Comrie, Nixon and Overland before him, opted to retire early.
Graham Ashton, who had previously served as a deputy commissioner in both the Australian Federal Police and Victoria Police, replaced Lay in 2015. In a first for Australian policing, Ashton’s command team for a time included two female deputy commissioners: Lucinda Nolan and Wendy Steendam. They had previously been appointed assistant commissioners, West and East respectively, by Overland on 11 June 2010. Nolan, the force’s first female deputy commissioner, was appointed deputy commissioner (strategy and organisational development) in 2012. An exemplar of policing in the twenty-first century, she was married to a police officer and was a mother of three children, including a son with Asperger’s syndrome. Nolan served with the Victoria Police for thirty-two years and excelled in every aspect of her career. She held a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) and a Master of Arts from the University of Melbourne, and her string of post-tertiary qualifications included a stint at Harvard University. Dux of her police training squad, she was an accomplished general duties officer and investigator who also duxed her Detective Training School course and in 1989 was adjudged DTS Student of the Year. No mere armchair theorist, in 1991 she was seconded for three years to the Spectrum Task Force. Following the appointment of Ashton, Nolan resigned on 9 November 2015 to take up the ill-fated position of CEO at the Country Fire Authority.1
Prior to leaving the force Nolan was joined briefly by Deputy Commissioner Wendy Steendam, who officially commenced her new role on 7 September 2015. A thirty-year veteran with an eclectic policing background, one of Steendam’s major strengths was her extensive experience in policy development and implementation at both supervisory and senior management levels. She was appointed chief information officer and was involved in the development of the Victoria Police’s violence against women and children strategy. A holder of the cutting-edge Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG) degree Executive Master of Public Administration, her initial brief as deputy commissioner was to ‘look at innovative opportunities to enhance the way Victoria Police worked’.
It signalled yet another fresh beginning for the force, which was still watched over with abiding interest by Mick Miller. His sage advice to Christine Nixon on her appointment counselled: ‘You have been given temporary custody of a police organisation which has existed since 1853 and which, during that time, has experienced the highs and lows of its development to what it is today. You are not the first to have been accorded this honour and you will not be the last. Depending upon how [you] address your responsibilities, you could prove to be the best. However, that will be for history to judge’. And in a prescient last word he reminded Simon Overland: ‘Nothing is forever …’
We trained hard—but every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.
In the last decade of the twentieth century, the above satirical quotation by ‘Project Arbiter’ was displayed in police offices throughout Victoria. This insubordinate lampooning of mismanagement grew from its initial use by force command as the title for what became a generally unpopular administrative reform project. It was an apt description of the force, which in the years following 1984 underwent tumultuous organisational disruption. The fabric of the force was being rent from within and without, moving Chief Commissioner Kel Glare to express concern at the ‘levels of disquiet’ and plead, ‘Policing has never been easy—there is no job where so much is asked, so consistently, and under such stressful and thankless conditions’. He went on to say, ‘but trying to institute change in a police force is no easier’.2
The force was no stranger to violence, but a series of events during the 1980s surpassed even the Kelly years for wanton bloodshed, and the 1980s remain the bloodiest decade in the history of the Victoria Police. Some of this violence was perpetrated by police and much of it was directed at them. Other atrocities to touch the force were random mass killings committed in public places, where lone gunmen killed and maimed innocent victims; and the perpetration of vicious aggravated burglaries, principally targeting young girls in their own homes.
The worst of the atrocities, which investigators suspected spanned a decade, remain unsolved, and were attributed to a lone offender dubbed ‘Mr Cruel’ by sections of the Melbourne media. Although the first of these callous crimes is believed to have occurred around 1985, it was the criminal abductions of two girls, Nicola Lynas and Karmein Chan, who were taken from their family homes in July 1990 and April 1991 respectively, that shocked the nation. Karmein was murdered. These abductions led to one of the most complex police investigations undertaken in Australia. The Spectrum Task Force, formed in 1991, did not catch Mr Cruel and was disbanded in January 1994, but in the course of its investigations members of the forty-strong task force travelled throughout Australia, analysed more than 10 000 items of information, checked 30 000 homes with possible links to the abductions and murder, examined more than 27 000 persons of interest, and conducted interviews in Britain and the USA. Although the Chan murder remained unsolved, a by-product of Spectrum’s investigations was the prosecution of seventy-four people for offences including rape, incest, blackmail and possession of child pornography.3
The first of the multiple murders occurred on 9 August 1987, when Julian Knight walked along Hoddle Street, Clifton Hill, indiscriminately shooting at passers-by, killing seven people and injuring nineteen others. He was later arrested near the scene, but the horror of his crimes traumatised many police and community members and necessitated an ongoing programme of individual and community counselling. Knight pleaded guilty to the murders and was sentenced to life imprisonment. The Hoddle Street shootings were still affecting the lives of many Melburnians when, on 8 December 1987, Frank Vitkovic entered an Australia Post building in Queen Street and went on a shooting rampage, killing eight people before killing himself by jumping from an upper floor of the building. It remains the worst mass murder in Victoria’s history.
These crimes profoundly affected the Victorian community and sparked intense public debate on a range of law-and-order issues, in particular the question of gun control and the broader issues of future directions for policing and enabling powers for police. The force, after five years of Labor government, was the most legislatively restricted police service in Australia. It lacked basic powers available to police in most English-speaking countries, such as the power to obtain photographs, fingerprints and biological specimens from criminal suspects. Chief Commissioner Miller had lamented in 1985 that ‘The lack of these enabling powers produces some incredible consequences’. Two years later, in his final annual report, he expressed regret that he had been unsuccessful in obtaining enabling powers ‘available to other Australian police forces’, further observing that civil libertarians had ‘remained strangely silent about the fate of victims of crime’. He thought that this lack of action reflected ‘a preoccupation with philosophical abstraction at the expense of practical reality’.4
Stark evidence of the practical realities of policing during the force’s deadliest decade can be found in the plethora of motor vehicle accidents, shootings and other violent incidents that befell twenty-one members killed on duty in the space of ten years. Despite the publicity surrounding police shootings, the ‘deadliest weapon’ was in fact police motorcycles, which caused Miller to lament that the dangers ‘faced by police motorcyclists every time they took their bikes onto the roads were demonstrable, because as a unit of the force, they incurred a higher fatality rate than any other unit, squad or branch’. In the years from 1950 to 1979 twelve police motorcyclists were killed on duty, followed by a further four in the early 1980s; six of these were on Miller’s watch. This ‘alarming fatality rate’ prompted Miller in 1982 to convene an assembly at the Police Academy of every available police motorcyclist. His ultimatum to them was a threat ‘to abolish the use of motorcycles as a component of the Traffic Operations Group, if there was another accidental police motorcycle fatality in the next six months’. As a call to action Miller’s ultimatum was a masterstroke that served as a catalyst for changes in police motorcycle-rider culture, policy and practice. Not only was his six-month challenge met, but the remaining five years of his commissionership were free of operational police motorcyclist fatalities, the only death being that of Senior Constable Peter Ross Smith in 1987, when on a training ride his motorcycle left the road and struck a tree. Since his death there has not been a police motorcycle fatality in Victoria.
Almost on a par with the rate of police motorcycle-rider deaths was the number of members killed in motor-car accidents. In the 1980s, eight members were killed in car accidents, including the force’s first multiple-vehicle fatality. Constables Walter Hewitt and Shaun Moynihan were killed on 27 November 1981 when, in pursuit of a speeding motorcyclist, their police vehicle collided with a divisional van. A further six members were killed in motor-vehicle accidents in the 1990s, but the most poignant incident occurred in 2000, when senior constables Fiona Robinson and Mark Bateman died in the second multiple police vehicle fatality in the force’s history. At 2.20 a.m. on 20 May 2000, the Northcote divisional van, an older-style Holden Commodore van, was responding to a burglar alarm. Travelling along High Street, Northcote at a relatively slow speed (estimated at 37 km/h), with its emergency lights operating and in the course of overtaking slower traffic, the van clipped another vehicle before rolling and smashing, roof first, into a utility pole. Robinson and Bateman were killed instantly.
The iconic police ‘divvy vans’ had been the ubiquitous front-line workhorses of the force for decades, but were always bedevilled by design shortcomings and inherent operational limitations. Just as the death rate of police motorcyclists led to significant changes in motorcycle usage, the deaths of Robinson and Bateman prompted a force-wide review of police vehicle safety, with a particular focus on the design and safety of divisional vans. An investigation into the accident found that the model of van used by Robinson and Bateman ‘was twice as likely to tip over in a collision as the utilities previously used by the force’. As a result, 148 Commodore vans were recalled and as an interim measure were replaced with a new fleet of modified Ford utilities.
Concomitant with this action was the development of a fleet safety strategy and the production of a custom-built four-door Holden police divisional van that set new national standards for safety, stability and functionality. Built by Holden Australia in consultation with the Monash University Accident Research Centre, prototypes were road-tested by police in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland before the van was launched in Victoria in March 2006. In a tribute to Robinson and Bateman, Northcote was the first police station to receive a new van in an initial roll-out of 140 vans across Victoria. Since then, none of the new-age ‘divvy vans’ have been involved in a fatal collision.5
Although motor-vehicle accidents accounted for most police deaths, fatal incidents involving the use of firearms, whether accidental or felonious, attracted the most public attention and controversy. During the 1980s seven members were shot and killed, including Constable Neil Clinch, who died at Fawkner on 5 April 1987 after being accidently shot in the head by a colleague in the course of restraining an armed offender.
2005 Crewman divisional van
The first police homicide of the decade occurred on 28 January 1982. Senior Constable Stephen Henry was patrolling the Hume Highway between Melbourne and Seymour on solo motorcycle duty when he was shot and mortally wounded at Wandong by Peter Reid, an escapee from a Sydney mental hospital. Henry was attempting to intercept Reid for traffic offences when Reid shot him in the head with a sawn-down .303 rifle. Henry never regained consciousness and died in hospital on 1 March 1982.
The next fatal shooting of a police member was the tragic death of Constable Claire Bourke in the watch-house at the Sunshine police station. On 16 March 1983, she was shot and killed in a ‘joke’ by Dog Squad member Senior Constable Michael Duffy. Mistakenly thinking that his firearm was loaded with a ‘blank’, he pointed the gun at Bourke and pulled the trigger, shooting her through the heart with a live round. Duffy was suspended from duty and charged with manslaughter but was acquitted by a jury.
These fatal shootings, of and by police respectively, were followed in a matter of months by the cold-blooded murder of Senior Constable Lindsay Forsythe, the officer-in-charge of the one-member police station at Maldon. Forsythe’s wife, Gayle, was having an affair with Senior Constable Leigh Lawson of Castlemaine. During the evening of 22 June 1983, Gayle lured her husband to a deserted location by lying to him that ‘an old lady had reported a suspicious light in a farmhouse’. On arriving at the scene, Forsythe was ambushed by Lawson and blasted at point-blank range with a shotgun. Lawson was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, while Gayle was convicted of manslaughter.
On 22 November 1984, Sergeant Ron Fenton was shot in the head at Beaumaris. The gunman, Kai Veli Korhonen, was a psychopath who had earlier murdered an unarmed security guard and was also responsible for shooting a news helicopter, causing $75 000 damage. (Fenton was critically wounded but recovered sufficiently to eventually return to duty.) This was followed on 18 June 1985 by the shooting of Sergeant Brian Stooke and Senior Constable Peter Steele, who were both wounded while questioning a burglary suspect at Cheltenham. A few hours later the same gunman was encountered by Sergeant Ray Kirkwood and Constable Graeme Sayce at Noble Park. Kirkwood was shot and wounded; Sayce, trapped in a police car, narrowly escaped injury when the offender repeatedly shot into it, shattering the headrest of Sayce’s seat and grazing his head with a bullet. The mayhem did not end there. Shortly afterwards, dog-handler Senior Constable Gary Morrell was shot by the same offender and only saved from serious injury by his ballistic vest. The gunman was identified as Max Clarke, alias Pavel Marinoff or ‘Mad Max’, and after an exhaustive manhunt he was killed in a gun battle with police at Wallan on 25 February 1986. Sergeant John Kapetanovski and Senior Constable Rod MacDonald were seriously hurt in the shoot-out and subsequently received valour awards.
The wounding of so many police in such a short space of time was yet another example of the violence that was a hallmark of the 1980s. An unprecedented fifty-five valour awards were presented during this time, a number that was well in excess of that for any other decade since the inception of the award a century earlier. In 1983 Paul Mullett, then a detective senior constable in the Major Crime Squad, became only the third member to receive the award a second time, in circumstances that his superiors described as ‘bravery and professionalism … displaying exceptional courage far beyond the norm’.
Chief Commissioner Miller described the shootings during this period as among ‘the blackest few hours in Victorian police history’, and with sad prescience added, ‘These were not the first Victorian policemen to have become casualties as a result of criminal attack. Nor, regrettably, will they be the last’.
On the Thursday before Easter, on 27 March 1986, a car bomb was exploded outside the Russell Street Police Complex. The blast hurled debris over the ten-storey building, shattering every window up to the seventh floor and causing property damage estimated at $1 million. It also injured twenty-two police and civilians and killed Constable Angela Taylor, who sustained serious burns to most of her body. Taylor was a bright and popular constable who had graduated as dux of her recruit squad little more than a year earlier. In his eulogy the police surgeon, Dr Peter Bush, described her as a ‘symbol of youth, of dedication and loyalty, of efficiency and discipline. She is also a symbol of vulnerability’.
Four men stood trial for the bombing, an act motivated by a hatred of police. The car, packed with about fifty sticks of gelignite, was originally intended to detonate inside the Police Complex quadrangle but was instead detonated at a main door while the offenders waited nearby to observe the result. The miracle was that only one person was killed. The cowardly bombing—and in particular the death of Taylor—shook the force, generating a solidarity born of fear, anger and bitterness and moving even the usually gracious Miller to sourly note that, of hundreds of tributes and expressions of sympathy received from all over Australia, there was ‘not one tribute from any of the civil liberties groups’. Nor would there be.
Within months these same sentiments again swept the force when Senior Constable Maurice Moore was murdered at Maryborough. On 27 September 1986 Moore was returning to the station from his home, where he had gone to get some milk for his night-shift crew, when he encountered two men stealing a motor vehicle. Soon after, Moore was dead—shot five times with his own service revolver. The murderer was a well-known local identity named Robert Nowell, who had a reputation for violence and a hatred of police.
The abhorrent and unprecedented wave of extreme violence was not restricted to murderous attacks on police. On 24 November 1986, the peace in Caroline Street, Toorak was shattered when a car bomb exploded in the car park of the Turkish Consulate, killing Hagop Levonian, one of two terrorists involved in the attack. It was suspected by investigators that the bomb had detonated prematurely. Levon Demirian, a resident of Sydney with links to an Armenian terrorist group, was charged and convicted of murder and conspiracy, but on appeal to the full Supreme Court the murder conviction was quashed. Wayne Rotherham was a detective in the Major Crime Squad who attended at the scene, and he later lamented that the bombing came at a time ‘when the world seemed to be going mad and everything was becoming more complicated’.
The criminal crusade of violence then washing over the force and the community at large did not end with the deaths of Taylor and Moore or the Turkish Consulate bombing, but climaxed on 12 October 1988 when constables Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre were ambushed and murdered in cold blood in Walsh Street, South Yarra. The two young constables were responding to a call to check an unattended suspect vehicle and were blasted at close range with a shotgun in what was generally accepted as an ‘ambush and execution of two police because they were police’.
Four well-known criminals stood trial charged with the murders: Victor Peirce, Anthony Farrell, Peter McEvoy and Trevor Pettingill. All four were controversially acquitted at the Supreme Court in Melbourne on 26 March 1991 when a key witness, Peirce’s de facto wife Wendy, reneged on an undertaking to give vital evidence against the accused men; Wendy was subsequently convicted of perjury. Following the 2002 gangland murder of Victor Peirce, in a belated dénouement in 2005, Wendy Peirce publicly admitted that Victor had organised and participated in the killings of Tynan and Eyre.
There is little doubt that Tynan and Eyre were murdered by members of Melbourne’s criminal underworld as payback killings for the death of convicted armed robber Graeme Jensen, who had been shot and killed by police only thirteen hours before the Walsh Street shootings. A violent career criminal, Jensen had committed his first bank robbery when aged only fifteen. Eight members of the Armed Robbery Squad intercepted him when he was alone and allegedly armed in his car at Narre Warren. All eight detectives were subsequently indicted for murder but only one, Robert Hill, who fired the fatal shot, stood trial for the killing; he was acquitted on 9 August 1995.6
One police death linked inextricably to the death of Jensen and the imbroglio surrounding him was the suicide of Homicide Squad Detective Senior Sergeant John Hill. A highly respected investigator who had joined the force in 1967, Hill investigated the shooting of Jensen, collecting twenty-five exhibits and interviewing 145 people for a 503-page inquest brief. Despite his belief that his investigation was comprehensive, he was ‘torn apart’ at the inquest and subsequently charged on direct presentment by the director of public prosecutions, Bernard Bongiorno, QC, with being an accessory to murder ‘in that he impeded the investigation’. Of this insensitive treatment at the hands of the legal system his wife noted: ‘We had to take the deeds of the house to court so John could make bail. He then had to report to the local police station as part of his bail conditions. It was so humiliating for him’. He never recovered from that ordeal, either personally or professionally, and took his own life in 1993. After the acquittal of Hill on a charge of murder, Chief Commissioner Neil Comrie broke his public silence on the matter and said of Hill’s death, ‘John Hill was regarded as the ultimate Homicide Squad detective. He was the mentor to whom all other Homicide Squad detectives turned for guidance and inspiration. His death was a tragic loss to the force and the community. It will be felt for years to come’. The John Hill Memorial Award for most promising investigator was introduced in his honour in 1999.
Certain of Melbourne’s criminals had expressed fear and loathing of police over a number of fatal police shootings, and there was also considerable community disquiet at the frequency and nature of these shootings: at one point a television documentary described Victoria as the ‘police shootings capital of Australia’. Between 1982 and 1994 a total of thirty-four people were shot and killed by police in Victoria. This compared with fifteen for the rest of Australia, of which seven were in New South Wales. During 1988–89 there were seven fatal shootings by police in Victoria, including those of Jedd Houghton and Gary Abdallah, who were believed by some police to be linked to the deaths of Tynan and Eyre. Houghton, who was killed when Special Operations Group (SOG) police raided a caravan near Bendigo on 17 November 1988, was later described by Magistrate Hugh Adams as ‘an active participant in the Walsh Street murders’. Abdallah, who was never positively linked to the murders of Tynan and Eyre, died on 19 May 1989 after being shot seven times by police in Carlton on 9 April 1989, allegedly after he had threatened them with an imitation pistol. Two detectives, Clifton Lockwood and Dermot Avon, were charged by the director of public prosecutions with the murder of Abdallah, but they were acquitted after a Supreme Court trial in 1994.
Following the police shootings in 1988–89 there were widespread calls for a judicial or public inquiry. Subsequently the state coroner, Hal Hallenstein, conducted a coronial investigation that became known as the Police Shootings Inquiry. Hallenstein investigated seven deaths, including those of Jensen, Houghton and Abdallah, beginning his deliberations in July 1989 and finishing hearing evidence in December 1991. He produced 40 000 pages of evidentiary transcript but did not deliver his first findings—those relating to the death of Gerhard Sader, who was shot by police in 1988—until June 1994. Throughout this period the shootings by police continued, with a further nine people being killed in 1994 alone.
In his findings for the Sader matter, Hallenstein commented in general terms of all seven deaths that they reflected inadequate police training and a ‘police ethic and culture of public duty requiring courage in physical exposure to personal risk’. His unequivocal conclusion was that substantive change was needed to the operational use of firearms by police, a change ‘attainable only by implementing a tight, conservative and restructured firearms policy’.7
For many people the findings were too long in coming and the force was equally slow in developing its own response to stop the killings. In 1992 Father Peter Norden wrote:
There is serious concern in the community about police use of ‘deadly force’. Is it necessary for all police officers to carry firearms at all times? Have the occasions on which police have used their firearms always been justified? Are there any situations where police have killed citizens where it simply has not been necessary? Are there other strategic police responses which could have been implemented to avoid persons being killed in the course of police making arrests?
On 1 June 1989 the force formed the Firearms and Operational Survival Training Unit (FOSTU) to standardise and manage firearms and operational survival training, and also issued long polycarbonate batons to operational members on patrol, to fill the void between the use of bare hands and the use of firearms in dangerous situations. The introduction of FOSTU training and the issue of long batons was in part a belated response to the dual problems of killings of and by police. The emphasis on increased protection for police was symptomatic of the ‘vulnerability’ described by Peter Bush and starkly described by FOSTU in a monthly training bulletin: ‘There is no doubt that the dramatic escalation in violence over the past decade, and in particular the more recent period, has had a profound effect on members of the police force and the community in general. Incidents such as Queen Street, Hoddle Street, Walsh Street, Russell Street [bombing], the Turkish Consulate [bombing] and the Mad Max saga have catapulted the Victoria Police Force into the new decade, with a stark realisation for the need to reassess the way in which we train, prepare and equip our operational police to cope with front-line duties’.
During 1988 and 1989 more than two thousand police were assaulted—209 seriously—and police attended 166 incidents in which firearms were used or threatened to be used against them. The incidence of deadly force used against and by police in Victoria during these years was extraordinary, as was the force’s almost total absence of enabling powers. Many police thought that their relative operational vulnerability and impotence was both emboldening criminals and frustrating police, with fatal consequences. The escalation in fatal shootings by police was arguably due in part to their heightened sense of vulnerability and partly to FOSTU-enhanced proficiency in the use of firearms, which was not matched by the development of other conflict resolution skills.
It was not until 1994, amid calls for a royal commission, that the force adopted a range of significant initiatives to tackle the problem. In a flurry of activity, the force complemented its own internal reviews and the work of Hallenstein by initiating four independent reviews by the Australian Institute of Criminology, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the National Police Research Unit. Collectively these reviews, augmented by the findings of relevant coronial inquiries, resulted in 219 recommendations, which were constantly monitored. On 6 April 1994, the chief commissioner wrote to all commissioned officers espousing what was effectively the new force mantra, Safety First: ‘the success of an operation will primarily be judged by the extent to which the use of force is avoided or minimised’.
On 19 September 1994, Chief Commissioner Neil Comrie launched Project Beacon, with the goal to ‘effectively implement the minimal use of force philosophy as a key element in all force operations, whether planned or unplanned’. A high-profile programme initially headed by Assistant Commissioner Ray Shuey, Project Beacon commenced with 8100 police undergoing five days of intensive training on defensive tactics, conflict resolution, dealing with mentally impaired people, and the use of firearms. Comrie observed that Project Beacon ‘resulted in a remarkable cultural shift in the attitude of police which saw a significant decrease in police shootings and a reduction in injuries to police and others involved in critical incidents: in the 19 months to 30 June 1997 there was only one fatal shooting by police’. So successful was Project Beacon that it was embedded into the culture of the force and members were required to attend a two-day operational safety and tactics training course every six months.8
The operational vulnerability felt by the force was traumatic, but in an era of increasing public accountability and rapid reform there was little escape in the familiar surrounds of routine duties and police offices. This was exemplified throughout 1985–86 during the Continental Airlines imbroglio, an entanglement that led to the downfall of the governor of Victoria, Rear Admiral Sir Brian Murray, and the death of airline executive Robert Tanfield, together with the premature retirement of Assistant Commissioner Bob Stewart and the besmirching of almost twenty other police who were never charged with any criminal or disciplinary offences. The investigation centred on the acceptance by police and others of discounted airfares from Continental Airlines, allegedly provided by Tanfield and facilitated by Stewart. It lasted fourteen months, during which time 21 000 documents were examined and 235 people were interviewed. Amid suggestions of political interference and chicanery, details of the investigation, including the names of innocent officers, were leaked to the media, creating a public perception that there was indeed a ‘scandal’. In fact, the publicity, innuendo and accusations of criminal conduct came to nought: the charges against Stewart were never proceeded with, and six police were reprimanded for their indiscretion in accepting discount airfares. It was a testing period for Chief Commissioner Miller and his successor, the man who headed the probe, Assistant Commissioner Kel Glare, and highlighted the degree of organisational integrity sought but not always achieved for the force by these two men. It is debatable whether the sacrifice of innocent others in this process was justifiable. It did, however, set a national benchmark for police accountability in all forces.9
Mick Miller retired from the force on 28 November 1987 after forty years’ service, ten of them as chief commissioner. Although not a tertiary graduate himself, he championed the pursuit of higher education for police and fostered a cadre of influential senior officers who were almost all university educated.10 He tried to give policing a new focus that emphasised professional standards, personal integrity, public accountability, proactive community-based initiatives and sophisticated criminal investigation techniques. Miller was the elder statesman of Australian policing, with a national profile and a measure of influence and public credibility not achieved by any of his predecessors. He often stressed the importance of leaders identifying, fostering and grooming their successors and was confident that he had done so. However, there was a perception in sections of the force that his personal stature was such that his retirement left a worrisome void.11
Miller was succeeded as chief commissioner by Kelvin Glare, who was appointed by the Labor government of John Cain, Jr—the first Labor government appointment of a chief commissioner since Selwyn Porter’s appointment by the Labor ministry of John Cain, Sr in 1955. A career policeman with a degree in law, Glare had joined the force in 1957, qualifying as a fingerprint expert and also serving in the uniform branch and CIB at a number of suburban and rural locations. In the early 1970s he had been in the vanguard of a small group of police who undertook part-time university studies, very often without peer support or study leave and while still carrying a full-time police workload. Together with another police law graduate, Bill Horman, Glare later pioneered the implementation of specialist police prosecutors’ offices to conduct criminal prosecutions in the Magistrates’ Court jurisdiction. This initiative significantly raised the standard of police prosecutions and freed many sub-officers from an onerous task for which they were often not suited.
Before his appointment as chief commissioner, Glare held the positions of assistant commissioner (internal investigations; then operations) and deputy commissioner (operations). Whereas Miller had been a charismatic leader with a high personal profile, Glare was a dour administrator who lacked his predecessor’s commanding presence and gift for oratory. Evidence of this dissimilarity was the disquiet surrounding Glare’s notable absence at the funeral service for Damian Eyre in Shepparton on 14 October 1988. Although Glare might have had good reason, and he did make it to the funeral of Steven Tynan two days later in Melbourne, it would never have done for Miller, and demonstrated very publicly that there had been a change of style at the top. Glare later observed that his decision not to attend the funeral of Eyre was one that he ‘regretted for a long time after’.
The shift from Miller to Glare, with its inherent differences in management style and reform programmes, was accurately described by Glare as ‘one of the most turbulent transitional periods’ in the force’s history. It was exacerbated by government funding constraints and personnel shortages. In August 1985 the Police Service Board granted members of the force a thirty-eight-hour week, which it was agreed would be taken as an additional ten days’ leave each year. No allowance was made in police recruiting to compensate for this reduction in working hours. Initially, police were paid in lieu of their accrued time off, but from 1 January 1987 all 8978 members of the force were required to take their extra ten days’ leave—an effective annual loss of almost 18 000 working weeks or the equivalent of more than three hundred full-time personnel.
Chief Commissioner K. Glare
This diminution in the force’s ability to provide optimum levels of service to the community worsened significantly in 1987, when the Emergency Services Superannuation Act became effective in the form of the Emergency Services Superannuation Scheme (ESSS). The new scheme was created in recognition of ‘the arduous nature of emergency services, and the consequent need to provide operational officers with realistic options for early retirement’. Providing lucrative early retirement and vesting benefits for members, it sparked the most significant exodus of personnel from the force since the police strike in 1923. One of the main differences, however, was that the 1923 losses were almost solely from the constable ranks, whereas the ESSS opened the way for the departure of many mature and experienced officers. Chief Commissioner Miller described it as ‘an extraordinary brain drain’. It left the force with 78 per cent of all members being under the age of forty years. In the four years preceding the ESSS a total of 1318 members left the force, including 102 officers; during the next four years 3132 members departed, of whom 279 were officers, eleven of them commissioners. Although the loss of these people placed enormous pressure on those who remained, Miller expressed confidence that the force was resilient enough to cope. He was right: many members suddenly experienced a steep learning curve, but overall no critical aspect of the force’s operations foundered. Later, Chief Commissioner Glare gave the outcome of this exodus a positive focus, describing the majority of the force as young and articulate, a fresh force emerging into a new era of ‘stability and success’.12
But that was a mixture of prophecy and hope—first, there was more change and pain. The Committee of Inquiry into the Victoria Police Force, known as the Neesham Committee, presented its report containing 220 recommendations for action to the minister, Race Mathews, in 1985. An implementation steering committee chaired by the minister and including the chief commissioner and a joint working party, chaired by the secretary of the ministry and including the Police Association and Public Service Association, were subsequently formed to examine and progressively implement the Neesham Committee recommendations, some of which were as prosaic as a proposal to examine ‘the relative merits of police torches’, but others of which were far-reaching and led to major administrative changes.13
Project Arbiter was the name given to the programme of administrative reform that grew from the Neesham Committee proposals. It was a reorganisation that at times produced confusion and demoralisation, an experience that caused some lamentation in hindsight that the project title was too negative—and too apt. At different points in the Arbiter process, Chief Commissioner Glare lamented that the force was ‘going through a painful era’ and said that he was concerned that it was ‘being undermined by selfishness, rumours, misinformation and gossip’. Resistance to the changes in some sections of the force was openly subversive.
The Project Arbiter team, led by Assistant Commissioner (Research and Development) W. H. ‘Bill’ Robertson, began work in August 1988, and the restructure was implemented by the Operations Department on 4 March 1990. The first phase focused on the Operations Department because it was the largest component of the Victoria Police, containing 7090 personnel, or 68 per cent of the force. The changes included a reduction of police districts from twenty-three to seventeen, and a reduction of police divisions from ninety-two to thirty-four. This process abolished ninety-five police positions (forty-nine of them chief inspector or inspector positions), releasing those people for redeployment. In essence the entire profile of the Operations Department was altered: boundary, position, rank, office, code and staff configurations were all changed on a scale that was rare in the history of the force. It upset the lives of many police families: senior members with clear career paths and goals, many of them settled with their families in country locations, found their idyll shattered overnight by management decree.
Glare described the year as a ‘watershed’, and it was. Arbiter was a necessary and bold reform process that could have been better marketed and executed. The demoralisation generated by it was behind much of the organisational disquiet that concerned Glare. He acknowledged that command had ‘failed to communicate effectively’ and pledged to hire ‘a marketing consultant as a matter of urgency’. That the force needed to resort to a marketer to rectify internal problems created by management was itself a reflection of the ineptitude with which the change process was undertaken, and perhaps of some of those vested with its implementation. The force did learn from the pain of Arbiter Phase One; and subsequent phases of the restructure, which focused on other departments within the force, were managed and marketed more deftly. The reform process was, however, an ongoing one, made easier by the relative malleability of the force’s increasingly youthful workforce.14
A younger workforce also proved to be an asset as the force moved inexorably to adopt computerisation. In 1971 Mick Miller, who was then an assistant commissioner, had gone on patrol with the chief secretary, Rupert Hamer, accompanied by Maxwell Beggs, the officer-in-charge of the nascent Information Systems Division (ISD). With the assistance of Burroughs computers and the Communications Section (D.24), Beggs, who was described by his superiors as ‘highly intelligent’, demonstrated how stolen-car checks could be conducted in real time from a police vehicle. Over a four-week trial period during October and November 1971, the recovery of stolen cars increased by 241 per cent. As a result, the government approved the expenditure of $250 000 for the purchase of a computer and, in October 1973, a Computer Systems Division (CSD) under the command of Brevet Inspector Beggs was established within the Services Department. Tasked with developing a computer-based information system for the force, the work of Beggs and his small team came to fruition on 17 September 1975 when the premier of Victoria, Rupert Hamer, officially opened the Victoria Police Computer Centre.
The operating system implemented by the CSD was code-named PATROL, standing for ‘Police Access To Records On-Line’, and with its launch a new and enduring acronym entered the police lexicon. It provided police with rapid access to records of stolen and wanted motor vehicles through computer terminals installed in D.24, the Stolen Motor Vehicle Squad and the Motor Registration Branch. The response time for an inquiry was less than one second, and when it first went online PATROL generated a 350 per cent increase in inquiries over the manual system that had preceded it.
The evolution of computer systems within the force proceeded exponentially, culminating in the establishment of the Law Enforcement Assistance Program (LEAP) on 1 March 1993. A computer-based crime information system, LEAP was designed to process crime, traffic and patrol activity information. With its launch, elements of PATROL were integrated, providing improved community service and officer safety by supplying practical and timely information about crime, offenders, wanted persons, field contacts and stolen property. LEAP also offered comprehensive information to assist decision-making and resource management. Described by Superintendent Dave Smith of the LEAP Implementation Team as ‘a first for Australia’, it was promoted as a ‘dynamic’ or ‘smart’ computer-based crime information system, ‘designed with the needs of operational police as its first priority’.
Initially at the leading edge of such developments internationally, the base platform was still in use over twenty years later. Enhancements and updates were progressively made, and after a decade the force had computer access to more than three million names, the details of four million incidents, and the records of one million vehicles, three million locations, five million items of property and 70 000 offenders. Other more contemporary inclusions were 130 000 offender photographs, 720 000 photographs of firearms licence holders and a LEAP Forensic Identification Module to facilitate the management of fingerprint and DNA matches.
Despite such enhancements, the system in a number of material respects failed to keep pace with the rapidly changing world of information management and technology. It also suffered from misuse and mismanagement. In 1996 a review of LEAP was conducted by the Victorian auditor-general, and a subsequent high-level task force was established to address concerns about inappropriate use of the LEAP data system by Victoria Police employees. In 2005 the Office of Police Integrity (OPI) conducted an extensive investigation into the force’s management of LEAP and found that in addition to LEAP there were ‘at least 200 separate intelligence databases and a reported fifty different roster systems’. The OPI also proffered the view that it was ‘an opportunity for Victoria Police to wipe the slate clean’, and recommended ‘the replacement of LEAP with a Force-wide computer-based information system’. The then chief commissioner, Christine Nixon, conceded that ‘the technology surrounding LEAP was outdated’, but also pointed out that substantial funding was required to remedy that major failing and that it was ‘for the government to determine what would be appropriate to commit to the enhancement or replacement of LEAP’.15
It was during this era, too, that one of the most apparent developments within the organisation was the enhancement of the profile of women within the force. At one point the director of personnel, the media director and the assistant commissioner (internal investigations) were all female, while women filled a wide variety of other key and specialist positions. Bernice Masterson was the first female assistant commissioner in Australian police history, and her appointment in 1989 highlighted the new opportunities for policewomen. Some areas were slower to change than others: the proportion of women to men in country districts was 1:11 compared with 1:5 in the metropolitan area, and there were no women in the SOG or Dog Squad. In 1992 the force had the highest proportion of women—14.4 per cent—of any police service in Australia, and the Victorian rate was significantly higher than that of most forces in the UK and USA. Over 60 per cent of all non-police personnel (public servants) were female. Men, however, still dominated physically. One study found that only 33 per cent of female applicants passed the physical agility course compared with a rate of 88 per cent for men, and that both sexes preferred having a male partner during a violent confrontation.
The gender shift necessitated changes in procedure and philosophy. An Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Unit was formed and a broad range of EEO activities were initiated, including an evaluation of gender equality in the workforce, EEO training, the development of gender-neutral questions for force applicants, and a pilot study into the viability of positions for part-time police. It was also necessary to take action against a number of policemen for sexual harassment in the workplace, including physical harassment and lewd comments to female staff. A force-wide newsletter item warned: ‘Here’s a shock for some people—the days of patting backsides, sexist or crude remarks to trainees “in fun”, or jobs for the “boys” (or girls) are over’.16
Other shocks were in store for many police as unacceptable past practices and procedures were abandoned or changed. Drink-driving and alcohol-related road deaths involving police came under scrutiny when twenty-one police (twelve off-duty and nine on-duty) were killed in five years, prompting Chief Commissioner Glare to warn that ‘the days of badge-flashing’ were over. Between March 1988 and June 1990 thirty-eight police were charged with drink-driving offences, fourteen of them driving police vehicles. Assistant Commissioner (Traffic) Frank Green dryly noted: ‘Five were over 0.2; one refused a breath test; four of the top five readings were female; eleven were detectives (eight of them in police cars); and they were all ranks (recruit to inspector)’.
Police also fell prey to the much-maligned traffic cameras. From 1991 to 1993, 2157 police vehicles were caught speeding by traffic cameras. There was, however, a legislative exemption for police drivers in certain circumstances, and police seeking that exemption produced some of the most inventive excuses known to modern motoring. An alarming number of them were photographed while allegedly pursuing suspects of one sort or another, most of whom miraculously escaped detection by both the speeding police drivers and the traffic cameras. Some police did not even attempt to provide an explanation but arrogantly argued that they were entitled to speed because they were police. Few were fined or lost their licences: only 203 infringement notices were issued, amounting to less than 10 per cent of all police vehicles caught. This compared to a figure of 70 per cent for the rest of the community.
In 1991 the deputy commissioner (operations), John Frame, expressed concern at ‘the practice of police using their identification certificates to gain access to nightclubs and other venues’, reverting to an old police truism to warn that ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’. There was general concern among the commissioners about police ethics, prompting Frame to observe: ‘There are signs that our standards, attitudes and professionalism are slipping’. He subsequently visited all police districts, giving a ‘coach’s address’ on professional standards, and in a homily that was apt for the times urged all members to ‘Remember that leadership and management are not necessarily the same’. The force also produced a booklet, Ethics and Professional Standards, and the code of ethics was required to be displayed prominently as a poster in police stations. Although there was concern about police ethics, the force drew some solace from the fact that of 3.5 million police–public contacts annually, there were only 1128 formal public complaints.17
Less than two decades earlier, the force had prided itself on being the ‘only organisation in society that will answer any call for help—anywhere, any time’. The ideal of community service was not then restricted by economic considerations. In a bid to balance the traditional notion of personal police attendance against the perceived need to manage the force along modern business lines, there was a significant rationalisation of ‘non-police’ duties, and fees were charged for many police services.
It was an era of paradox, when the force constantly emphasised the need for public support and turned increasingly to co-operative, community-based initiatives to combat crime while having to work with government policies driven by economic rationalism and fiscal constraint. The latter policies promoted a shift to impersonal policing, such as speed cameras, crime screening, user pays, corporate sponsorship and private-sector management models, which required sections of the force to operate competitively and on a commercial basis with private companies. At the same time, the force began to accept outside corporate sponsorship for such things as police computers and vehicles and to increase the dollar value of crimes screened from CIB attendance in recognition of resource problems. General calls for police service were also screened to assess ‘whether calls are being received which other government departments and organisations could handle more appropriately, for example wandering cows’.
Although Miller was the first commissioner to embrace community policing, his successor also saw the benefits in such strategies and, upon his return from a world tour in 1988, Glare embarked upon what he considered the ‘greatest achievement’ of his time as chief commissioner. During his overseas travels he had come across a number of ‘police in schools’ programmes, which in Victoria became known as the Police Schools Involvement Program, or PSIP; he ‘freely acknowledges that the original idea’ was not his. He succinctly described the object of the PSIP as ‘trying to have school children understand that they not only had rights but they also had corresponding obligations and responsibilities and that it was essential that they consider the consequences of their actions before doing something wrong rather than afterwards’.
Glare’s nascent scheme met with considerable resistance from the ranks, but by 1991 he had seventy-two school resource officers (SROs) servicing 720 schools. From these beginnings the PSIP successfully grew exponentially, and in 2004 the scheme was, for the first time in sixteen years, subjected to a commissioned review. In 2005 the PSIP numbered seventy-five SROs who reached about 5 per cent of the state’s total school population, and the review found that ‘modification of the original PSIP approach was timely’. Consequently the Youth Resource Officer Project was established by the force to ‘improve and refocus its school program and widen its reach to a range of young people’. The new model took into account the various ways police came into contact with young people, including ‘as victims, offenders, reporting crime, domestic violence and mental health issues’.
Years later, in his retirement, Glare suggested that one of his successors, Christine Nixon, had abolished the PSIP ‘as a matter of trying to control expenditure and because the program was not being well managed internally’, adding that both aspects were a commentary on ‘her inability to control and manage effectively and competently’. In a rapidly changing world, some observers might regard such comments as gratuitous, and the demise of the original PSIP as something to be expected in a police service seeking to keep in step with ever-changing community expectations and values.
Two related schemes that were also actively promoted by Glare were the establishment of Police Community Consultative Committees (PCCCs) and the development of ‘an integrated anti-crime strategy’ badged ‘VicSafe’. PCCCs were first developed in Victoria in 1991 with the aim of harnessing community resources to increase collective and personal safety. Members of PCCCs were drawn from a wide section of the community, including municipal councils, local businesses, Neighbourhood Watch groups, and residents. Similarly, VicSafe sought to consolidate anti-crime measures in a partnership model that embraced diverse business, community and government agencies. Like the PSIP, the PCCCs and VicSafe eventually wound down and were replaced by more contemporary community policing strategies and styles. However, the work of commissioners Miller and Glare in this regard left an enduring legacy that ensured that community policing remained a key element in the policing landscape.
The introduction of traffic cameras began in Victoria in 1982 with the installation of fixed red-light cameras. This was followed several years later with the first use of speed cameras in Australia. Introduced in March 1986, they were not extensively used until a statewide speed-camera programme was implemented in December 1989. By 1992 the camera systems were checking the speed of almost 20 million vehicles annually, resulting over a three-year period in the issue of 1 502 202 infringement notices totalling $130 million in fines. They also produced a decrease in the number of speeding vehicles and were a significant factor in reducing Victorian motor-vehicle collision injury levels to among the lowest in the world. Many motorists, nevertheless, were unhappy with the traffic cameras and their mode of operation—police sitting kerbside in unmarked cars fitted with cameras—particularly as infringement notices often arrived unexpectedly, weeks later, in the mail. So sensitive was the force to accusations that it was ‘revenue raising’ that even the police annual reports omitted the details of traffic camera revenue. Speed-camera duty was also disliked by many Traffic Operations Group members, who found the time spent sitting roadside operating the cameras to be ‘boring’ and ‘mechanical’. Specialists in such duties as highway patrol work, they missed the personal contact with drivers and felt that camera duty was a misuse of their time. During 1995 trials were conducted using civilian speed-camera operators, after which Assistant Commissioner (Traffic) Graham Sinclair announced, ‘during the trial there [were] fewer errors made during the loading and unloading of film by the new civilian unit’, adding that ‘while TOG members had previously performed their tasks with care, the civilian members had performed better’.18
The overseer of most of this change was Chief Commissioner Glare, who for much of his commissionership headed a force that was enigmatically progressive, respected and disenchanted. The stature of the force in police and government circles was such that four deputy commissioners, W. J. ‘Bill’ Horman, Noel Newnham, Bob Falconer and Mal Hyde were chosen respectively to head police departments in Tasmania, Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia. Other Victorian officers were appointed to senior positions with the National Crime Authority, Queensland Criminal Justice Commission and Queensland Police Service. The recruitment of Victorian officers for senior executive positions interstate, particularly to post-Fitzgerald Queensland, was in part testament to the success of the push for systemic integrity by Miller and Glare. While other forces recruited some of his most talented officers, Glare battled locally with political obfuscation and fluctuating force morale. In his last Police Annual Report he wrote of the difficulty he experienced working in a ‘very turbulent operating environment, characterised by substantial funding constraints, increasing public accountability and the rapid pace of change’. A decade of working under Labor governments had left the force hamstrung operationally, and under-resourced. Whereas Miller, with his operational focus, was critical of inadequate enabling powers, Glare, with a more administrative focus, often expressed concern at the ongoing ‘erosion of the force’s resource base’. It was this erosion, coupled with economic rationalism, that led to the introduction of crime-screening and user-pays policies.19
Many of the force’s technological and management innovations, like speed cameras, produced positive benefits for the force and the community. There was, however, always an inherent danger that the ethos of community service might be lost in the mire of economic rationalism. The force, and the community it served, were yet to determine acceptable limits for a fiscal doctrine that saw the force shedding some of its traditional duties and responding to others on the basis of cost-effectiveness. In that regard the words of retired chief commissioner Miller have a timeless importance: ‘the reality is that the true measure of police effectiveness is qualitative not quantitative … We need to remember we are in the people business’.20
An indication of the malaise afflicting the force surfaced publicly in 1992 following the retirement of Chief Commissioner Glare, who officially left the service on 28 November. The Labor government led by Joan Kirner selected Deputy Commissioner John Frame to replace Glare as chief commissioner. Frame was an accomplished police administrator who had served as a staff officer and assistant commissioner under Miller and worked as an assistant and deputy commissioner under Glare. Despite lobbying by a number of groups, including the Age newspaper, for the appointment of an ‘outsider’ as chief commissioner, Frame was generally expected to get the job. Politics interposed, however, and the Kirner Government was voted from office on 3 October 1992 before the selection of Frame as chief commissioner became effective. The new conservative government, led by Jeffrey Kennett, and the minister responsible for police, Patrick McNamara, started the chief commissioner selection process afresh. After weeks of advertising and searching, with Frame acting as chief commissioner, the Kennett Government announced the surprise selection of Queensland assistant commissioner Murray Neil Comrie. It was generally touted within the force that Frame’s principal disqualifying factor was his previous selection by the Kirner Government. However, the Kennett Government had amended the Police Regulation Act to establish an independent police board ‘to advise the Minister and the Chief Commissioner principally upon ways in which the administration of the Police Force might be improved’. Frame reportedly indicated a disinclination to work with such a board. Comrie had no such reservations and was the police member on the board when it met for the first time on 7 January 1993.
In a startling dénouement, Assistant Commissioner (Internal Investigations) Bernice Masterson publicly criticised the selection of Comrie as chief commissioner, describing it as ‘a dreadful mistake’. Masterson had earlier been ‘outed’ in the media as being a lesbian and had received ‘instant and unequivocal support’ from Frame. She resigned shortly after Comrie’s appointment and did not serve under him. That the one commissioner personally responsible for police discipline could make such an undisciplined outburst was seen by many as evidence that some aspects of the force’s senior administration were sadly awry. Frame retired on 2 January 1993 and was followed some weeks later by Jean Gordon, the force’s first civilian director of personnel and the first woman to have held such a position in the force.
The unexpected announcement of Comrie’s appointment was clouded in controversy, including constant references to him being an ‘outsider’. Such criticisms were without foundation: Comrie was the third generation of his family to serve in the force. His grandfather, Angus Comrie, served from 1899 to 1934, and his father, Murray Comrie, served from 1934 to 1972. (His son, Heath Comrie, joined the force in 2001.)
Angus Malcolm Comrie and Mary Ellen Comrie, grandparents of Chief Commissioner Neil Comrie at the Murtoa police station, 1900
Chief Commissioner N. M. Comrie
Neil Comrie commenced his police career in 1967 and worked in a variety of positions in the operations, traffic, crime, research and vice areas over a period of twenty-three years before resigning at the rank of superintendent to move to Queensland. He had a strong operational and investigative background and was noted in Victoria for his work in the suppression of child sexual exploitation, particularly when he headed the Delta Task Force. In Queensland, Comrie was part of the post-Fitzgerald Inquiry reformation. He held the position of assistant commissioner (task force command) and also acted as commissioner and deputy commissioner.21
Comrie took up his appointment as chief commissioner on 4 January 1993 on a five-year contract that included performance requirements and provision for a performance bonus. He was unhappy about the bonus clause, and it was later removed at his request. He was also made a member of the State Coordination and Management Council (SCMC). Chaired by the secretary of the Department of the Premier and Cabinet, it included all eight government department heads and the public service commissioner. The Kennett Government was elected at a time of severe financial crisis. Having undertaken to restore the state’s AAA credit rating, Kennett introduced a wide range of efficiency and cost-cutting measures across all government sectors. Referred to as ‘efficiency dividends’, these cuts comprised around 3 per cent of the force’s annual budget. In a competitive process with other Department of Justice business units, the force was required to bid for funding before the government’s Budget Expenditure Review Committee.
Chief Commissioner Neil Comrie with students from the Belfield Primary School, West Ivanhoe
In many respects it was a new frontier for the force. At the time of his appointment, Comrie expressed concern about the efficacy of the discipline system and was of the view that the police service and discipline boards ‘usurped the authority of the chief commissioner’. He felt that this system restricted his capacity to maintain the integrity of the force. And despite vigorous opposition from the Police Association, he sought and achieved major amendments to the Police Regulation Act, resulting in the removal of both boards in favour of a new discipline system based on administrative rather than criminal law.
In what Comrie described as ‘a major cultural change’, the Police Regulation (Discipline) Act came into effect in August 1993. At the time Comrie noted: ‘the force is now able to deal with internal discipline problems in a manner which is more satisfactory for members and the public we serve. Like other professional organisations, the Force will now be able to deal with its own disciplinary matters, but with an independent review process’. With an emphasis on personal development rather than punishment, the system provided a number of levels for disciplinary action, starting with a base level of counselling, and rising through cautioning and admonishments to charges. The most controversial provisions were those giving the chief commissioner or his delegate the power to dismiss members and to exclude lawyers during matters before the hearing officer. Provision was made in the Act for the Police Discipline Board and the Police Service Board to continue to exist until all matters before them were finalised; the Service Board concluded its last appeal matter on 15 March 1995. The new Police Review Commission was headed by John Giuliano, with two deputies. A former member of the Police Service Board, Giuliano had also worked with the Public Service Appeals Tribunal. The dire prophecies of the Police Association did not come to pass, and in time Chief Commissioner Comrie considered it ‘worthy of note, that in the five years prior to my appointment not one member was dismissed from the Force. In the first five years after my appointment eighty-five were dismissed’.
Another far-reaching change forming part of the Kennett Government’s reform package took place on 10 November 1996, when the government shifted its industrial relations powers to the Commonwealth. Creating a single industrial relations system for Victoria, this decision, taken pursuant to the Commonwealth Powers (Industrial Relations) Act 1996, rendered obsolete the role of the Police Service Board in determining police salaries and working conditions. Supplanting the board with a system of enterprise bargaining, it effectively made the chief commissioner the ‘employer’ and required him to negotiate directly with the Victoria Police Association over salaries and working conditions. It was a move that introduced a level of estrangement between the police union and the chief commissioner that hitherto had been absent from their relationship, and it worsened over time, fostering levels of acrimony and police militancy not seen since the mass rally to protest the findings of the Beach Inquiry at Festival Hall on 18 October 1976.
While Comrie initially had ‘a positive working relationship with the Police Association, occasionally going toe-to-toe with its secretary Danny Walsh’, that relationship deteriorated. The displacement of Walsh by Paul Mullett as secretary in 2001 ‘led to a serious decline in the relationship between Force Command and the Association, culminating in the resignation of all members of police command from the Association’. The enmity that existed between Comrie and Mullett was palpable, and no one, including the police minister, seemed capable of brokering a truce.
It was a time when 94 per cent of the force budget was committed to staff salaries and related flow-on costs, and Comrie had very little discretionary funding in areas such as computers and new technology. Although the Kennett Government eviscerated the public sector and fifteen thousand public servants lost their jobs, the police force was spared much of this political savagery and Comrie was left to joust with the Police Association over wages and work conditions. In one reportedly myopic moment Mullett is said to have quipped: ‘Computers don’t lock up crooks, police do’. The police union mantra across the decades had largely constituted a perennial push for increased police numbers, much to the detriment of spending on critical support technology such as computers, radio networks, and forensic and other technological resources. Comrie was dismayed at the inefficient stand-alone data management system he had inherited, which was costly to maintain and totally inadequate for a modern police service.
The Kennett Government push for increased financial accountability and its concomitant emphasis on human resource management and technological change signalled clearly to Comrie that the days of omnipotent ‘gifted amateurs’ in the higher echelons of the organisation were fast drawing to a close. It had been accepted practice for almost 150 years for all senior positions in the force to be filled by police, who frequently lacked any tertiary qualifications or particular expertise in the portfolios that they filled. Typical of this conservative cadre was Deputy Commissioner Graham Sinclair, who was known to boast that his formal education had ended in ‘Year 10 at Box Hill Tech’. They were respected and adroit investigators of the ‘old school’, who lacked the benefits of higher education and specialist management skills. In stark contrast and representative of the ‘new breed’ was Deputy Commissioner Mal Hyde. A qualified lawyer with an MBA from the University of Melbourne, he left the force in 1997 to take up the position of commissioner of police in South Australia.
Based on his Queensland experience and subsequent return to Victoria, Comrie formed a view that ‘many senior officers had little experience outside of the Victoria Police and were therefore quite introspective and lacked the capacity to be innovative and flexible’. In a bid to counter this insularity, Comrie implemented an exchange program with the Strathclyde Police in Scotland and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Noel Ashby was the first Victorian to go to Strathclyde, and Peter Nancarrow went to Canada. Comrie also provided the opportunity for members of command ‘to travel overseas and undertake a study tour of appropriate forces to examine contemporary policing techniques and strategies’.
To meet the significant changes and challenges wrought largely by the Kennett Government, especially in the portfolios of financial management, technological change and human resource management, Comrie appointed three senior public servants to his command team. In April 1997 Ken Latta, MBA, who had an extensive background in the TAFE sector, was the first civilian appointed at deputy commissioner level to executive command, as director (corporate services). Two earlier appointments equivalent to assistant commissioner level were Geoff Cliffe and Peter Breadmore. Cliffe had an MBA and was a clinical psychologist, and his diverse career background included working on the Very Fast Train project; he was appointed director of corporate resources in 1994. Peter Breadmore was appointed director of personnel in May 1993. A former pentathlete, parachutist, mountain climber and Arctic expedition leader, his eclectic background included tertiary studies in education, service in the British Army, and extensive service in the public sector in Victoria.22
Much of Comrie’s initial focus was the politically driven ‘new managerialism’ of the Kennett Government. During the first two years of his commissionership he was also compelled to deal with the fallout from a spate of operational crises that embroiled the force in intense public criticism and debate.
The first of these was a public order incident on 13 December 1993 that saw police involved in a baton charge at the former Richmond Secondary College site. As part of the government’s educational restructuring programme, it decided to close the Richmond Secondary College and establish the new Melbourne Girls’ College on the site. This proposal was opposed by a number of interested parties, notably the Friends of Richmond Secondary College Occupation Committee, which enrolled students for the 1993 school year and proposed using volunteer teachers to run the school. In a non-violent protest, the committee illegally occupied the college premises for 360 days between 13 December 1992 and 7 December 1993, when the sheriff, without the use of force, evicted the occupiers and secured the building.
Throughout the occupation local police had provided a low-key police presence and had a cordial working relationship with the protesters. Following their eviction on 7 December, the demonstrators established a tent campsite in close proximity to the work site and the police presence was increased significantly, including the deployment of the newly formed Force Response Unit (FRU) and the Protective Security Group (PSG).
When the school site was cleared of protesters, the Department of School Education moved to accelerate work on the project and a police operation was planned to provide contractors with secure access to their workplace. On the morning of Monday 13 December 1993, police tried unsuccessfully to negotiate with the picketers in a bid to facilitate unhindered site access for contractors and tradespeople. Picketers were warned that they would be removed by force and charged with besetting premises if they did not comply. When that warning went unheeded and violence was looming, police, in accordance with their operation order, implemented a ‘level four’ operation and with the use of batons cleared picketers from the entrance. Police brandishing long batons and aggressively chanting ‘move’ in unison struck protesters about the head and body. They later explained that their tactics were a response to earlier demonstrations where, unprepared for violence, police had been injured in the fray. After reviewing those earlier demonstrations, police tactics had been changed and specialist units had been formed to deal with the threats posed by such events.
In the days following this operation, numerous members of the public complained to Dr Barry Perry, the deputy ombudsman dealing with police complaints, that the level of force used by police was ‘disproportionate to the action that was being taken by the demonstrators’. After a lengthy investigation Perry found that police had used ‘unreasonable actions and excessive force’ and recommended that the force adopt ‘a formal risk management process to identify, evaluate and control risks in light of the objectives to be achieved’.
The police field commander at Richmond later said that he was ‘unaware of Victoria Police ever drawing long batons and advancing as they did’, and the senior sergeant responsible for FRU tactical training explained that the militaristic tactics used at the school site ‘had never been used before in Victoria’.
It wasn’t long after this incident that another ‘first’ in Victorian police tactics aroused the ire of many Victorians and the interest of Dr Perry. On 10 February 1994, anti-logging protesters blockading the offices of the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources in Victoria Parade, East Melbourne were moved by police using ‘pain compliance pressure point control techniques’.
Seventy demonstrators with their arms linked formed a single line across the front of the building, blocking both pedestrian and vehicular access. Police equipped with long batons established a single cordon between the building and the line of demonstrators. Initially, police removed demonstrators from the driveway using the generally accepted ‘lift and carry’ method, but this proved ineffective when demonstrators repeatedly moved back into the blockade and elected to sit on the driveway. As a result, members of the PSG, wearing fatigues and surgical gloves, forcibly removed demonstrators by using pain compliance techniques. Demonstrators claimed that this involved the ‘rotating of arms, wrists and fingers against the normal direction of movement, applying pressure to nerve points to the side of the neck, nose and cranium; eyes were gouged, and ears and hair pulled, all causing considerable pain’.
Following this action, Perry received sixteen written complaints. He did not undertake an exhaustive investigation of the facts because Commander A. R. Roberts, with the concurrence of the deputy commissioner (operations), had ‘substantiated the allegations that inappropriate force and tactics were used by police … and that a review of the techniques, defensive tactics and crowd control methods generally would be undertaken’. It was also announced that ‘as an interim measure, pain compliance techniques would not be used in demonstrations where only passive resistance was encountered by police’. Senior police met with conservation groups to re-establish the non-violent working relationship that had previously existed between police and the demonstrators.
One commentator observed: ‘the police tactics evoked varying degrees of public outrage. Within a week of the pressure-point holds being aired extensively on national television, Police Command outlawed the tactic’. Dr Perry closed his report with the succinct observation that the police action ‘could have endangered life [and] was out of all proportion to the objectives sought to be achieved … the action was grossly excessive and without justification’.23
Sometimes change comes in response to painful experiences. Your presence here today is as a result of a very painful episode experienced by members of the community at the Tasty nightclub in Melbourne on 7 August 1994. Simply put, the events that took place that night caused distress to people who were in attendance and had a significant impact on the relationship between Victoria Police and the wider lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex [LGBTI] community. It is therefore appropriate, as we near the twentieth anniversary of this incident, that Victoria Police extends a sincere apology to the community members who were affected by events on that night. There is no doubt the Tasty nightclub incident was a low point in the relationship between the LGBTI community and Victoria Police.
This unprecedented public apology was made by Acting Chief Commissioner Lucinda Nolan on 5 August 2014 to mark the twentieth anniversary of Operation Maze, a police raid on the Commerce Club—a predominantly gay venue more widely known as the Tasty nightclub—located at 328 Flinders Street, Melbourne.
Police executed a warrant at the premises at 2.10 a.m. on Sunday 7 August 1994 ‘for the purpose of searching for drugs of dependence namely amphetamines’. What ensued was farce of Keystone Cops proportions. Thirty-five police drawn from the PSG, FRU, ‘A’ District Support Group and Uniform Section entered the premises. As described in the subsequent report, ‘On entry, lights were switched on, the music stopped and a police member using a megaphone explained the police presence’. Patrons were then requested to ‘place their hands up against any wall in the vicinity or otherwise on their heads’.
Despite the fact that planning for the operation had not included any provision for strip-searching, an inspector at the scene made a unilateral decision on the spot that all patrons be strip-searched. He then left the premises and some 463 people, including ‘an unexpectedly large number [130] of women’, were strip-searched with varying degrees of privacy. It was a marathon effort that was not completed until 5 a.m. The Dog Squad was in attendance but not utilised, and the initial entry team included only two policewomen. As a result of the raid six people were charged with minor drug offences (one charge was subsequently dropped), and forty-two items of evidence, including amphetamines, ecstasy and LSD, were found at the scene.
In the aftermath of the raid thirty-four written complaints were made to Deputy Ombudsman Perry, who found that the raid was discriminatory and the search warrant was based on inaccurate and embellished information. He found further that it was totally unreasonable to strip-search 463 individuals: patrons felt threatened and intimidated, and a large number of innocent people were caused inconvenience and distress.
The Tasty nightclub raid received enduring, widespread adverse publicity and seriously damaged the relationship between police and members of the LGBTI community. It subsequently took many years to bridge the chasm that existed between the two groups, but the public apology tendered by Acting Chief Commissioner Nolan in August 2014 was evidence that in some areas of policing things had changed for the better.24
Following close behind the Tasty nightclub fiasco, but arguably of greater significance for the force, was Operation BART. Described by Dr Perry in 1998 as ‘one of the largest internal investigations ever conducted by the Victoria Police’, it had its genesis in April 1995 when Constable Karl Konrad, who was stationed at the Moorabbin police station, contacted Perry to express his concerns about the conduct of some of his colleagues. In essence, Konrad alleged that some police were receiving payments from shutter-service operators in contravention of the force’s shutter allocation system that had been in existence since March 1978. He further alleged that when he reported a specific instance of this malfeasance to his senior sergeant, it triggered a campaign of harassment that subjected him to verbal abuse, damage to his car and the release of his private telephone number to a mentally disturbed person.
Upon receiving this information from Konrad, Perry made contact with Assistant Commissioner (Internal Investigations) Gavin Brown, who initiated a number of courses of action, including the use of an undercover operative from interstate and the establishment of a dummy security and shutter-service company. These inquiries were sufficient to establish the veracity of Konrad’s allegations. It was evident that the practice of shutter-service operators paying police for providing shutter and glazing jobs was widespread. It was a lucrative criminal enterprise. Police were paid $100 for referring a small broken glass pane, such as in a door or house, and $200 for a plate-glass window or shop front. From April 1994 to May 1995, one shutter-service operator made 1200 payments to police totalling $144 000. In one early case, Senior Constable Ashley Clarke of the Flemington police station was videotaped and tape-recorded in the Moreland Hotel car park accepting $200 in cash and twenty-four cans of beer from an undercover operative. He was the only member charged and convicted of criminal offences arising from Operation BART and was dismissed from the force. Clarke’s case was unusual in that he was charged with criminal offences, whereas, on the advice of the director of public prosecutions, it was decided that ‘police should generally proceed in future to lay disciplinary charges against members rather than criminal charges’.
The scale of police malfeasance involved in this matter prompted force command to form a task force, and Operation BART commenced on 12 September 1995 with an initial complement of twenty members under the command of Chief Superintendent Tom McGrath of the Internal Investigations Department. On 9 October, the task force was increased to thirty-eight investigators and analysts working from separate covert premises. The operation ran for two years and six months and was officially wound up on 6 March 1998. During that period eighty-nine police stations and 1548 members were investigated, and 846 members were interviewed in relation to possible criminal and/or discipline offences. Just over a hundred members resigned from the force during the course of Operation BART. In all, 550 police were charged with a total of 1290 discipline offences, and fines totalling $239 000 were imposed.
In his final report, Perry gave credit to Konrad for his actions, ‘which directly led to Operation BART and indirectly to changes to policing in Victoria’. He also touched upon two of the most salient outcomes, observing, ‘If there is one thing to be learned from Operation BART, it is that the price of a truly professional and ethical Police Force is eternal vigilance and the need on occasions to heed the messenger’. He also noted that, in his view, the most significant achievement of Operation BART was ‘the creation of the new Ethical Standards Department [ESD]. The Ethical Standards Department has been introduced with a rigorous and demanding agenda set by police themselves to mould the attitudes and change the practices of many of its members’. One of the driving influences in this regard was Neil Comrie, who was concerned that the number of police involved in corrupt activities associated with broken windows was significant and that it ‘provided evidence of an unacceptable degree of tolerance in the force (particularly at supervisor level) to this conduct’.25
The ESD alluded to by Dr Perry was created on 2 September 1996 but in reaching that point it had undergone a long gestation period and a number of incarnations. Its genesis was the Complaints Section, headed by a superintendent at Russell Street Police Headquarters. All complaints of a serious nature against police were forwarded to him by other officers, including matters requiring secret investigations. Such was the superintendent’s workload that when Colonel Sir Eric St Johnston inspected and reported upon the force in 1971, he observed that ‘because of the number of serious complaints received he is very greatly overworked’, and went on to describe the model of organisation he felt was best suited to overcome the shortcomings of the existing Complaints Section.
That recommendation was adopted by the force and Executive Instruction No. 77, promulgated on 31 July 1975, established the Bureau of Internal Investigations (BII). It comprised four investigators, plus a fifth member with legal qualifications, commanded by a chief superintendent who reported to the deputy commissioner. BII was essentially a reactive investigative unit, and it functioned as such for a decade until it was replaced by the Internal Investigations Department (IID) on 21 February 1985.
IID was the eighth department of the force. Commanded by newly appointed assistant commissioner Kelvin Glare, it ‘assumed all the functions and responsibilities of the Internal Investigations Bureau and took over the actual investigation of all complaints of a serious nature’. A new element within IID was the Internal Security Unit, which was intended to direct ‘greater emphasis towards preventing and detecting corruption within the force’.
On 19 August 1985, Glare was replaced by another newly appointed assistant commissioner, W. J. ‘Bill’ Horman. Like Glare, Horman was a lawyer with an extensive police background. A charismatic and popular officer, he rose to the rank of deputy commissioner (operations) and also served as the commissioner of police in Tasmania and Vanuatu, and deputy director of the ABCI.
In 1986 IID moved from accommodation in Spencer Street, which it had shared with the former Cadet Academy, to new stand-alone premises in East Melbourne. This was an indication of the scale and nature of the work it was then undertaking. During that period, in addition to their investigative role, personnel from IID addressed an eclectic range of community and legal organisations and events, including the Legal Aid Commission of Victoria, the Community Workers’ Association seminar, the Community Legal Centres conference, bar readers’ courses and the Police Wives Association.
One distraction for the force during this period was the creation of an independent Police Complaints Authority (PCA) in July 1986. Established by the Labor government of former solicitor John Cain, Jr and Minister for Police and Emergency Services (MOPES) Race Mathews, the PCA had a lifespan of barely twenty months. Its demise was overseen by Steve Crabb, who replaced Mathews as MOPES on 14 December 1987. The foundation head of the PCA was Hugh Selby, who had previously worked with the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s Office in Canberra performing a similar police complaints role in relation to the Australian Federal Police. He had also worked as a barrister in Sydney, as a trade union official and as a social worker. Counsel assisting the PCA, co-ordinating investigations into police misconduct and corruption, was Ian Freckelton. A senior lawyer from the Australian Law Reform Commission in Sydney, Freckelton was the author of a number of publications on such subjects as opinion evidence.
From the outset, the relationship between the PCA and the Victoria Police was acrimonious. The 1987 Police Annual Report opined: ‘The establishment of the Police Complaints Authority has not produced significant improvement. Indeed, the Authority seemed intent upon adopting a hypercritical, adversarial approach to the Force. This has done little to achieve co-operation or to serve the interests of complainants’. For its part the PCA, in its final report to parliament in May 1988, pleaded, ‘This report has been written as a warning: legislate now to create a truly independent external watchdog and take steps to override deep-seated attitudes within the police force so as to make investigations into allegations of serious misconduct effective, or be prepared to see today’s fine reputation of our police force brought to nought through the unchecked activities of a dangerous few … We hope that they will all understand that we share their hopes for a police force which wishes to be the finest in Australia’.
The PCA was abolished by the Deputy Ombudsman (Police Complaints) Act, assented to in May 1988, and Dr Perry was appointed for three years as the deputy ombudsman. From the outset protocols were established between Perry and the force, thereby averting the rancorous negativity that had bedevilled its relationship with the PCA. Against this background, IID continued to function as the body principally responsible for investigating complaints against police. During a decade that embraced unprecedented levels of police malfeasance, Comrie was prompted to report to the Conference of Commissioners of Police of Australasia and the South West Pacific Region that:
The Victorian community has always expressed resounding support for the Victoria Police. However, during the period from 1994 to 1996 this support was tested through adverse media attention centred on the police shootings issue (Project Beacon was established in response), and the unethical actions of a small group of Victoria Police, involved in the window shutter incidents and other matters. These factors (coupled with the results of police corruption inquiries undertaken at that time in other jurisdictions) caused Victoria Police to increase its commitment to the people of Victoria by establishing Project Guardian.
Although the force might have ‘increased its commitment to the people of Victoria’, some observers were justifiably left wondering where things were headed if ‘adverse media attention’ was held to be the sole driver of what had ensued—and if ‘550 police charged with more than a thousand discipline offences’ constituted the unethical actions of a ‘small’ group of Victorian police. Following the successes of Project Beacon and Operation BART, together with the recommendations of Perry, the force established Project Guardian on 2 February 1996 ‘to examine all issues associated with police culture which impact upon ethical behaviour, and to identify best practice to achieve the desired aims and ensure the community has a high level of confidence in and respect for the Force’.
Project Guardian was led by Chief Superintendent George Davis, who was subsequently appointed assistant commissioner (traffic and operations support). He was specifically tasked with deciding on the structure of an ethical standards department to replace IID. This included ‘establishing ways of detecting or preventing major corruption and … sharpening the focus on the blurry areas of ethics’. Davis highlighted the ethical dilemmas confronting both police and members of the public by pointing to the longstanding practice of police being offered such things as half-price hamburgers and spotter’s fees: ‘Even some members of the community are saying, “Well, it’s a spotter’s fee—what’s wrong with that?” [but] there is something wrong with that. If we don’t put a stop to these sorts of things, the next step from spotter’s fees may be demands for fees for service. From there it’s a small step to major corruption’.
The recommendations of Project Guardian did not propose any significant departure from the investigative structure within IID. They did, however, result in enhancements to the discipline system. Substantial changes introduced in August 1993 included ‘a comprehensive education program on police ethics, and the creation of a sophisticated corruption prevention program that generated the environment needed to bring about cultural change’. The project also initiated the publication and force-wide distribution of codes of conduct and ethics.
In a matter of months the work of Project Guardian was complete and IID was replaced by the ESD. Created under Executive Instruction No. 308, 2 September 1996, ESD was headed by newly appointed assistant commissioner Peter Nancarrow. It was staffed by 200 personnel. IID and ISU, which Neil Comrie described as ‘under-resourced and largely reactive’, were both replaced by the ESD. In addition to its complaint investigation role, ESD ‘actively oversighted the investigation of serious incidents, including the use of police firearms, police pursuits, serious police collisions, escapes from custody, and illness and injury of persons in custody’. Nancarrow described his first year in the position as ‘exciting’, and highlighted ‘Public Incident Resolution, the proactive use of internal sources and procedures such as integrity testing’ as evidence that ESD was meeting its charter.26
In addition to his focus on discipline and complaints against police, Comrie had long been concerned about the centralised nature of force administration. He was firmly of the view that the historic structure of twenty-six geographical districts reporting to police headquarters in Melbourne through a lengthy chain of command was ‘no longer an efficient manner in which to do business’. He expressed concern that district commanders had very little flexibility or autonomy to make even mundane decisions about such things as overtime, and that inspectors, who held the title of patrol officer, had no ownership of any function within the force. Their wide experience was wasted on routine matters. Furthermore, local communities were rarely consulted on the police services that were provided to them, and policing policies and priorities were decided and managed from headquarters, often with little relevance to regional locations.
As a result of these and other considerations, Comrie initiated one of the most significant reorganisations in the history of the force. Under the banner of Local Priority Policing (LPP), widespread reforms were implemented in three stages, the first of which was the Statewide Management Model (SMM). Commencing on 1 November 1999, key reforms included the consolidation of seventeen districts into five regions with budget autonomy, and the further sub-division of regions into divisions and districts respectively. Each district was aligned with a municipal boundary and had its own budget. A key innovation was the creation of local safety committees in each district. Initially chaired by a district inspector, they were required to actively involve community members in determining local policing priorities. Many other improvements flowed from LPP and, with a number of minor adjustments, the LPP model was maintained under Comrie’s successor.27
In Police Life in April 1996, Comrie advised all members that he ‘had been thinking about how we [the force] can properly recognise the special nature of police and the work we do. The ideas we have discussed at Command have all focused on how we can distinguish individual police members who, for some reason, deserve to stand out from the crowd’. Following an extensive review of the force’s honours and awards system, a series of new awards were promulgated. Along with the introduction of the new Victoria Police Service Medal (VPSM), a series of department, district and unit or group commendations were introduced. Provision was also made for the inclusion of non-police employees.
A further review of the force honours and awards structure was conducted by the Honours and Awards Committee during 2008–09, following which the system was enhanced by the introduction of five new awards: a group citation for courage and a group citation for merit, and three individual medals for courage, excellence and merit. It was considered that the presentation of medals and ribbon bars gave recipients a more visible form of recognition than did the presentation of certificates. The Valour Award was retained as the highest honour, to be awarded only for exceptional bravery displayed in extremely perilous circumstances.
The VPSM was introduced to recognise ten years of continuous diligent and ethical service. Approval for it was not automatic, and district commanders or their equivalent could make recommendations for the award only after a detailed appraisal of candidates. Any employee against whom a serious criminal offence was proved was permanently ineligible for it, and any person found guilty of a lesser criminal or disciplinary offence could be ruled ineligible for a designated period. In 2009 the chief commissioner changed the eligibility criteria for the award, making it available to living former members who had served with the Victoria Police prior to the introduction of the VPSM.
The VPSM is a one-piece cupronickel medal suspended on azure and striped ribbon. It incorporates the St Edward crown along with two circles, an outer and an inner, on the face of the medal. The outer circle contains the words ‘Diligent and Ethical Service’, while the inner circle contains the words ‘Victoria Police’. In the centre is a cross that contains the five stars of the Southern Cross. Authority was given by the governor-general to use the St Edward crown. To complement the medal, an upgrade kit or clasp set could be awarded to employees after the completion of each further five-year period of diligent and ethical service. The first awards to sixty members, nominated from among the longest-serving in each rank, were presented by the governor of Victoria, Sir James Gobbo, at Government House, Melbourne, on 15 September 1997. Two days after the initial presentation, Comrie undertook a three-month tour of all police districts to personally present medals to all eligible members.28
Against this background of broad-based reforms and innovations, the years of Comrie’s commissionership were punctuated by a range of events. Some of these—such as the closure of the iconic Russell Street and William Street police complexes and the consolidation of police resources at the Victoria Police Centre at Docklands in 1994—were immediately evident to anyone familiar with the Melbourne streetscape. Police headquarters had been based at Russell Street from 1864 to 1977. The cream-brick ‘Empire State’-like building erected during the 1940s with its distinctive communications tower was one of Melbourne’s earliest multi-storey landmarks.
Not as visible as the police headquarters buildings, but almost as iconic, was the D.24 communications control centre, which was replaced by the Intergraph communications system in December 1995. The Victoria Police D.24 broadcasting call sign of VKC was one of the best known in the state and had a broad following of listeners who found the police radio broadcasts to be a real-life link with crime and adventure. In contrast to the romanticism surrounding the original D.24, the State Emergency Communications Centre featured a world-class, multi-agency computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system. Built, owned and operated under a seven-year contract by international private company Intergraph Public Safety, it was located at the Victoria Police Centre. More than one hundred and fifty civilian communications personnel were employed and trained to work alongside a core group of up to thirty-seven Victoria Police officers and sub-officers, who maintained a 24/7 command and control presence. The system incorporated state-of-the-art technology that was capable of taking 1.2 million calls a year. Its computerised map encompassed 15 000 square kilometres, including 46 087 kilometres of roads and 1.2 million addresses, allowing operators to access maps of any metropolitan locality. Initially taking 3000 calls a day, the system was configured to cope with double that number. Despite some initial public complaints with the system and the concerns of other agencies, Comrie was of the view that ‘The replacement of D.24 by Intergraph was in fact a substantial positive for the Victoria Police’.29
The relocation and consolidation of state police headquarters and the shift of D.24 to Intergraph were both significant once-in-100-years events not experienced by Comrie’s predecessors.
One type of tragic occurrence that recurred during the commissionerships of Glare, Miller, Jackson and Comrie was the murder of members of the force who were feloniously slain in the course of their duties. In the case of Glare and Comrie, the deaths that beset the force under them were multiple homicides that displayed a degree of callous savagery not witnessed since the days of the Kelly Gang. Comrie, the spouse, father and son of Victoria Police members, later described these deaths as ‘the lowest point’ of his tenure as head of the force.
On Sunday morning 16 August 1998, just after midnight, Sergeant Gary Silk and Senior Constable Rod Miller were performing stakeout duty in the Moorabbin area as part of a police operation named Hamada. Up to sixty members were involved in the operation, which covered an area embracing suburbs from Brighton to Frankston, across to Box Hill and Nunawading, and was targeting a gang of bandits who were suspected of committing a string of armed robberies dating back to 1992. Wearing rubber masks and armed with firearms, the robbers preyed upon so-called soft targets such as Chinese restaurants, which they raided around closing time, tying up staff and diners and frequently robbing the customers. These bandits were never caught and Hamada was a concerted bid to bring their run of robberies to an end.
Silk, aged thirty-four and single, was a thirteen-year veteran of the force. Popular and respected by his colleagues at St Kilda police station, ‘the job’ was his extended family. Miller was a year older than Silk and had been in the force for seven years. An army veteran who had served in the Australian defence force, he was married with a seven-week-old son. Dressed in mufti and crewing an unmarked police Commodore sedan, their lot initially was to sit off a Korean restaurant in North Road, East Bentleigh. Fate interposed, however, and that establishment closed early. Silk and Miller drove to the Silky Emperor Chinese restaurant in Warrigal Road, Moorabbin as back-up for another crew. Shortly after midnight a vehicle, later described as a ‘small dark Asian car: a dark blue Hyundai’, aroused their interest. They followed it into Cochranes Road, the first street on their left off Warrigal Road, where, with a rotating blue police light operating, they intercepted it. It was a relatively desolate location, and watching this unfold was the other crew from the Silky Emperor stakeout, senior constables Darren Sherren and Frank Bendeich, who years later told the Supreme Court, ‘We would have been doing, I would have said, round 40 kilometres an hour as I drove past. Everything appeared to be fine. There didn’t appear to be any aggression or anything like that and we just continued past’.
But at that moment things were far from fine. Within two minutes of Sherren and Bendeich’s drive-past, Silk was dead, shot three times at close range in the head, torso and hip. Mortally wounded, he died at the scene. Miller, shot in the abdomen, was able to return fire and, though critically wounded, made his way to Warrigal Road, where he collapsed. He was found dying by his colleagues and was transported in an intensive-care ambulance to the Monash Medical Centre, where he died some hours later.
The murder of Silk bore a chilling note of poignancy in its similarity to the murder of Michael Kennedy at the hands of Ned Kelly 120 years earlier. Kennedy and Silk were both sergeants working as part of a special operation in pursuit of armed offenders, and both were effectively taken by surprise and callously put to death by criminals with no regard for human life.
In the wake of the murders of Silk and Miller, Taskforce Lorimer was formed under the command of seasoned Homicide Squad investigator Detective Inspector (later Superintendent) Paul Sheridan. A graduate of the prestigious FBI National Academy at Quantico in the USA, his leadership of the hand-picked Lorimer team was inspired copybook detective work. One of the most complex and successful homicide investigations in Australian police history, it was a blend of ‘old-fashioned police work’ and new-age policing technology. Judiciously deploying forensic science, listening devices and covert operatives, the Lorimer team worked assiduously for twenty-three months before the day arrived when they were able to bring the pair of cold-blooded killers to justice. Neil Comrie, himself a former Homicide Squad detective, described it as ‘a defining moment in the history of the Victoria Police’, adding that ‘the healing process for the force after losing two outstanding and dedicated policemen is not over. The sixteenth of August 1998 has hung like a black cloud over the Victoria Police’.
On 25 July 2000 at 7 a.m. Bandali Michael Debs, in a case of arrest by appointment, was lured to an empty warehouse in Clayton. There he was apprehended by members of the SOG for the murders of Silk and Miller. On the same day, Jason Joseph Roberts was detained but strategically released before being arrested and charged with the murders on 15 August 2000.
A committal hearing before Magistrate Peter Couzens opened on 24 September 2001 and, after weeks of legal thrust and parry, on 13 November 2001 Debs and Roberts were ordered to stand trial for the murders of Silk and Miller. Almost a year later, on 15 August 2002, the Supreme Court trial of Debs and Roberts began before Justice Philip Cummins. After eighty-one days of evidence the jury went into deliberation and, after what seemed an eternity to those involved, on the seventh day, New Year’s Eve 2002, unanimously found Debs and Roberts guilty of the murders. At a sentencing hearing on 17 February 2003, Justice Cummins described Debs as a person of ‘highly dangerous disposition’ and sentenced him to ‘life imprisonment, with no minimum’, adding ‘Life means life’. Roberts, who had fired the first shot and displayed a singular lack of remorse, was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of thirty-five years.
The murders of Silk and Miller touched the lives of many people in very personal ways. One of those was Comrie, who, on approaching retirement from the force, nominated the murders as his toughest time in the job. He described how, after answering his telephone at home at 3 a.m. on Sunday 16 August 1998 he ‘sat on the edge of the bed and felt helpless, wondering how I could have prevented it … It was, absolutely without question, my worst moment in the job … to see two members murdered in absolute cold blood was very, very difficult’.30
The outpouring of public grief occasioned by the murders of Angela Taylor, Steven Tynan, Damian Eyre and other slain police was manifested in lasting memorials to police killed on duty. Largely established at the instigation of members of the Victorian community, the most symbolic of these was the Victoria Police Memorial. An imposing edifice located a short distance from the Shrine of Remembrance and overlooking St Kilda Road, opposite what was from 1924 to 1973 the site of the Police Depot, it was dedicated on 5 July 2002 and commemorated the ‘137 members [to that time] who had been killed in the line of duty while protecting and serving the community’. Premier Steve Bracks explained how the idea for the memorial emerged from the public outpouring of grief following the murders of Silk and Miller and that it ‘was intended as a public demonstration of community support and gratitude for our courageous officers’. Constructed at a cost of $400 000, the memorial is an amphitheatre design featuring a 16-metre curved blue-stone wall with brass plaques bearing the names of those Victorian police killed on duty. Reflecting on the monument, Comrie echoed the thoughts of many when he wrote, ‘In the past, we may have underestimated the community feeling for its police force. But [its] overwhelming support was clearly shown after the murders of Sergeant Gary Silk and Senior Constable Rodney Miller in August 1998. The memorial is for the public. But it will also have space for quiet, personal reflection by members and their families’.
Much attention understandably focused on the deaths of Silk and Miller, but a number of other police, including Stephen Henry and Maurice Moore, were also killed during this era. However, it was the audacious and extraordinary nature of the murder of Angela Taylor in March 1986 that first galvanised broad public sentiment in support of the police in the aftermath of an attack aimed at the force. The Angela Taylor Memorial Trust was established in Taylor’s memory, and a scholarship fund was created for members of the force, together with funding for specialised emergency facilities at the Royal Women’s and Royal Melbourne hospitals.
The death of Taylor and the subsequent outpouring of public support created a climate within the force that was conducive to introspection and solidarity. The words of Chief Superintendent Brian Casey, a veteran of the Russell Street bombing, resonated with many police and community members when he lamented, ‘Victoria came of age when we realised it wasn’t all nice and fluffy, that it was dangerous out there. It became patently clear how vulnerable we were. It really hit home that people were prepared to do this to police. It made us stand closer together’.
Casey’s sentiments were not only felt by operational members working at the coalface: in the mood of the times they also touched senior police and transcended jurisdictional boundaries. At the annual Conference of Commissioners of Police of Australasia and the South West Pacific Region held in Sydney from 21 to 27 July 1988, Commissioner Brian Bull from Western Australia successfully moved that in memory of all Australian police officers killed on duty, all forces adopt 29 September each year as National Police Remembrance Day. The date was suggested by Commissioner Michael ‘Mick’ Palmer of the Northern Territory Police as it is ‘the Feast of the Archangel, Saint Michael, who was always fighting evil’—and St Michael soon became universally accepted as the patron saint of police. It was also unanimously agreed that the inaugural National Police Remembrance Day would be in 1989 and that the Victoria Police Requiescat and the Victoria Police Pipe Band composition Uphold the Right would be adopted nationally as part of the service. The Requiescat, a police alternative to the Last Post, was composed by Inspector Donald Jarrett, director of music and officer in charge of the police bands. Instigated by Chief Commissioner Mick Miller, it was first played at the inaugural Victoria Police Annual Church Service on 14 November 1982. Composed for organ, trumpet or bugle, the sheet music was made available to all Australian police forces. Uphold the Right, a classic pipe-band piece, was composed by Brian Niven of the Victoria Police Pipe Band.
When the commissioners agreed on the proposal for a National Police Remembrance Day, they did not know that within a matter of weeks two police homicide victims would be the first names added to the inaugural Remembrance Day roll call. Many people thought that the events surrounding the death of Angela Taylor and the creation of a benevolent trust in her memory would never be repeated, but their faith in human nature was shattered when constables Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre were murdered on 12 October 1988. For the second time in just over two years the force and large sections of the Victorian community were swept along on a tide of grief and disbelief, which was manifested publicly as people came to terms with yet another act of violence aimed at police for no other reason than that they were police. As with the case of Taylor, many community members were moved to ‘do something’. Notable among them was John Forbes, national promotions manager for Puma Australia, who became the inaugural president and driving force behind the creation of the Tynan–Eyre Memorial Foundation. Supported by donations from the community, the foundation funded ‘living memorials’ that perpetuated the memory of fallen police. The first of these was the Tynan–Eyre Unit at the Alfred Hospital. Within a decade it was estimated that foundation projects were providing specialised treatment to 50 000 Victorians a year across a number of public hospitals, including the Tynan–Eyre Trauma Centre at Bendigo Hospital.
The Angela Taylor Memorial Trust and the Tynan–Eyre Memorial Foundation co-existed successfully for more than a decade, but in order to ensure their long-term viability and unity of purpose, Comrie began to stress ‘the need to co-ordinate the organisations representing the three fallen constables’. Before this was achieved, however, Silk and Miller were murdered. A few days after their deaths, Melbourne radio broadcaster Neil Mitchell asked his listeners for ideas on how the community could show their support for police. One caller was Mal Wangman of Noble Park, a retired sales and marketing manager, who suggested that people tie a blue ribbon on their car aerials. Over the next two weeks thousands of Victorians either wore or displayed blue ribbons on their vehicles. So overwhelming was the support that it was decided to combine the existing memorial foundations under an umbrella organisation. Named the Victoria Police Blue Ribbon Foundation, it continued to facilitate the fundraising work of the trusts and sought to perpetuate the memory of all police killed on duty. In response to the level of support being shown by the community, Comrie determined that beginning on 29 September 1999, National Police Remembrance Day would also be known as Blue Ribbon Day. In July 1999 a Blue Ribbon Council, comprising prominent Victorians and supported by the chief commissioner, was formed to set the agenda for the first official Blue Ribbon Day. Promotional packs were distributed to all police stations, Blue Ribbon flags were flown at half-mast, and all members received a blue ribbon in their pay envelope. The Blue Ribbon Foundation made a commitment of $350 000 to the Southern Health Care Network for a Silk–Miller Trauma Receiving Centre at Dandenong Hospital. The tragedy of the Silk and Miller murders sparked a spontaneous generosity of spirit and good will that endures to the present day. The 750 000 ribbons in the blue and white police colours distributed throughout Victoria in 2000 surprised even Mal Wangman. Despite having ‘no strong connections with police’ he felt ‘emotional about the idea’ and, like many Victorians, had been touched in his own way by the deaths of Silk and Miller.31
The establishment of the Blue Ribbon Foundation and the attendant focus on public events and community involvement understandably garnered the immediate thoughts of many members. There was, however, one detective who went further and drew attention to an inequity within the police awards system that he felt was long overdue for rectification. Detective Senior Constable Alex Stewart of the Sex Crimes Squad, who at the time was seconded to the Lorimer Taskforce investigating the Silk and Miller slayings, began thinking about the force’s awards regime: ‘I became concerned that some police who paid the ultimate price, or were seriously injured, would not necessarily be eligible for a Valour Award or other Victoria Police commendation because their deaths did not meet the award criteria. Angela Taylor, Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre paid the ultimate price and were murdered solely because they were police doing their job, but they were not formally recognised for that’.
As a result of Stewart’s initiative a working party, chaired by Chief Inspector Ralph Stavely of the Police Historical Society, was tasked with developing a proposal for a suitable award. At the suggestion of the then assistant commissioner Simon Overland, the new award was named the Victoria Police Star (VPS). A sterling silver medal with blue and red ribbon, the VPS filled the need identified by Stewart. It was struck as an award for employees killed or seriously injured while on or off duty, in circumstances where they might not be eligible for a Valour Award. Made retrospective, with eligibility open to all those who had served with the force since 1853, the medal was first presented on National Police Remembrance Day in 2005 to the families of Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre.32
Against this background of collective introspection and reflection, after seven years in office the conservative government led by Jeff Kennett was surprisingly defeated at the 1999 state elections. It was succeeded on 20 October that year by a new Labor government led by Steve Bracks. Andre Haermeyer had served as the Victorian ALP’s shadow police minister from 1996 during a period when he forged close ties with the Victoria Police Association and, aligned with Bracks when Labor came to office in 1999, he was appointed minister for police and emergency services, a position he held until 2005, when he was moved to another portfolio.
Despite sometimes having ‘a strained relationship’ with the Kennett and Bracks governments, Neil Comrie generally enjoyed a sound working relationship with both of them and had deferred plans to retire early to ‘oversee a smooth transition’, adding that he ‘would have stayed in office if charges had not been laid in the case of the Silk–Miller murders’. Although he had two years to run on his contract, the unexpected illness of his wife, coupled with the demands of his position, prompted Comrie to retire early, on 10 March 2001. This afforded him a rare opportunity to reflect on some of the changes and events that had both challenged and excited him during his eight years at the ‘pinnacle of policing’.33
One such innovation was the Cannabis Cautioning Program. Initially trialled in one metropolitan police district between 21 July 1997 and 21 January 1998, it was deemed ‘extremely successful’ and was implemented across Victoria in July 1998. Describing it as a ‘pioneering move’, Comrie made the point strongly that ‘the new approach to drug users did not mean the Force was going “soft” on drugs’. Nor was it a ‘form of de facto decriminalisation’. In keeping with the nationally adopted harm-minimisation approach to drug users, first-time offenders who were found in possession of small amounts of cannabis and who met a set of strict conditions were cautioned rather than charged. Comrie expressed the hope that the police could ‘divert first-time illicit drug users away from the criminal justice system before they become immersed in the drugs culture and its links to crime’. Ninety-three per cent of police members surveyed believed that, as a result of the programme, police resources were saved in terms of time and paperwork. A number of interstate police jurisdictions followed Victoria’s lead.34
While the Cannabis Cautioning Program was widely accepted as a positive move by the force, the police role in the 2000 World Economic Forum (WEF) was far more controversial. Not everyone shared Comrie’s view that the WEF police operation was ‘a great success’. The forum was conducted over three days in Melbourne by a private organisation based in Switzerland. It was held at the Crown Casino complex on 11–13 September 2000 and attended by several hundred delegates from around the world, mainly business leaders and government representatives. Policing the event was the largest operation undertaken by the force for many years. For the duration of the forum, approximately 2400 police were rostered on duty in two shifts around the clock, at a cost to the force of more than $3 million, not including salaries. The WEF was the focus of protest action by many groups and individuals, and over the three days there were numerous clashes between police and demonstrators.
More than fifty police were injured during the forum and a further seventy-six needed medical assistance or counselling for minor scratches, bruises, blisters and medical tests after being spat on. A number of police were assaulted and hit by missiles, including nails, bolts, nuts and bearings, and were spat on and sprayed with urine. Subsequently the ombudsman received over a hundred written complaints from protesters, alleging, inter alia, that police had used excessive force against demonstrators.
In his final report on police action at the WEF demonstrations, the ombudsman said:
It is my view that, on this occasion, the strategies adopted by police involving the use of force without arrest were reasonably open to police in the circumstances. The particular strategies devised and executed over the three days to deal with the total blockade which protesters sought to impose were appropriate and were, generally speaking, executed in a manner which, in my view, does not warrant any punitive action by way of disciplinary or criminal proceedings against police. There were, however, some examples of undisciplined acts by individual members which appear to have been in breach of instructions and guidelines and which, on their face, would amount to misconduct for which punitive action may be required.
It was of ‘the utmost concern’ to Neil Comrie that the lenient sentences imposed on some of those offenders charged with assaulting police ‘did not adequately reflect the sense of outrage [felt] in the broader community … nor did they provide any real sense of deterrence’. He went on to add that ‘Police officers are entitled to be provided with a safe workplace as they go about their duty of protecting the community. They are not punching bags for thugs and should never be expected to accept being spat upon or sprayed with urine’. For their part in what Comrie described as a ‘historic police operation’, those members directly involved in the operation were granted an additional day of leave known as ‘WEF Day’.
That, however, was not the end of the matter. A group of forty-seven litigants blamed ‘heavy-handed policing for injuries sustained at a riotous protest outside Crown Casino’. Represented by the law firm Slater and Gordon, the protesters sued the Victorian government, the 953 police who worked at the protest site and their senior commanders, for injuries that allegedly included ‘fractured vertebrae, sternums and wrists, as well as shock and anxiety caused by police’. After protracted legal negotiations conducted over a period of years, and on the advice of their insurers, in March 2007 the Victoria Police ‘secretly’ paid $700 000 in compensation to the litigants. Premier Steve Bracks described it as a ‘good outcome’, and Deputy Commissioner Kieran Walshe was adamant that ‘the compensation deal was not an admission by police that their tactics were too heavy-handed’. When asked on ABC Radio if the payment made ‘a softly-softly police approach more likely in the future’, he responded emphatically, ‘No, it doesn’t. No, it does not. No. No.’35
Since the establishment of British-style police services in the 1800s, these services have operated in two distinct forms that, to a large degree, have shaped community perceptions and expectations of the different roles of police. Much of the work performed by police forces is adversarial and places them in direct opposition to or conflict with significant numbers of the communities they purportedly serve and protect; the WEF public-disorder protests provide a clear example of this. In equally clear contrast is the non-confrontational nature of many police functions that generally have the unqualified support of an overwhelming majority of community members. Typical of these roles is the work performed by the Search and Rescue Squad and Missing Persons Unit, and duties performed in support of victims of crime, especially the elderly, vulnerable young people, and women who are the victims of domestic violence or sexual assault. In this second category is some of the outstanding work undertaken within or for police agencies by highly qualified personnel such as forensic scientists. Frequently staying in the background, they undertake work that is vital not just to the organisations that employ them, but also to the broader community. One breakthrough was the discovery and application of DNA profiling, which Neil Comrie described as the most significant development for criminal investigations since the discovery and general introduction of fingerprint identification systems in 1900.
DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) profiling was discovered and developed in 1984 by British geneticist Dr Alec Jeffreys (later Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys). Working in his laboratory at the University of Leicester, he had a ‘Eureka moment’ when he grasped the significant scientific potential of DNA profiling, using variations in the genetic code to identify individuals. He discovered that the unique differences between people made it possible to match samples such as semen found in a sexual assault case with samples of blood from suspects. His work stimulated world-wide debate about such issues as patents, and other centres involved in molecular biology research turned their attention to forensic applications for the technique. Jeffreys’ method was not commercialised until 1987, and in the intervening period his laboratory was the only one in the world undertaking DNA ‘fingerprinting’. His discovery was first applied in a practical sense in an immigration case to confirm the identity of a father, but he and others were excited by the potential of genetic fingerprinting as a technique for use by forensic scientists.
DNA profiling first came to the official notice of the Victoria Police in August 1985, when Dr Stephen Gutowski, head of research and development at the State Forensic Science Laboratory (SFSL), attended the 11th Congress of the Society for Forensic Haemogenetics in Copenhagen. Interest in the potential of the technique was such that in September the following year Gutowski and his colleagues in Melbourne commenced experimental work on DNA profiling. Its first use in an investigation in Victoria was undertaken for the Homicide Squad in July 1988, when detectives investigating the rape and murder of Heather Nelson in Geelong were provided with the details of six suspects. Samples of their semen were taken by Gutowski to Lifecodes Corporation in New York, where he worked under the supervision of experienced DNA profilers. All the samples were excluded from being the donor of the semen found on the body of the victim.
Following that experience, in September 1988 the Labor minister for police, Steve Crabb, pledged $100 000 in special funding for the development of DNA profiling in Victoria. In November, Gutowski returned to New York with samples from major criminal investigations for DNA processing at Lifecodes. That was the last occasion on which samples from Victoria were taken to New York: between November 1988 and February 1989 the DNA profiling process was perfected at the SFSL, and from 1 July 1989 SFSL offered a full casework DNA-profiling service.
Despite being Australian pioneers of DNA profiling, the efforts of Victorian detectives and scientists working in this field were severely restricted by inadequate legislation: ‘In Australia, the Victoria Police Force was alone in having no power to compel the provision of body samples. In New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia, a police member of or above the rank of sergeant could compel the taking of body samples for use as evidence of the commission of an offence’.36
While the first application of DNA profiling in a criminal investigation in Victoria had been used to exclude suspects, in another case that year it was used in Operation Shadow by Gutowski and John Scheffer, then head of the Sexual Offences Section at the SFSL, to identify the man responsible for a series of rapes committed over a four-year period in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs. The offender, George Kaufman, initially refused to provide a blood sample—as was his right under the restrictive legislation then in place in Victoria—but other possible comparison samples collected by investigators for analysis by Gutowski and Scheffer included two pieces of chewing gum, underpants, sheets from the defendant’s bed, and underpants from the defendant’s girlfriend. Kaufman’s estranged wife and daughter also provided samples that, in a case of paternity-type DNA profiling, linked him to some of the rapes. Detectives then charged Kaufman with all the Operation Shadow rapes. Protesting under interrogation that he was not ‘an animal’, he did not initially confess to the rapes of his elderly or very young victims. He did, however, readily confess to some others and also provided a blood sample. This improved the odds of a chance match to better than one in three million, and in October 1989 he pleaded guilty in the Supreme Court to all fourteen rapes. It was the first criminal trial in Victoria where DNA profiling was successfully used in evidence.
Following these cases, the application of DNA technology was given significant impetus on 1 June 1990 when, pursuant to the Crimes (Blood Samples) Act 1989, police in Victoria were given the right to take blood samples without the permission of a suspect provided they first obtained a court order. This followed the Crimes (Fingerprinting) Act 1988, which had come into effect on 1 January 1989 and permitted police to take the fingerprints of an adult suspect pursuant to a court order, or if a suspect person submitted to the process by giving informed consent. Many observers were of the opinion that the spectre of DNA profiling that had been looming in Victoria since 1985 hastened the passing of both fingerprinting and blood sample legislation. A significant point that emerged in support of DNA profiling was the fact that SFSL DNA tests ‘excluded approximately twice as many suspects and defendants as it included’.
From this period onwards, DNA profiling experienced exponential growth in Victoria and the technique became an integral element in the forensic work undertaken by the SFSL. A new DNA Molecular Biology Section was formed at SFSL comprising three qualified staff headed by Dr Henry Roberts. Consequently, the DNA workload soon increased by an estimated 250 per cent, including DNA profiling undertaken for three interstate police agencies. In 1999 a new DNA laboratory was opened at the Victoria Forensic Science Centre (VFSC) at Macleod, at a cost of $1.8 million. It was staffed by eighteen scientists working in three teams: two dealing with everyday cases where there was a known suspect and a court case was pending, and the other working on criminal intelligence.
It was a dynamic field for both research and experimentation, as scientists around the world sought new applications for genetic fingerprinting. Things took a quantum leap in June 1997, when an article by Dr Roland van Oorschot and Max Jones of the VFSC’s Biology Division, describing the discovery of trace DNA, was published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature. Despite later receiving world-wide acclaim for their work, when van Oorschot and Jones first submitted their article to Nature it was rejected for publication because it was deemed that the ‘impact of their work would not be that great’. On the advice of Sir Alec Jeffreys, who was visiting Melbourne, van Oorschot re-submitted the article to Nature with a supporting letter from Jeffreys. The publication of the article generated widespread international interest, with the BBC flying a television crew from England to interview the two scientists and the story featuring in numerous television, radio, newspaper and magazine reports, including Time magazine.
The discovery of trace DNA revolutionised the scope of DNA profiling, enabling scientists to process items that had previously been considered unsuitable for analysis. World-wide, many of the samples collected for genetic profiling to assist criminal investigators were of touched objects, such as sunglasses, dandruff from combs, razors, shirts collars and cuffs, the inside of gloves and condoms, and more obvious objects such as knife handles, car steering wheels and door knobs.
In recognition of their work, van Oorschot and Jones were presented with a Chief Commissioner’s Commendation by Neil Comrie on 7 April 2000. John Scheffer, then assistant director and manager of the VFSC, lauded the international significance of the discovery, noting that, ‘Although Melbourne is a long way from the epicentre of forensic science work in Europe and America, we still have the ability to be world leaders. It makes me really proud of these two’.
When DNA profiling was first discovered, scientists worked with chances of a match in the hundreds, then the thousands—or, as in the Kaufman case, one in three million. In March 2013 the VFSC changed its methodology from using ten DNA sites to twenty-one. If there was a match across all twenty-one sites, the laboratory succinctly and routinely reported, ‘The DNA profile is estimated to be 100 billion times more likely to occur if the DNA originated from the reference sample donor than if it originated from a random person’.37
While developments such as trace DNA focused the international spotlight on Victoria and drew praise from Comrie, closer to home, like commissioners before him, Comrie was confronted with ongoing criticism that the force did not do enough to recruit, train, retain and promote women. It was a criticism he agreed with, observing that: ‘Even with the best of intentions, it must be acknowledged that there have been past shortcomings in relation to equal employment issues within the Force, and despite significant advances in recent years, there is still room for considerable improvement’.
Comrie’s wife was a former police sergeant, which gave him first-hand insight into the issues confronting women police and placed him in a unique position that had not been open to his predecessors. However, he readily conceded that, ‘Like other policing services around the world and also the defence forces, Victoria Police has traditionally been a male-dominated organisation. But community expectations in relation to equal employment opportunities have changed significantly in the past decade and we have been forced to play “catch-up” to many of these training attitudes’.
Much has been made of the fact that in the years immediately preceding the appointment of Christine Nixon as chief commissioner, ‘only 15 per cent of the Victorian membership was female’ compared with New South Wales, which ‘had a 20 per cent female force’. Nixon, even before commencing duty in Victoria, unfairly deduced that such ‘raw numbers’ reflected adversely ‘on the culture of senior command in Victoria’.
Such a simplistic view of what was a complex issue did little to foster balanced debate. The diminution in women police numbers from their peak under Mick Miller in 1984 had its genesis in the extraordinary rate of police deaths and violence during ‘the era of the streets’—Hoddle, Russell, Queen and Walsh streets—and a shift in focus within the force to officer survival training. A ‘toughening-up approach’ was also evident in the style of policing exercised at some of the significant police raids and protest operations, such as the Tasty nightclub imbroglio and the Richmond Secondary College blockade. Whether it was fortuitous or planned, the events of that era produced a style of policing that was more aggressive, physical and ‘masculine’, and this clearly impacted police recruiting and training.
Former Assistant Commissioner (Training) Kevin Scott, reflecting on this regime, succinctly noted: ‘Not only were our selection and training requirements oriented towards the males [one study found that only 33 per cent of female applicants passed the physical agility course, compared with 88 per cent of males], so too were other aspects of particular relevance to women, such as part-time work and re-integration following the birth of a child. We did not keep up. Job opportunities were limited for women and there were issues around sexism and violence against women. Other jurisdictions would have had the same issues, but it seems that the Victoria Police had to get to a watershed moment for things to change: and it seems we have done that’.
Comrie and Nixon were both right in their assessments of there being considerable scope for improvement. In 1999, acknowledging that women police numbers in Victoria—14 per cent of the force—were ‘below the national average when compared with police in the rest of Australia’, Comrie launched the Equity and Diversity Strategy, aimed at redressing the recruitment imbalance and fostering the implementation of lasting reform to broaden career opportunities for women.
In furtherance of these objectives, in May 1999 the force Equal Opportunity Services Branch was replaced by the Equity and Diversity Unit, headed by Kathy Ettershank, who had an extensive background in the public service specialising in equal opportunity legislation, and equity and diversity policy development. Concomitant with these changes, Senior Sergeant Sandra Makepeace produced a recruit marketing strategy. Rather than a simple focus on the percentage of women in the force, her work highlighted that 29 per cent of recruits then in training were women. Despite being well intentioned, the initiatives of Comrie were described in one review thusly: ‘It was apparent that in the face of presumed good intentions, the management of Victoria Police had not been able to improve the representation of women during the 1990s’.38
When announcing his retirement in a newsletter sent to all members, Comrie candidly confessed: ‘This is a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week job and it’s inevitable that policing issues must come before family considerations’. At that time he was ‘Australia’s longest-serving police commissioner in one jurisdiction who was still in office’, and on that note he added: ‘I now want to regain my private life, travel around Australia and spend some quality time with my family, especially my wife, who has endured the long hours and the stressful times of my position’.
On entering retirement Comrie fulfilled his wish to travel and spend quality time with his family, but his talents were not totally lost to the Victorian community. Like Mick Miller some years before him, his post-retirement activities were manifest. This included appointments as a visiting professor in the Faculty of Business and Law at Victoria University, and monitor of the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission Implementation.39
Comrie’s numerous post-retirement appointments were an indication of the regard in which he was held by the emergency services community, as well as by the Australian government and successive Victorian state governments. It also reflected the public status of the force he had commanded for eight years. Contrary to the suggestion of Nixon, quoting her father, that ‘[maybe they had got] a bit carried away with their own publicity’ down in Victoria, measured both quantitatively and qualitatively over a period of decades the Victoria Police was widely regarded as one of the leading police services in Australia. In the Australian Bureau of Statistics Population Survey Monitor, 72.4 per cent of Victorians indicated that they were satisfied with their police service—a figure above the national average of 67.2 per cent. This result mirrored those in the Report on Government Services 2001, which showed that the Victoria Police enjoyed the highest satisfaction rating in Australia, with 73 per cent of people being ‘very satisfied’ or ‘satisfied’ with police services and 85 per cent having confidence in the force. The Herald Sun newspaper reported on 1 February 2001:
Victoria’s police are the most loved in the nation … The politeness, friendliness and fairness most impressed those surveyed … Our police were also rated the country’s most professional (84 per cent) and received high marks for confidence and ethics … The report also showed Victoria’s police had the least complaints against them and the biggest fall in complaints between 1995 and 2000.
Under Neil Comrie, Victoria recorded the lowest road toll since 1952 and, with a crime rate almost 20 per cent below the national average, was the safest place in the nation. The report of the Ministerial Administrative Review into Victoria Police Resourcing, Operational Independence, Human Resource Planning and Associated Issues, conducted by former Tasmanian police commissioner John C. Johnson, was released on 31 March 2001 and stated: ‘The Victorian community is well served by its police force. For example, Victoria’s crime rate per head of population is well below the national average, Victoria has safer roads than Australia as a whole, and there is a high level of public confidence in Victoria Police as verified by national surveys. Nevertheless, Victoria Police has recognised the need to continuously improve the quality of its service in order to achieve a safer community through service excellence.’40
The early retirement of Neil Comrie in 2000 left the way open for the incumbent government to select a new chief commissioner. For the first time since Joan Kirner’s failed attempt to install John Frame as chief commissioner in 1992, the Labor government—led by Premier Steve Bracks, a right-wing Labor Unity faction member—was in a position to choose a new chief commissioner. The selection process was done in stages, but the final panel—including Bracks, his Labor Unity faction colleague Police Minister Andre Haermeyer, and Finance Minister Lynne Kosky—chose Christine Nixon, then an assistant commissioner in the New South Wales Police. She was the first woman appointed to head an Australian police service and, with 12 000 sworn personnel, the first woman anywhere in the world, including the USA, UK, most parts of Europe and Asia, to lead a police agency the size of Victoria’s. Bracks said of the appointment: ‘Christine Nixon is recognised both here and overseas as an exponent in best practice in policing and law enforcement. I am particularly impressed by Mrs [sic] Nixon’s strong belief in the need to professionalise police, to raise its status, to bring knowledge and research to the task of policing and to encourage ideas and initiatives from within the police force itself’.
Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon
Nixon was well qualified for the position. Aged forty-eight and a member of the New South Wales Police since 1972, she had a number of tertiary qualifications, including a BA (Philosophy and Politics) from Macquarie University. She had travelled extensively overseas undertaking police-related research, including a secondment to the London Metropolitan Police, and was actively involved in consultancies and committee work. In 1984 she had been the first police officer to be awarded the prestigious Harkness Foundation Scholarship, which enabled her enrolment in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in Boston, where she was conferred with the degree Master of Public Administration. In 1997 she was awarded an Australian Police Medal and the same year was runner-up in Telstra’s Business Woman of the Year. A recipient of an Australasian Women and Policing Award for Leadership, in 2000 she had received a Glass Ceiling Award from the US National Centre for Women and Policing.
Nixon served in New South Wales for twenty-eight years, the previous seven at the rank of assistant commissioner. For most of her career she had worked in non-operational areas and her strengths lay in the fields of policy development and implementation, police training and education, human resources management, industrial relations and leadership. In 1996 she had applied unsuccessfully for the position of commissioner in her home state, and in 1997 her application for the position of commissioner in South Australia had been similarly unfruitful. That position was filled by Victoria Police Deputy Commissioner Mal Hyde, a lawyer and holder of an MBA from the University of Melbourne.
Much to Nixon’s chagrin, the position of commissioner in New South Wales had gone to distinguished British police officer Peter Ryan. Formerly the national director of police training at Bramshill, the British police staff college, Ryan was highly qualified but his welcome in New South Wales was hostile and his relationship with Nixon was, at best, tetchy. At the time of her move to Victoria she held the position of region commander, South Eastern Region, based at Wollongong. Immediately prior to that posting, and at the behest of her nemesis Ryan, she served six-month stints as region commander at Greater Hume, the largest police region in the state, and North Metropolitan, based at Gosford. These transfers were akin to Chief Commissioner Tom Blamey’s ‘Siberia transfers’ of police union delegates in 1929. But rather than penalise Nixon, the consecutive front-line postings—not of her choosing and away from her home base—were a ‘make or break’ test of her mettle at the pointy end of policing, which she passed. Of these operational regional commands she would later observe, ‘I’d learned a great deal in exile. Thank you, Peter Ryan. The missing part of my curriculum vitae had been addressed in a very fulfilling, very stimulating couple of years’. Respected Age journalist Andrew Rule wrote of this dénouement, ‘without working in Wollongong, she would never have become Victoria’s 19th chief commissioner’.
Sworn in on 23 April 2001, Nixon, like Comrie before her, came from a proud police family. Her younger brother Mark was for a time a police officer in New South Wales, and her father, Ross, was a seasoned criminal investigator who rose to the rank of assistant commissioner. Her family and friends attended her swearing-in ceremony in Queen’s Hall at Parliament House in Melbourne. Fittingly, other attendees included her long-time mentor and benefactor, former New South Wales commissioner John Avery. This augured of things to come.
When Mick Miller was sworn in as chief commissioner on 9 June 1977, the ceremony was conducted by Chief Stipendiary Magistrate Lindsay Griffin in his chambers at the City Court, in the presence of several magistrates and senior public servants. Notably absent was a media gaggle or fanfare: the story garnered a meagre six lines in Police Life. The Fifth Estate was, however, present at the slightly more media-savvy swearing-in of Miller’s successor, Kel Glare, on 5 October 1987. In company with Miller and the unsuccessful aspirants for the position, Bill Horman and John Frame, they were summoned to the office of the police minister, Race Mathews. There, to Glare’s dismay ‘at the way the announcement was handled’, Mathews informed the assemblage that Glare was being appointed chief commissioner, and within minutes Glare found himself sharing the spotlight with Miller and Mathews ‘in front of a media frenzy’.
While still a ‘fairly low-key affair’, Neil Comrie’s swearing-in ceremony took place at the stately Airlie Police College in South Yarra on 4 January 1993. Chief Magistrate Sally Brown administered the oath of office and Premier Jeff Kennett and Police Minister Pat McNamara both made speeches. Members of the Comrie family were present, and invited dignitaries included Attorney-General Jan Wade, Chief Justice John Phillips, Chief Judge Glenn Waldron and members of force command and the nascent Police Board. Unsurprisingly to Comrie, ‘the media were present as you would expect … with a focus on the “controversy” surrounding my appointment’.
Compared to the relatively modest swearing-in ceremonies of her predecessors, Nixon’s inauguration was a gala affair where more than one hundred and twenty distinguished guests, drawn from interstate and the higher echelons of Victorian politics, law, justice and policing, witnessed the chief magistrate, Ian Gray, swear in ‘recruit’ 33 000. Also at the ceremony was Nixon’s husband of nine years, John Becquet. Twelve years her senior with a teenage son and daughter, Becquet was a former Qantas executive responsible for managing air-crew operations. His presence at Nixon’s swearing-in was entirely appropriate, but it was also an insight into the road ahead. The presence of Becquet alongside Nixon at all manner of official functions and public duties was ubiquitous and without precedent. Sections of the Melbourne media likened him to Denis Thatcher, the husband of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Becquet admired Denis and was reputedly flattered by the comparison. Despite the misgivings of many members, Nixon was staunch in her defence of Becquet’s quasi-official role and ubiquity. One observer noted: ‘Christine never relinquished her roots or her femininity. She has remained true to herself. She also modelled the importance of family and demonstrated that it is all right for a leader to give an insight into his or her personal life. John, her husband, was often by her side’.
Nixon’s gender and ‘outsider’ status in Victoria generated widespread interest and debate. One of the first people to congratulate her on her appointment was Miller, who in the 1970s had been the first Victorian chief commissioner to make serious efforts to promote the place of women in the force. He reminded Nixon that she had ‘been given temporary custody of a police organisation which has existed since 1853 and which, during that time, has experienced the highs and lows of its development to what it is today. You are not the first to have been accorded this honour and you will not be the last. Depending upon how [you] address your responsibilities, you could prove to be the best. However, that will be for history to judge’.
Women almost universally applauded Nixon’s appointment. Western Australia Police Assistant Commissioner Barbara Etter, a contemporary of Nixon’s, gave voice to the sentiments of many when she said, ‘Australasian policewomen rejoiced at one of their own being chosen, quite controversially, for the position, particularly in what was known to be one of the more “challenging” jurisdictions. Instantly, policewomen and female police staff across the country sensed that the winds of change might be beginning to blow. Christine’s appointment sent a strong message to women in policing and female community members that maybe policing would start to take issues like domestic violence and sexual assault more seriously or that priorities might at least change’.
Former chief commissioner Kel Glare opined at the time: ‘I have no doubt that she has the integrity, intellect, education, police experience and general competence to meet all the challenges with ease. I believe this is an excellent appointment’. (He later recanted on this assessment, stating bluntly, ‘I was wrong’.)
While most observers proffered balanced views, some of the commentary surrounding Nixon’s appointment was asinine, including baseless claims, bordering on misandry, that ‘there was surprise all round when she took the top post in Victoria, which for the preceding decade had been amongst the most misogynist forces in the country’. The decade alluded to included some of Glare’s commissionership, during which time he created the Equal Opportunity Unit and appointed the nation’s first female assistant commissioner and first female civilian director of personnel.41
Australian historian Professor Marilyn Lake, with an eye to both the future and the past, succinctly noted: ‘At last a woman … Who would have thought it would take 85 years after their initial recruitment for a woman to reach the top post … It would be good to think that 85 years on the new police commissioner will be able to escape the public gaze and settle down to the job for which she seems so eminently qualified’.
In reality, Nixon was never going to escape the public gaze. She courted the media, and much of the hype surrounding her appointment was, in her early days in the role, consciously generated by her. A tireless and accomplished public speaker, she hit the ground running with Becquet in tow, and ‘Team Nixon’ was feted in places never contemplated by her predecessors. A defining moment early in her commissionership, and one of the first public occasions on which she appeared wearing the Victoria Police chief commissioner’s regalia, took place on 22 January 2002, when she led a uniformed formation of LGBTI police participating in the Pride March down Fitzroy Street, St Kilda. Nixon acknowledged that she ‘got letters and emails from police officers apoplectic with rage’ and conceded that her decision to march ‘wasn’t applauded universally’, but said ‘the reaction on the street was ecstatic’. And the public gaze was firmly fixed on Nixon.42
Appointed by the Bracks Government as a force for change, Nixon moved swiftly to put her stamp on the organisation. She began with kindly advice to her personal aide and veteran commissioner’s driver, Leading Senior Constable Gavin McGraw, to ‘Call me Christine’—an informal first-name form of address that none of her predecessors had used but one that was readily and almost universally adopted by the force, the media and members of the public. She also eschewed the use of a standard commissioner’s vehicle and insisted upon an eye-catching ‘blue V8 Holden Statesman with lights and sirens’.43
Like former chief commissioner George Steward, another outside appointee, who in 1920 ‘wanted to meet as many members as he could’ and on ‘one country tour spanning fourteen days travelled 1500 miles and visited fifty-seven police stations’, Nixon, within days of assuming office, embarked on a whistle-stop ‘meet-the-troops’ tour of the state. She described her tour as ‘revolutionary’ and suggested that other senior officers do something similar, but failed to see that those senior officers were steeped in local knowledge and it was she, not them, who needed, ‘as a foreigner, to come to grips with some important cultural and political differences’. The first stop on her roadshow was Frankston, and from there she worked her way around Victoria, joined by Becquet ‘on the longer trips’. With a whiteboard as her backdrop, she asked her police audiences to ‘Tell me anything, ask me anything’ and gave them carte blanche to ignore the traditional police chain of command, instead urging them to email her directly. And they did: she ‘got emails for the next eight years from members of the organisation of every rank and position, from all over the state, with concerns, big and small, personal and organisational’. When her roadshow concluded she had a list of 494 issues that had been raised by members, and ‘found new friends, and adversaries, waiting every day in [her] email box’.44
One controversial Nixon action, taken just days after she had arrived in Melbourne, was a total ban on alcohol in police premises. Upon discovering ‘a well-stocked bar’ in her office and ‘another in the meeting room next to [her] office—where the most senior police in the state gathered most days to make decisions about how to keep Victoria safe’, Nixon ordered that the liquor cabinets in her office ‘be cleaned out and shut down’. She purportedly followed this directive with a memo circulated force-wide banning the possession and consumption of alcohol on police premises, including headquarters, the academy dining room and all suburban and country police stations. It was intended to place Nixon above her predecessors and the commissioners who comprised her inherited command team (who were all Comrie appointments), but also cut deeper at the alcoholic malaise that had afflicted the force for decades.45
At the time of the formation of the force in 1853, the abuse of alcohol was a feature of police life that permeated and blighted police organisations around the world. As early as 1854, ‘alcoholism and its associated evils were a constant worry to the police hierarchy’ and the incidence of members arrested for being drunk on duty was high. Across the decades the damage done to the force by alcohol abuse and misuse was ameliorated, but all too often it impacted adversely on the force’s image, performance, public trust, health and general well-being. Police ambivalence on the subject of alcohol misuse was such that in 1962, the police surgeon, Dr John Birrell, a lifetime crusader on the carnage wrought by excessive alcohol consumption, stated in a public lecture that ‘alcohol was no respecter of person or position’ and that he ‘had seen a policeman drunk on duty at a car crash’. His comments were relayed to the chief commissioner, who suggested to Birrell that ‘he get another job’.
Nixon’s alcohol ban was a blunt and timely first strike in her quest to change the culture of the Victoria Police, but she was not the first commissioner in contemporary times to tackle the issue, and her bold blanket ban was inconsistent with existing force instructions and was soon watered down. In 1991, Deputy Commissioner John Frame had led efforts to change the culture of the force with a focus on alcohol misuse and drink-driving; this had been consolidated and formalised in 1996 when Neil Comrie issued a Chief Commissioner’s Instruction banning the consumption or possession of alcohol by members on ‘operational police premises’. This instruction did, however, permit the possession and consumption of alcohol on non-operational police premises subject to written permission.
In 2001, following her statewide road trip, Nixon distilled the 494 issues raised by members into a list of eighty and allocated them to thirty-four project teams, tasked with ‘finding solutions to those issues’. One of these was ‘alcohol, including testing of members for alcohol, the consumption of alcohol by an employee at a one-member station and alcohol on police premises’. The completion date for this project team was 31 December 2001. It recommended, inter alia, that the ‘Victoria Police introduce an alcohol testing program comprised of random, targeted and post-incident testing as part of an integrated, welfare-based substance abuse program’. Also recommended was a ban on the consumption and possession of alcohol ‘at any Victoria Police premises’.
The project team’s recommendations were not fully implemented: instead, on 11 July 2003, Comrie’s original instructions were updated and the distinction between operational police premises and non-operational premises was maintained. It was not until 18 August 2008 that the project team’s recommendations were given full effect, when Chief Commissioner’s Instruction 06/08 directed that ‘Alcohol must not be consumed by employees on police premises, unless it is a special occasion and with the approval of a department head’ and that ‘alcohol may be only possessed on police premises for specific occasions with the approval of and subject to any conditions set by an officer’. The instruction also gave the Victoria Police the ability to test its members for the presence of alcohol or drugs of dependence in certain circumstances.
Nixon had been instrumental in the introduction of random breath testing of police in New South Wales and ‘went with the first testing crew to go out to a NSW station’, but it took her ‘seven and a half years to get drug and alcohol testing up in Victoria, even in a limited way’. Despite opposition from a number of quarters, including the Police Association, she was assiduous in her efforts to have the necessary provisions promulgated. One reason the policy took so long to come to fruition was that it also encapsulated the burgeoning incidence of ‘other drug use’ in the workplace. The implementation of these powers and procedures was finalised only weeks before Nixon resigned, but they were an important hallmark in her efforts to reshape the culture of the force.46
Another early and highly visible salvo in Nixon’s self-proclaimed ‘culture war’ was the festering matter of police uniforms. Described by Nixon as ‘a huge issue’, ‘uniform’ was another project that had its genesis in her roadshow and one that many observers felt characterised her populist management style. It was also reflective, in part, of generational changes in the broader community.
During the first half of the twentieth century, the first significant alterations to the Victoria Police uniform had been introduced following the formation of the Police Classification Board in 1946. These changes included a soft cloth cap with a cloth peak to replace the leather ‘bobby’ helmet that had been on issue since 1877, and an open-necked jacket with epaulettes to replace the high-collared tunic. Later, one-off changes included the issue of a white plastic-topped cap to all ranks, and the introduction of short-sleeved shirts for wear during summer. All these changes had the broad support of members and reflected changes in contemporary workplace attire.
It was not for another thirty-two years that a significant revamp of Victoria Police uniforms came to fruition. Lauded by Chief Commissioner Mick Miller as his ‘greatest administrative achievement’, the changes, when they came into effect on 10 August 1979, constituted a complete overhaul of the uniform system. Prior to Miller’s appointment, all members had been paid a commuted fortnightly uniform allowance that, over time, was regarded by many of them, erroneously, as a component of their salary. The unintended consequence of this system was that many members pocketed the uniform allowance and uniform standards deteriorated commensurately. This prompted Miller, a former drum major in the Highland Pipe Band and renowned for his impeccable uniformed bearing and presence, to observe that many uniforms ‘had seen better days’ and were the ‘worse for wear’.
Miller ushered in a changeover from the uniform allowance system to a personal issue system that had the tacit support of the Police Association and did not impact adversely on the take-home pay of members. It was an important element in his uniform makeover and enabled the design and force-wide distribution of a new uniform that was functional and gave ‘the wearer a smart appearance in line with modern clothing trends’, all achieved at no cost to members. To give effect to these proposals, Miller created a uniform design and development section headed by Chief Inspector Ken Robertson, who sagely reinforced the timeless and intrinsic place of uniforms as an element of police culture: ‘The object of a uniform is to make the wearer identifiable and distinguishable to the public. From a practical point of view, a police uniform must be not only distinctive, but also functional, durable and economical. It must be attractive to the wearer and acceptable to the public, since it projects the image of the organisation’.
From that time on the basic design underwent numerous modifications, largely reflecting ongoing changes in workplace safety, contemporary clothing design and shifting operational requirements. For example, in 1981 ‘slack pants’ were introduced for women police, who until then had worn skirts and ‘jumped fences and performed other such physical feats while retaining whatever dignity and modesty they could’.
Miller was justifiably proud of his uniform revamp, which produced a dramatic recurrent cost saving of almost $7 million and a ‘superior system of uniform supply’ that rendered the force one of the best attired in the country. The collective pride and acceptance the new policy fostered extended to the administrations of Glare and Comrie, who never faced any serious disquiet on the subject of uniforms. But the cyclical nature of changing uniform styles predisposed the Nixon era to a push for change, which she managed adroitly. It was, however, bedevilled by what she described as ‘a material reflection of the penetrating depth of the culture war’ between ‘the old guard’ and younger police, ‘who wanted more flexibility and comfort’, including baseball caps, beards, jumpers and cargo pants. A symbol of American popular culture, the ubiquitous baseball cap became central to Nixon’s ‘culture war’. Sporting her own cap, she identified herself firmly with ‘the underdog and not the hierarchy’ and, in the words of one commentator, ‘The humble baseball cap became a surprise symbol of Christine Nixon’s first year at the helm of Victoria Police’.
Euphemistically described by Nixon as a ‘baseball hat’ and cited in the Police Gazette as a ‘soft peak cap’, Nixon’s first strike in the uniform war came into effect on 27 August 2001, when baseball caps became de rigueur. Members were also granted ‘more freedom to decide how to wear their uniforms’, which extended to a policy change allowing members to wear a beard ‘in the King George V style’. The uniform changes wrought by Nixon were not a totally fresh look in the way that Miller’s were, but were aimed at giving members more freedom of choice. Pullovers, army boots, cargo pants and a new-style operational jacket were all up for grabs, and in that heady egalitarian climate women were granted permission to ‘wear male shirts if they prefer pockets’, and ‘Those women wanting to wear the male style of trousers were also permitted to do so’. Understandably, Nixon’s ‘old guard’ railed at these changes, whereas younger police embraced them to such an extent that, largely during Nixon’s time as chief commissioner, the police wardrobe expanded to ‘eighty different ways to wear the uniform’.47
In the opening stages of her culture war, Nixon adopted an evolutionary management strategy that enabled her to adapt to changing environmental factors, including professional, socio-economic, political, technical, global and local community issues, described later by former Deputy Commissioner Neil O’Loughlin as ‘garbage can theory’. She wanted bottom-up reform and moved quickly to galvanise some momentum and ‘get a bit of leverage’. In her words, ‘It would show them I meant business’. She had some early scores on the board with her participation in the Pride March, statewide road trip, alcohol bans and uniform changes, but what followed was a more substantive focus on the crime rate. She identified four criminal offence categories that she described as ‘worrying’—family violence, burglary, robbery and motor vehicle theft—and tasked four ‘senior commanders’ to develop strategies to counter them.
Nixon selected Trevor Thompson to focus on reducing the incidence of motor vehicle theft. He developed a blueprint of initiatives that endured for a decade and coincided with a significant reduction in thefts statewide: from 2001 to 2009, motor vehicle theft in Victoria dropped by more than 70 per cent, an average of 14 per cent per annum. Similarly, Kieran Walshe, the architect behind Operation Burglary Response, was credited by Nixon with achieving a 10 per cent fall in burglary rates across Victoria. And Leigh Gassner was ‘responsible for developing and implementing the Victoria Police strategy to combat violence against women’. Thompson, Walshe and Gassner were subsequently appointed assistant commissioners. Whether fortuitous or prescient, Nixon enjoyed this local success at a time when the national rates for car theft, burglary and robbery were falling rapidly. The following year she said that there were an ‘extra 800 police on the street’ with 600 more to come, and that, together with ‘the focus by everyone around the state’ on key issues such as violence against women, burglary and motor vehicle theft, ‘the crime rate was down 6.6 per cent’.
While quick to claim credit for these successes, Nixon harboured a lingering legacy from her time in New South Wales and believed that ‘there were big concerns about the integrity of Victorian crime statistics, which had previously been so consistently good that police in other states were convinced they had been manipulated’. It was but another take on the envious notion plied interstate that ‘down in Victoria they were a bit too self-satisfied with the popular belief that they are the best in the country’. It was a fallacious view that failed to pay due regard to related work previously undertaken by the force, and applied in particular to the appointment in January 1977 of Dr Andrew Macneil as force statistician. A former tutor in statistics at Monash University, Macneil had completed a PhD thesis on the theory of measurement in quantum mechanics. Vested with a number of responsibilities, his tasks included a review of the way the force collected, analysed and presented statistical data, and a revision of the annual statistical review of crime.
When Nixon presented her four anti-crime initiatives at a media conference the day before the force’s annual crime statistics were released, she announced that she had initiated an independent review of Victoria’s crime statistics. The review, conducted by researchers at the Australian Institute of Criminology in Canberra, noted, inter alia, that, while there was scope for some changes and enhancements, ‘The crime statistics published by Victoria Police accurately reflect the counting rules and crime classifications’. It also found that ‘Victoria Police meets its own needs by publishing the most comprehensive set of crime statistics in the country’.48
Nixon described herself as ‘primarily a strategic leader’. A newcomer with a clean sheet ‘with no hostages to fortune, no history and no hidden agendas’, one of her highest priorities was to build a leadership team she could trust. ‘Little by little’ she gathered an in-sync team around her, enabling her to expose the force to new ideas and new people. As vacancies arose she moved personnel about, giving effect to her plans for restructuring the organisation.
At the time of her appointment Nixon inherited two deputy commissioners and seven assistant commissioners with an average age of fifty-eight; all of them except Noel Ashby, aged forty-six, were older than Nixon. All Caucasian males, they had served exemplary life-long careers in the force, though that changed post-appointment in the case of Ashby. The most senior civilian member of the command team was Executive Director Ken Latta. Appointed by Neil Comrie in 1997, he was highly regarded within the organisation and served on Nixon’s team until he left in March 2007 to take up the position of chief executive officer of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade. In July 2010 he was joined at the MFB by Comrie, who was appointed president of the MFB board.
The oldest member of the group was Deputy Commissioner Neil O’Loughlin, who had served as acting chief commissioner in the interregnum between Comrie and Nixon. Born in 1944, he joined the force as a junior police trainee on 7 February 1961 and retired on 15 March 2002. He officially witnessed Nixon’s swearing-in ceremony at Parliament House and, in a very real sense, that ‘passing of the baton’ exemplified the generational change that the force was undergoing. O’Loughlin was titular head of an esteemed police family dynasty of eighteen sworn and unsworn members. Together they served the Victoria Police continuously for sixty years, for a collective total in excess of three hundred years. O’Loughlin’s impeccable old-school credentials included service with the Armed Robbery Squad, Detective Training School and SOG, and attendance at the FBI National Academy. Missing from his CV were tertiary qualifications, and this underscored the polarity that separated the force that had been O’Loughlin’s lifeblood from the police service that had been entrusted to Nixon. After retiring, he observed that ‘Nixon certainly changed the style of policing in Victoria, and not for the better. She was a nice enough person but she was not a good operational police person and destroyed much of the tradition, reputation and history of Victoria Police’. It was a view not shared by all, but O’Loughlin did voice the concerns of many of his colleagues.49
Special Operations Group operators performing night vision clearance drills in 2017
