Queensland police admin officer hacked records ‘for vanity’

An admin officer was motivated by vanity when she altered information in the Queensland police computer system over seven years, a court has been told.

Tracy Lea Hurling received a suspended jail sentence for 20 computer hacking offences after the police commissioner appealed against a $15,000 fine as manifestly inadequate.

The admin worker’s hacking charges related to a period of about seven years.Credit: Silas Stein/Getty Images

Hurling, an administration officer with the Queensland Police Service (QPS) from 2003 who worked in the Navy for nine years, admitted causing damage to contents of the police’s computerised record system on nine occasions over nearly seven years from November 2013.

This included accessing information relating to charges against her for theft and assault that were discontinued and attempting to delete references to herself.

She also admitted looking at records concerning a partner at the time, his ex-wife and a friend.

One charge related to Hurling in 2015 unlinking in the computer system a quantity of cash from a report she made six years earlier – for insurance purposes – about items lost while shopping.

In 2019, she added a flag that would notify her if anyone searched her own address.

Hurling’s counsel said the matter was one of ill-advised mischief rather than explicit misconduct.

“It was submitted, her offending was motivated by vanity because of a concern that others would discover personal matters about her if they were searching through the system,” Brisbane District Court Judge Michael Byrne said in response to the appeal.

Prosecutors said the offending was serious and stopped as a result of an audit of the system, rather than of her own accord.

Judge Byrne said the offending did not occur continuously over the seven years and some charges were on the less serious end of the spectrum.

While Hurling’s counsel sought to minimise her conduct as checking on information and not using it in any way, no acceptable explanation was offered for accessing records about other people.

“It is open to infer that she was doing nothing more than prying into other people’s personal lives,” Judge Byrne said in a judgment published on Thursday.

“This style of conduct is a direct breach of the expectation of privacy that members of the community are entitled to expect of an organisation that necessarily holds private, and potentially embarrassing, information.”

Hurling resigned from QPS after being charged and studied nursing, but was employed as an office manager at the time of the appeal.

Judge Byrne said some offences required the imposition of a jail sentence to give appropriate recognition to their seriousness, general deterrence, community denunciation and protection of the community.

He handed down sentences of up to 12 months behind bars to be served concurrently, but ordered they are suspended immediately.

Convictions were recorded on some charges.

For the remainder of the charges he sentenced her to a $5000 fine, which has already been paid.

-AAP