Andrew Rule: Force fails the test on big little lies
THE row over faked breath tests has shone a light on other occasions cops and statistics have been an uncomfortable mix, writes Andrew Rule.
Andrew Rule
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SOME senior police have a nerve. And plenty of it, in the case of one crime commissioner who later boasted that he drove a government minister and a fellow assistant commissioner to a rendezvous with a crazed kidnapper in early October 1972.
The self-proclaimed “driver”, Bill Crowley, later claimed he had a “derringer pistol” in his pocket and his fellow senior officer (future police chief Mick Miller) was hidden under a blanket in the back nursing a high-powered rifle.
If any of that had been true, it was probably a good thing kidnapper Edwin John Eastwood didn’t show up or it could have ended up like the OK Corral.
But not all of it was true, says the detective who actually drove the car that night. Bill Kneebone, called in after midnight to drive the then-education minister and $1 million ransom to the dawn meeting at Woodend, says Crowley fabricated some of it.
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He recalls driving an unmarked fawn Ford Falcon to a Malvern address to pick up a “Mr Thompson” — and being surprised when the state education minister (and future premier) Lindsay Thompson stepped silently into the car.
He recalls meeting Crowley and Miller at Russell St police headquarters and putting the cash ransom in the boot.
But the former detective cannot recall seeing the rifle that somehow became part of the Faraday kidnap legend. He believes there wasn’t one because “half way up to Woodend, Mick Miller asked me if I was armed and I handed him my police pistol”.
Crowley’s subsequent porkies were typical, he says. As assistant commissioner for crime, the late William Desmond Crowley was well known for “cooking” the crime statistics — carefully recording “solved crimes” but mislaying enough unsolved ones to keep the police minister happy and his job safe.
This practice went all the way down to desk sergeants, who fudged crime statistics in those pre-computer days simply by slipping every other crime report under the ink blotter. Amazing how burglaries and car thefts dropped in election years. Everyone was a winner — including the crooks.
All of which is background to the present scandal over the fake breathalyser tests. Attach millions of dollars of sponsorship to an unrealistic quota of breath tests and inevitably the tests will be artificially inflated. This happens in two ways.
The first is by diverting busy police from real anti-crime work to test overwhelmingly sober motorists in the middle of the day when there are hardly any drink-drivers. The second, as we now know, is by manually faking the number of tests, with police blowing into the units themselves or tampering with them.
Retired police have told this column that booze buses often had unofficial targets of 1000 tests a night. One member would write down each car registration number and whether a male or female was driving. But if not enough tests were done by end of shift, they nabbed the number of every car passing by. It was not unknown to record numberplates in car yards. Great for stats, not so hot for wiping out drink-driving.
All in all, it’s a wonder Victoria Police didn’t see the breathalyser fraud coming. It’s not as if there weren’t warning signs.
News item, 2007: “Queensland police are faking alcohol breath tests so they can meet a ‘stupid’ political quota of three million drink-driving checks a year, senior officers say. They claimed overworked frontline police routinely manipulated alcometers to generate dozens of false ‘zeros’ in a few minutes.”
“The trick,” continues the Queensland story, “was done by blocking air holes on the devices with fingers or straws, which causes a negative alcohol reading … the fake results distort data so it appears Queensland roads are safer than in reality.”
No shite, Sherlock. That’s what they say in Ireland, where the rort was so widespread in the past decade that the acting Garda commissioner Donall O. Cualain didn’t bother disciplining officers for “mass falsification of breath tests”. But at least the commissioner apologised for what he described as “sloppy, lazy and unprofessional” behaviour leading to almost two million fake breath tests over eight years.
Sadly, the Irish say, piggies often tell porkies.
No one knows that better than frontline police forced to bend rules to meet nonsensical “productivity” demands by self-serving senior officers aping MBA business jargon from the sort of bankers now in disgrace.
One cheesed-off traffic cop of 30 years standing says Force Command cynically demands extra daytime breath tests to inflate the stats, knowing drink-driving collisions almost never occur at noon on weekdays.
“They (daytime breath tests) are pointless except for doing more stats. If something is pointless, then that is when people lose interest,” he says.
“Force Command take divvy vans and patrol units and supervisors off patrolling duties to do them (daytime breath tests).
“I have been at sites where the sergeant is being rung by the inspector to see how many have been done.”
The result is that operational police are taken off the streets — attending to burglaries, assaults and the like — just to puff the statistics.
Slippery crime stats have caused plenty of trouble for police chiefs seduced or pressured into cooking the books for someone else’s political ends.
After Christine Nixon was appointed Victoria’s chief commissioner in 2001, she made it clear she was puzzled by a statistical quirk we’ll call the Murray River Miracle.
ALTHOUGH Victoria and NSW traditionally had similar crime rates, just before Nixon arrived the Victorian rates had been so unbelievably low she didn’t believe them. Who could believe that crime north of the Murray was so much worse than on the south?
Nixon was so doubtful, she confirmed this week, that she publicly questioned the statistics and called a review by the Australian Institute of Criminology.
It turns out, the Victorian stats were a stinkeroo. That piece of relatively recent history should be well known to any senior police in Australia, let alone in Victoria. So it was surprising that well-informed and well-coached Commander Stuart Bateson defended police statistics when he guest-starred on the ABC’s “talkback television” show Q&A in April.
The commander, respected veteran of robust frontline law enforcement before taking on the gentler Kumbaya community policing he now espouses, works hard to be a sort of diplomat in dark blue.
He had three paid advisers on the ABC set, minding him for his television appearance as if he were PM. They didn’t appear to warn him about the risk of leaping to the defence of rubbery police statistics by attacking criticism of them.
Try shooting the messenger and you usually shoot yourself in the foot.
It took only seven weeks for the bogus breathalyser scandal to prove that.
It’s not that a few hundred thousand fake breathalyser tests matter in themselves. And it’s not just that it is a form of theft by deception, given that TAC funding is tied to breathalyser statistics.
What really leaves egg dripping off the face and on to that NYPD knock-off uniform is the question: “If they lied about this for so long, what else are they lying about?”
That’s the real damage.
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