We failed the families of Lindt victims: police chief

NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller says the families of those killed in the Lindt siege were let down by his force.

NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller says the families of those killed in the Lindt cafe siege were let down by his force and they are right to feel disappointed.

And he also criticised his predecessor Andrew Scipione for going to sleep while gunman Man Horan Monis continued to hold hostages in the Martin Place cafe.

“It’s clear the community’s ­expectation, if you are the leader, not the commander, if you are the leader, that you are there for the long haul. And I totally accept that,” he said.

He added that officers should have stormed the cafe when the first shot was fired at 2.03am on December 16, 2014, rather than wait 10 minutes until Monis shot dead cafe manager Tori Johnson.

“We certainly should’ve gone in earlier. The challenge in that, of course, is that that doesn’t guarantee there won’t be a loss of life,” he told the ABC’s Four Corners.

“I think the family members should feel disappointed, they should feel let down.”

But the brother of Katrina Dawson, a mother of three killed by police bullet fragments as officers stormed the cafe and shot Monis dead, said it was “demeaning” that police waited so long to admit mistakes were made.

“To watch your parents go through everyday almost, waiting for somebody to say ‘this went wrong, we could have done this better, we made a mistake and we’re sorry’,” media lawyer Sandy Dawson SC said. “No one was prepared to do that for the ­entirety of the inquest and it is ­demeaning and unfair that families like ours and families like the Johnsons are reduced to a cliche of begging for the truth.”

In submissions released yesterday, the Dawsons’ legal team called for adverse findings to be made against assistant commissioners Mark Murdoch and Mark Jenkins. The inquest heard they did not approve an ­action plan drawn up to storm the cafe at a time of police choosing, before a hostage was killed or wounded.