Victoria Police’s internal investigators are probing allegations surveillance crews falsified logs to claim they were monitoring suspects when not doing so.
At least 45 police investigations and an unknown number of criminal trials may have been compromised by allegations members of Victoria Police’s elite covert operations division falsified surveillance reports that may have been used as evidence in court cases.
Internal investigators are reviewing the surveillance logs from each investigation to determine if they have been doctored, while also working with the OPP to examine the impact on prosecutions relying on the logs as evidence. Surveillance teams are typically only used in operations involving serious crimes. The crew in question was so highly regarded that it was often sought for murder and organised crime investigations.
Depending on how widespread the practice has been, the inadvertent impact of the suspected misconduct on Victorian court cases may be significant. The Lawyer X case involved Victoria Police recruiting criminal defence lawyer and barrister Nicola Gobbo to inform on the very people she was representing.Veteran criminal barrister Robert Richter, KC, who formerly chaired the Criminal Bar Association, said the allegations, if proven, carried very serious consequences, “from obtaining property by deception to undermining cases by the use of fabricated evidence”.
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