Five senior NT Police officers committed a crime – the institutional cover-up continues

Our investigative series over the past week-and-a-half has exposed some uncomfortable truths into the character of those responsible for our law and justice system.

Most urgently, we know that five senior NT Police officers in current senior roles committed perjury with false sworn statements to the court in a blatant cover-up attempt.

There appears to be no consequence for this.

Most shockingly, the Office of the Independent Commissioner Against Corruption and the NT Police executive are complicit in the cover-up.

 

Beyond doubt

The joint investigation carried out by the ICAC and the NT Police’s Professional Standards Command had two main objectives: To investigate the production and distribution of the racist awards, which constitutes misconduct; and to investigate whether the five senior officers who denied their existence had knowingly provided false statements to the court, which constitutes a criminal offence.

The investigation clearly did not occur the way in which the public expected.

The ICAC and Police took more than eight months to clear those officers in the flawed investigation known as Operation Beaufort.

In less than two weeks, the NT Independent has shown those officers committed perjury and that at least three of them produced and presented the racist awards, which is classified as misconduct under the ICAC Act.

We did this while keeping our day jobs and to be honest, it wasn’t all that difficult – certainly not worth the $6 million we’re paying the bozos at the Office of the ICAC.

We reviewed the sworn statements of the officers and the evidence made public through the Walker inquest, spoke to officers involved in the creation and dissemination of the awards, those with knowledge of the investigation, and others who were there for the awards and have knowledge of the whole sordid affair.

We even went to three of the five officers we’ve reported on to date to get their side before we ran the stories implicating them. They chose to treat us like the ICAC and not provide comment.

Surprisingly, most of the people we did communicate with had earlier volunteered to speak to the ICAC during the investigation, but were never contacted by the bodies charged with formally investigating the criminal conduct.

 

Why?

Because, as we have said before, this is the most blatantly corrupt and incompetent investigation ever carried out in the Northern Territory (the ICAC’s Operation Jupiter investigation into Labor’s theft of public funds to run their 2020 election campaign is a close second).

As we learned last month when the Operation Beaufort report was released, currently suspended ICAC Michael Riches told Police Commissioner Michael Murphy in a letter the day after starting the investigation in March that he would not be making any adverse findings against the five lying officers.

This is in direct conflict with the stated objectives of the investigation to probe whether the officers’ statements knowingly “contained false information”, which would constitute “criminal conduct and/or improper conduct”.

Then he went about collecting evidence from others in such a way as to make it inadmissible in court, which ICAC delegate Patricia Kelly confirmed in her report, despite the Office of the ICAC possessing an abundance of evidence that disproves the five officers’ stat decs, including videos of drunk cops backslapping each other and making racist comments during annual “Noogudah” parties.

But even without the six terabytes of data collected from the TRG police database, the evidence on the inquest’s website is more than enough to tank the lying officers and shows they committed perjury.

As we revealed this week, one of the officers who claimed a “coon of the year” award never existed, personally created a certificate for the “most coon-like BBQ ever!!” with the Aboriginal flag colours in the background. He also claimed he had never heard any TRG officer use that offensive term.

Another cop who claimed the Noogudah club was “never linked to Indigenous people” forgot to tell the Coroner his name was engraved on the improvised weapon that was seized during riots at Wadeye. That cop, Supt Craig Garland, is also the officer who personally handed out the award with the full Aboriginal flag on it as the 2013 Noogudah award. He point-blank claimed “this award simply does not exist”.

Then there’s the other cop who told the Coroner the awards had no racial connotations, who later admitted in a secret third stat dec – after some of the certificates were made public – that he was involved in creating powerpoint presentations for the awards, including one of a man in blackface, when they went digital-only in 2015, the same year the ICAC claimed the racist awards stopped.

The other two officers who lied to the court were both present at various award ceremonies and received emails about the racist awards and other racially charged material that the ICAC is sitting on.

This was not a complex investigation. If any of the five officers or the Police Commissioner want to challenge the facts, we welcome it and encourage them to take us to court if anything we’ve reported is incorrect.

The evidence is all there, out in the open, and confirmed further after a few phone calls.

Yet Police Commissioner Michael Murphy refuses to take any action against the officers who perjured themselves and in so doing makes himself complicit in destroying whatever is left of the Northern Territory Police force’s integrity.

It has now been half a decade since the police had a reliable leader. Severe damage has been done over those years and continues unabated. And yet they wonder why some remote Indigenous Territorians are exploding with rage. With the current leadership showing the laws don’t apply to them, why should anyone else in the NT live by the law?

The parties we communicated with all had a great deal of respect for the five lying officers. They all contend these guys did some great work while policing in the difficult environment of the Northern Territory.

But they all said their jobs were now untenable because of the decision they made to lie in sworn statements.

It’s police sworn statements that put people behind bars. When a cop is found to have fabricated his or her evidence, they can no longer continue policing people. It’s as simple as that.

We appreciate the tough environment and the horrific things our police deal with every day while most of us enjoy the comforts of our cushy lives. We’ve published articles about that issue and police officers “blowing off steam” and saying things amongst themselves they wouldn’t say publicly to deal with the trauma they’ve witnessed. We get that. It doesn’t make it right.

These five broke the public’s trust by choosing to lie to the court and every day that goes by that they’re allowed to continue policing Territorians is a further day the fractured police force slips further and further from where it needs to be as a public body beyond reproach.

The other problem that has not been settled yet is this: Who told those officers to lie on their statutory declarations?

The answer to that is the reason why no action has been taken to date. It also explains why none of the five have done the honourable thing and admitted to committing perjury and accepting the consequences.

This scandal is quickly becoming the biggest test of Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro’s leadership to date.

Five senior NT Police officers committed a crime. The institutional cover-up continues | by Independent Staff | NT Independent | Dec 7, 2024