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Victoria Police and policing body at odds over Lawyer X scandal
Victoria Police has accepted its Lawyer X wrongdoing with new considerations into officer handling and training, while a professional policing body denied practices need to change.
Naomi Neilson
Victoria Police has told the Royal Commission into the Management of Police Informants (RCMPI) that it is considering options to enable external oversight into registration of the human sources with legal obligations of privilege or confidentiality.
Despite Victoria Police’s proposal to change policies, Australasian Institute of Policing, a professional policing body for Australia and New Zealand, said it is of the view that current processes for “recruiting, handling and managing human sources who are subject to legal obligations” of confidentiality and legal professional privilege are “adequate and effective”.
Its ultimate message is that legal professionals should not be restricted from working with police as human sources. It is of the “strong view” that there should be no restrictions on the obtaining of criminal intelligence, and to do so would “dangerously restrict police” and other bodies from “utilising a legitimate avenue of inquiry” – i.e. lawyers of their suspects.
“To prohibit police from recruiting, handling and managing human sources that are subject to legal obligations of confidentiality or privilege or use of such human source information in a criminal justice system is a dangerous precedent,” president Jon Hunt-Sharman said.
Another of its arguments for not changing policies around using legal professionals for all police criminal purposes, including snitching on their own clients, is that Victoria’s current internal policies have been recently updated and are not similar to those in place in the 2000s.
Although policies around human source management might be updated, its practices for recording and storing critical information on these sources were an issue throughout all of Ms Gobbo’s informing and right up to the final day of commission hearings. Missing notes, documents and a set of diaries belonging to Simon Overland were not quick to find.
Victoria Police agreed that their policies during the period in which Ms Gobbo was working with police no longer apply and the current policies are “considerably more sophisticated”.
However, it has proposed changes to strengthen this unit. On top of external oversight in human source registration, Victoria Police has considered reformed disclosure framework that does not place weight on the occupation, role or profession of the human source.
Rather, the source will be registered depending on whether the information that could be obtained is likely to be confidential or privileged. It is also in the process of implementing new handbooks and training courses to accompany a new disclosure procedure.
Naomi Neilson
Naomi Neilson is a senior journalist with a focus on court reporting for Lawyers Weekly.
You can email Naomi at:
