Australia: Lawless behaviour by by law-enforcement officials

GUARDS at Victoria's largest women's prison were told by experienced officers to break rules, conducted improper strip searches and falsified records, according to secret prison documents. The documents, obtained by The Age, detail concerns raised in October 2006 by new prison officers at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre. They included a complaint about inhumane policies that may have caused prisoners to harm themselves. The Age can also reveal that Victoria's ombudsman has spent several months investigating allegations of poor practices in the maximum-security jail, which can house up to 260 female prisoners.

The revelations come two months after Channel Nine aired secret files detailing claims that a few guards at the Deer Park prison had inappropriate sexual relationships with prisoners in 2003.

As part of the ombudsman's inquiry, investigators have interviewed a former senior prison manager who claims she was bullied after encouraging a fellow employee to raise concerns about staff involvement in contraband smuggling. The former senior prison manager told The Age that after arranging a meeting between the staff member and the general manager of women's prison, Brendan Money, in late 2006, the manager was ostracised and told to find a new job. She resigned from the prison last month. In a statement written late last year, Mr Money confirmed that the senior manager helped another staff member raise corruption concerns, but said they were unfounded. He denied that the senior manager had been bullied and said there had been performance issues.

The October 2006 documents reveal that when an officer was asked to describe a situation that had made them uncomfortable, a prison officer complained that an experienced officer had directed them "to do something you know is against procedures". Other guards said they had been "a second officer for a strip search which was not completed in accordance with procedures", and had recorded perimeter fence checks as being completed when in fact "they were not even conducted". One staff member said they had been ordered to treat a prisoner in a manner "which is in accordance with procedures but seems inhumane", and had to deal "with the consequence of that prisoner self-harming straight after you have completed the task".

When asked to list what they found most difficult at work, prison staff nominated: "When policies and procedures override humanity, there is inconsistency in the way that procedures are applied, people take short cuts." One prison guard criticised the lack of "direction, training, leadership, coaching, support in situations where you are working in a place for the first time". Other concerns included the flawed checking of prisoner numbers and cells, and a poisonous working environment in which staff talked about their sex lives, bullied others and refused to do work.

Victoria's Corrections Commissioner, Kelvin Anderson, said some of the conduct discussed in the 2006 documents appeared to be inappropriate, but stressed Victoria's prison system was humane. Not surprisingly, he said, when new staff arrived they found that existing staff had worked out "some short-cut ways" of doing things. "Our job is to stop that short-cut way of doing things," he said. "We go and look for those sort of inconsistencies so we can target our training and reinforce what we don't want done."

A separate departmental memo from December 2006, also obtained by The Age, raises concerns about staff training, saying: "There are a number of inconsistencies in the way we conduct urines (drug testing), searches, escorts and work in the gatehouse. "Some people do not follow Director's Instructions (perhaps because they don't know what they are)."

Report here





Australian policegoons

Police are investigating claims an officer tasered a handcuffed man three times in the Cleveland watchhouse last year to "shut him up". Three other complaints about police using the 50,000-volt stun guns inappropriately had been referred to the service's internal investigation unit, police said. Ethical Standards Command investigators dismissed one complaint against an officer who pulled out a Taser but did not fire it, according to a police spokeswoman.

Two matters are still under investigation and the other is subject to court proceedings, she said. Police Minister Judy Spence last month controversially announced a statewide rollout of Tasers to all frontline police despite being barely halfway through a 12-month trial. Ms Spence released only limited trial results and immediately faced heavy criticism from lawyers and civil libertarians who feared the weapons would become the standard police response even in non-dangerous situations.

Police have pulled out Tasers 128 times since the trial began in July last year, shooting them about 60 per cent of the time, according to police. The Tasers store data of the exact time, date, and duration of each shot.

Last August, police arrested concreter Nathan Brown, 23, near the Alexandra Hills Hotel and locked him in a cell at the Cleveland watchhouse. Mr Brown pleaded guilty to assault, assaulting police and being a public nuisance. However, he has claimed in a signed statement believed to have been given to investigators that he was tasered three times while handcuffed in the watchhouse. His sister Rebecca, 18, who was locked up that night after attempting to make an official complaint that police arresting her brother punched him, also gave an eyewitness statement.

Mr Brown admitted he lost control when police locked his sister up so he began "using aggressive language", telling officers to release her because she had done nothing wrong. "A policeman unlocked my cell to what I thought was going to be frisked-processed while still handcuffed and during this process I was hit with a Taser gun three times in a row by an older policeman," he said, according to the statement. Mr Brown's father Bryan, who has given statements to investigating officers, said about a week after the alleged incident he spoke to the officer who tasered his son. The officer said "it shut him up, didn't it?", and hung up, he said.

Police confirmed the ethical standards investigation was ongoing.

Report here (Via Australian Politics)



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