Before I Sleep (12 page)

It was well known in police circles that an informal system of recording offences, traditionally called “in Paddy's Book”, was current in the eastern states, and maybe elsewhere. This procedure required the initial report of an offence to be entered into an unofficial pocketbook. If there was a successful result, such as an arrest or the recovery of property, the details would then be transferred to an official form. This enabled the manipulation of relevant figures to produce commendable police clearup rates in annual reports. I was keen to do away with Paddy's Book. There was considerable opposition to my idea. But South Australia and Victoria were forceful supporters. I first raised this proposal in 1961, but it was not until two years later that the conference gave me the responsibility of organising and chairing a committee, comprising representatives from the state forces and the Bureau of Statistics, to implement the concept. It is interesting to note that the response of the Australian Bureau of Statistics was only lukewarm, but I talked to the deputy chief statistician who I knew through hockey and he agreed to have one of his staff serve on the small national committee I was forming.

I feel sure my limited knowledge of statistics, gained during the six years I spent studying part-time at the ANU for an Economics degree, helped me overcome some resistance because the participants of the annual conference (and their departmental advisers) knew even less. Nevertheless, I had to make compromises and the program which eventually received approval from the conference was a modified version of my original proposal. There were lots of teething troubles, particularly when we were considering what offences to include, how offences were to be defined and what criteria were to be used to determine the clear-up rate. We distributed a small book containing the guidelines to be followed in obtaining and compiling the data. Problems continued, but with tact and perseverance the Uniform Crime Statistics program got under way.

In the area of Uniform Crime Statistics, Australia lagged behind Europe, and the extent of our proposed coverage was still small compared to Canada. My committee recommended that the scheme initially cover only seven major offences — homicide; serious assault; robbery; rape; break and enter; fraud and motorcar theft — and we were interested to discover that the United States had also selected those categories. For a number of years, beginning in 1966, the Bureau of Statistics published in its
CommonwealthYear
Book
the limited but still useful data collected by our program. I understand that, in later years, the procedure was modified, allegedly because of its inadequacies. I remain convinced that in achieving this initial agreement, substantial progress was made in publicly providing reasonably valid information on the crime situation. Later, when I moved to Queensland, I managed to reduce opportunities to fake crime returns in the metropolitan area by arranging for all incoming telephone complaints of offences to be centrally recorded on tape. Each complaint was allocated a number which was then used on the actual crime reports. In addition, I made it possible for patrol officers to dictate by telephone to stenographers at the Operations Room details of offences detected by or reported to them by members of the community. I arranged for an independent auditor from the New South Wales Office of Crime Statistics to visit Queensland for a week each year to examine our procedures and audit our returns. My annual report to Queensland Parliament therefore carried the signatures of a financial and an operational auditor. During the seven years I was Commissioner of the Queensland Police Force, the figures showed a small improvement each year, although we still remained within the main range of British-type police clearance rates. The auditing procedure was abolished when my successor, Terence Lewis, took over. His first annual return showed that Queensland had made a dramatic leap to a high clearance rate. No one questioned this increase.

As far as I am aware, no other Australian Police Force has emulated my action, nor has there been any attempt to extend the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Victim Surveys to discover if offences reported by victims are actually recorded in the police database. All we know is that there is a big discrepancy between the number of offences experienced by victims and the number recorded by the police. There has been some research into the reasons why victims do not report crimes to the police, but there is no research that I am aware of that seeks to correlate victims' actual reports to police with subsequent police records.

When I proposed the gathering of Uniform Crime Statistics at the Police Commissioners' Conference, the low level of debate clearly indicated that both the commissioners and their advisers, the departmental secretaries, were ill-informed about possible challenges to law and order in the coming years. They were unable to assess which ways of meeting these challenges were best. I had some discussions with General Porter and Brigadier McKinna about how to improve on this situation. We agreed that there was little point in attempting to offer education to the present office-holders, but that there was merit in working on their probable successors. Victoria withdrew from further discussions because Porter was already doing something about it in his force, but he indicated that he would support our proposals. So South Australia and the Commonwealth recommended that there should be a Senior Police Executive Workshop, lasting for four weeks. The workshop would cater for representatives from each state or territory, chosen because they would probably become the next commissioners. McKinna and I were to organise the workshop. The first two weeks would be in Canberra, where participants would listen to such experts as we could muster and discuss with them the coming challenges to law and order. Then there would be one week in Melbourne, looking at what Victoria was already doing, followed by a week in South Australia to examine McKinna's plans. The conference endorsed the proposal, and planning for the workshop commenced.

I was able to select a panel of experts from the Australian National University whom I knew personally. From listening to lectures during my own courses I knew who could give talks providing the latest advice on their topics to these senior police in a style which would not be boring. I recruited Mick Borrie, George Zubrzycki and Des O'Connor. I put these academics “into the picture” with regard to the purpose of the workshop and was pleased with their response.

They set out on what I now know to be an unwinnable task: to interest these pragmatic deputy police chiefs in an intellectual task: thinking about the future. In retrospect, I realise that the attitude of the deputies was justified and that I was too optimistic. The New South Wales representative was Fred Hanson, who became the next New South Wales police commissioner. Try as my academic friends would to interest him, he sat most of the time looking out of the window He was not the only one — Athol Wedd from Western Australia was similarly uninterested in the proceedings, and there were various others. They had their own priorities, and these were not affected in any way by this attempt to intellectualise the police forces of Australia. In those days, commissionership of a state force offered rich pickings, with little or no possibility of any illegalities being discovered. However, the workshop provided many opportunities for socialising out of hours.

Another strategy I used was the provision of better and longer training for my recruits and the organisation of national workshops to which state officers were invited. I argued for the need for our own permanent school and, with some diligent hunting around, located the vacant quarantine barracks at North Head in Sydney and received Cabinet approval to occupy the site. It was an ancient collection of wooden huts, but with some scheming we managed to make it usable. The school was opened on 10 April 1959, and it fitted in nicely with my vision of creating a Commonwealth Police Force. This had officially come into being in 1957 when assent was finally given by federal Parliament to my draft bill. For several reasons, this act was not proclaimed until April 1960 when I was appointed the new force's first commissioner.

In just four years, my original plan to transform the discredited CIS and POG into a national law enforcement organisation had made useful progress. I had laboured long over the draft legislation before submitting it for departmental approval. I had backed it with convincing factual detail. I had confided in, and won the support of, significant Gnomes or their principal advisers in an effort to minimise opposition from those federal ministers whose territory might be encroached upon. I had gently explained to senior state police that I was not setting out to create an American-type FBI and had showed them those sections of my draft bill which restricted our activities to purely Commonwealth interests. In this way I hoped to reduce resistance from backbenchers in the federal Parliament who were vulnerable to state lobbying. I am not sure how much success I achieved. Certainly, when the bill was being debated in federal Parliament, all government members supported it, so that it passed with a large majority. But that support may have been due to the discipline of the government's whip. Since I kept well clear of politicians, I did not pick up any suggestions of concern from government members.

On the other hand, the well-known radicals in the opposition, who were probably still smarting from the outcome of the Royal Commission on Espionage, set out to strongly attack the proposed “creation of a national police force”. They may well have done this purely from Australian Labor Party principles, although socialist philosophies elsewhere favoured a strong, central law enforcement body. My recollection is that the prominent ALP parliamentarians — Evatt, Ward, Cameron and Haylen — were well-briefed on comments by the director of the American FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. Now discredited in the United States, Hoover had not wanted a national police force in his country, since it would have challenged his own empire. As well, the ALP spokesmen were able to correctly describe members of the CIS and POG as not conforming to the standards of state police in physique and training. Much of this detail came from another ALP member, Jim Fraser, who represented the Australian Capital Territory. My suspicion is that Fraser, in turn, was provided with this information by members of the ACT Police Force, who saw themselves as liable to being swallowed up by the proposed new force. With hindsight, it is possible to understand the alarm with which corrupt state police forces and their political allies would have viewed the creation of a national force. At the time, the state forces were the final arbiters of investigation. In Queensland and New South Wales, the top politicians would not have seen a problem in the head of the homicide branch being bent. The head of a homicide branch is a key man in state corruption as he is able to cover up the tracks of underworld, or police, executions. We now know that in the eastern states some informers who were prepared to give evidence about drug traffickers and their connections to the police simply disappeared. I had little understanding then of how some underworld groups might have influenced the policies of political parties.

Mr Eddie Ward, the member for East Sydney, made a strong onslaught on my proposed appointment as the first Commonwealth commissioner, claiming I had already displayed vindictiveness towards Labor, was bitterly opposed to Labor policies and that I was poorly qualified to be given this appointment. Someone, probably also Sydney-based, had fed Ward this material for he was able to go on and announce that I had acquired land at North Head to establish a training centre, and that I had been going through the state police services picking out the best officers and offering them higher salaries. Interestingly, during my years with the CIS and the CPF, I came across traces of association between Sydney CIS staff and key ALP figures. The minister defended me, saying that I had served the state and Commonwealth governments well, and I was now being slandered and defamed. The minister went on to explain again that the new force was concerned only with applying Commonwealth legislation and protecting Commonwealth property. It was not “the secret police” referred to by the opposition.

The bill was not as all-embracing in its provisions as I would have liked. I kept it as simple and minimal as possible. I had thought about introducing some legislation that would help me overcome problems of corruption but, even in those days, I realised that this might provoke further opposition. I decided to rely upon the lesson I had learnt in ASIO — if I could stimulate my staff to grasp a big enough vision of the important challenges embodied in their appointment, if I could secure their full commitment to achieving that vision, and if I could obtain satisfactory working conditions, the staff might stave off the temptations which were bound to develop.

I remembered that Chief Kelley had managed to achieve a transformation of the Kansas City Force when he was appointed after the exposure of the notorious Prendergast municipal machine, and I realised, too, that it had taken him twelve years to accomplish that transformation. Kelley had then gone on to replace the dubious J. Edgar Hoover as head of the FBI. Over the years, the field staff of the FBI had rightly earned a reputation for being incorruptible. It seemed to me that this was partly due to the prestige of their office, and I wondered how I could raise our reputation, both locally and internationally. Each year the English Home Office awarded the Queen's Gold Medal to the author of the best article on a police topic which the Home Office selected. It was open to serving officers of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. In international police circles, it was regarded as an accolade of standing. I submitted a paper with a
nom de plume,
and was delighted to be informed I had won. As far as I know, this was the first time the medal had gone to an Australian policeman. I was presented at Government House with the inscribed medal by the governor general, then Lord Casey. He entertained me to tea and was interested both in my paper and in my plans for a Commonwealth Police Force. I left that meeting feeling that I had recruited a supporter, and a powerful one at that. My paper was then published in the English
Police Journal
which has a worldwide circulation, and I hoped that this success might contribute to our recognition by other police and associated academics as a modern police force.