'A numbers game': NSW Police personal search targets revealed | AngusGthompson pallavisinghal_
NSW Police aimed to conduct almost a quarter of a million personal searches last financial year as part of a quota-driven system slammed as a politically motivated "numbers game" by the state's ex-top prosecutor.
Former director of public prosecutions Nicholas Cowdery, QC, who is now the president of the NSW Council of Civil Liberties, said the use of targets meant there was "great potential for abuse of power.""If a target is set by superior officers, especially a target that will be relevant to performance assessment, natural human response will be to seek to meet the target by proper or improper means - by fudging, by exercising power where it is not properly warranted," he said.
"The fact that people are being stopped and searched, not to address the circumstances on the ground, but to meet arbitrary quotas, is a dreadful development," he said. The police spokesperson said under state law officers must hold a reasonable suspicion when executing searches.Police conducted 2200 extra searches on top of their set target in Auburn, the equivalent of 37 per cent more.
"They would rather you have a 100 no-finds than do three searches and find something because they think there’s some correlation between that and crime going down," the officer, who spoke to theThe figures, which include but do not distinguish between strip searches being conducted, come as the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission, the state's independent police oversight body, prepares to release its report into officers breaching search powers following public revelations of...
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