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THE death of Glen Innes-raised police officer Bill Crews during a south-west Sydney drug raid was the result of “cascading, compounding errors” by police including a lack of effective supervision by senior officers, the State Coroner has found.
In handing down his findings into the September 2010 incident, in which Constable Crews was accidentally killed by his own police colleague during a basement gunfight, Coroner Michael Barnes said the tragedy had highlighted errors by individual officers, as well as broader systemic failures regarding operational risk assessment and the way plainclothes officers identified themselves.
“On occasions police are forced to rush into dangerous situations – this was not such a case,” Mr Barnes said yesterday.
“There was no pressing urgency that de- manded such a re- sponse. No one undertook sufficiently careful and considered analysis as to what needed to be done and to how it could most safely be done.
“These shortcomings contributed to an emergency arising in which a mistake was more likely to happen. Tragically, in this case that mistake was fatal.”
As Constable Crews’ family and police mates looked on, Mr Barnes said that when the 26-year-old and his colleagues from the Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad (MEOCS) entered a basement car park in Bankstown to execute a search warrant, they mistakenly be- lieved that the target, drug dealer Philip Nguyen, was unlikely to be armed and represented a low risk.
This was based solely on information an informant, “X”, had given to the officers leading the operation – Detective David Roberts and Senior Constable Richard McNally – rather than any physical surveillance of the premises, or Nguyen.
As a result, none of the officers involved in the raid knew that Nguyen was armed with a Glock pistol and had been the target of an attack by rival drug dealers just weeks before, leaving him extremely anxious about another attack.
When the officers eventually reached the garage where Nguyen’s drugs were meant to be hidden, having made a number of errors about the exact location of the garage and how to get there, he ran from behind a silver sedan and fired at them.
In the ensuing confusion, Detective Roberts fired a shot with one hand that struck Constable Crews in the back of the neck, fatally wounding him.
Mr Barnes found that the officer had not been looking in the direction of Nguyen when he fired the shot and had not discharged his weapon according to police procedure, which requires officers to have two hands on the weapon when firing and to face the target.
Crucially, the officers were not clearly identifiable as police during the operation, a fact which the coroner described as “a dangerous error”.
“Mistaken identity was a likely factor in Mr Nguyen’s decision to shoot,” Mr Barnes said.
“They didn’t look like police officers, they looked like robbers.
“I don’t think Mr Nguyen would have tried to shoot his way out had he realised they were police.”
The coroner said that, at the time, police policy had been unclear as to precisely how officers should identify themselves in such situations, though this had now been addressed through a new “operational order”.
The coroner also found that there had been a series of errors ascending up the police hierarchy in relation to the risk assessment process carried out prior to the operation, which categorised the operation as “low risk”.
Not only had Constable McNally completed the assessment without sufficient intelligence, he had made an error on the risk assessment form.
These errors were not picked up by any of the more senior police responsible for supervising the operation, including Detective Roberts, Detective Inspector Mark Ryan from MEOCS or the Commander of MEOCS Detective Superintendent Deborah Wallace.
The coroner found that Inspector Ryan had approved the operation “without proper scrutiny of the details” and “without proper consideration as to the potential risks involved”, though he noted that the senior officer had not been able to view the final orders because his smartphone had been withdrawn due to funding cuts.
Mr Barnes found that Detective SuperintendentWallace had made an “unwarranted assumption” about the effectiveness of “X” as a source, and described her failure to formally approve the raid because of a flat mobile phone battery as “somewhat lax”.
The coroner found that, in the five years since the incident, the NSW Police Force had “rigorously engaged with each of the inadequacies highlighted by the circumstances in which Constable Crews died”.
“These criticisms must be tempered by acknowledging that they occurred because the officers involved were so committed to their mission they allowed a degree of indiscipline and hastiness to override circumspection,” Mr Barnes said.
“They were doing what they had sworn to do – protect the public – sadly, one of them died doing it.”