An Australian inquiry has found an arrangement between police and the Catholic Church resulted in complaints of child sex abuse not being investigated.
A Police Integrity Commission has recommended that New South Wales police reconsider the practice of “blind reporting”.
This involves the names of alleged victims of child abuse and other details being deleted from reports to police.
The PIC’s Operation Protea found NSW Police and the Catholic Church had an informal arrangement.
This meant “attempts would not be made on the part of the Police Force to contact victims of abuse in circumstances in which a blind report form had been submitted” without first contacting the church’s professional standards office.
“Blind reports” meant that “many of these complaints were not investigated”, Protea Commissioner Bruce James, QC, concluded.
The complaints were simply filed as information by police, and, without victim and other details, were reduced to the level of hearsay.
The Protea inquiry heard that police ignored internal legal advice on a number of occasions warning that “blind reporting” breached section 316 of the NSW Crimes Act relating to concealing serious crimes.
The inquiry also considered one senior officer, Inspector Beth Cullen, engaged in misconduct in failing to investigate allegations.
This officer also had a conflict of interest in sitting on the church’s Professional Standards Resource Group, which heard multiple allegations of abuse raised during meetings.
The commission noted that while Inspector Cullen had acted in good faith and had not engaged in any conscious dereliction of duty, her misconduct was “not trivial”.
But it found there was no proof Inspector Cullen destroyed any evidence.
After the PIC report’s release, former NSW director of public prosecutions Nick Cowdery accused the NSW police of being “party . . . to a Catholic Church conspiracy to thwart the criminal justice process”.
Sources