Review of the Police Powers (Drug Detection Trial) Act 2003 - NSW ...

doesn’t give you the ability to target [drug couriers]. …if I was going to put a critical management eye over the
results of the operations we wouldn’t run another one, I couldn’t say it’s cost effective. 291
Another senior officer observed:
… the legislation is well intended but it takes up a lot of our time and resources … [the way operations are
conducted] does not create the impression [for the general public] that problem people are being targeted … 292
Another senior officer had this to say:
… instead of becoming a piece of legislation where you could have two coppers in a car with a dog behind
them just setting up a site somewhere, it turned into being 30 police [which made it] very hard to implement
without a lot of resources. 293
In their response to the Issues Document, the Police Association of NSW advised that the general view of officers
was that the Border Areas Trial and the Drug Detection Trial Acts have taken a simple and workable operational
procedure and over complicated it. 294
The Association suggested that:
… in order to make [drug detection] operations operationally effective, [the] legislation needs to be changed
so as to provide police with the ability to utilise a drug detection dog to conduct an external screening of a
vehicle that has been stopped for a lawful purpose [such as] random breath testing.
The screening process is non-intrusive … only takes a minute … and can be done simultaneously as police
speak with the driver in relation to other matters. 295
Another senior officer observed:
If you go right back to the beginning, the only thing that we were ever asking for was the ability to use a drug
detection dog to screen a vehicle at a RBT site. It was no more complicated and no more simple than that. 296
The view that the Drug Detection Trial Act is convoluted was raised on a number of occasions. For example:
… the legislators took a simple idea and over legislated it. … at the end of the day … far more members of
society are impacted by prohibited drugs yet we’re subject in trying to detect them and frustrate drug supply
routes with the constraints of the legislation. 297
From the perspective of our members, the legislation in its current form is untenable and unnecessarily
complicates what we consider to be the actual intent of the legislation. 298
… I think there is a place for this type of operation but I think they have made it overly convoluted … there has
got to be a simple way to stop a vehicle and use a tool, in this case a dog, to search for drugs without going
into this convoluted process that in application and implementation is ludicrous and time wasting … 299
We asked the NSW Police Force for their view on whether the Drug Detection Trial Act provides an effective mechanism
to target the vehicular trafficking of indictable quantities of prohibited drugs and received the following response:
The Act does not provide an effective mechanism, in and of itself, to target the vehicular trafficking of indictable
quantities of drugs/plants and the deployment of drug detection dogs, as per the current provisions of the Act,
should supplement HVP [High Visibility Policing] or other operations, not act as the focal point. 300
The NSW Police Force also noted:
While the powers are aimed at disrupting drug distribution lines within NSW, the actual execution of the
legislation is seen by many police as restrictive, resource intensive and, in its current form, impractical. 301
5.4. Impact of legislative changes
During the parliamentary debate of the bill to revive the drug detection trial it was suggested that the legislative
changes (outlined at paragraph 2.2) would increase the flexibility and mobility of drug detection operations as well as
making them less predictable and more difficult to evade.
Our observations of police implementing the legislation, and a critical examination of the results of the drug detection
operations, reveals that the anticipated benefits of the legislative changes do not appear to have been realised
despite the best efforts of police.
We asked the NSW Police Force for their views on the impact of the changes. In relation to increased flexibility and mobility
of operations, the NSW Police Force expressed the view that the legislation does not allow for operational flexibility:
NSW Ombudsman
Review of the Police Powers (Drug Detection Trial) Act 2003
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