Review of the Police Powers (Drug Premises) Act 2001 - NSW ...

in 2001 “there was that many junkies around, literally, they would go in groups of ten to a unit”. 577 In the following excerpt from an event
narrative, one officer documents how police followed several people to a drug house, and then created an intelligence report about the
incident:
On Wednesday the [date], police followed two known drug dealers (Asian males) from the [name] Service Station, on [street name,
suburb]. Also present with the two Asian males was a Caucasian male. All persons walked in a Westerly direction along [street
name]. Police followed them and saw the persons enter the driveway of [address]. Police conducted surveillance for a period of
time. At this time police saw the Caucasian male wait in the driveway of the premises while the two asian males were out of sight.
Asian males have approached the Caucasian male who was still standing in the driveway of the unit block and police saw the three
persons have a conversation. A short time later police observed all three persons walk a short distance away from the premises,
and police have then seen one Asian male hand something to the Caucasian male. Upon arrival back at Cabramatta Police Station,
an Intelligence report was created. 578
Police continued to conduct surveillance on this premises over the following two weeks. They then applied for, and were granted a drug
premises search warrant. This incident is “Case Study 3” in this chapter.
Cabramatta LAC used a database to record the details about drug premises. A former Crime Manager from Cabramatta described how
this fitted into the command’s strategy for policing drug premises:
As information would come in, “I have a drug premises next to me”, or “I have people selling drugs next to me”, we would start
that on a database, and we would start to build up the profile of that premises, and we’d set a criteria, that when that premises had
enough information to support a search warrant we would eliminate that, and so on and move down… Field intelligence would go
out, we would investigate that is or is not a drug premises. 579
Once police had received information about a suspected drug premises, they would seek to investigate it further to establish if the claims
about the premises had some basis. When asked how police prioritised which premises to target, one detective said:
If you’ve got a community saying “We’ve got a problem here”, and then we look at it, and there’s some intelligence on that premises
of drug supply, obviously our chances of conviction are going to be much greater, so we would prioritise that one. 580
According to one detective, there were so many drug premises in Cabramatta in July 2001 when the Act came in to operation, police
would say, “we’ll do this one afternoon, and we’ll do that one tomorrow morning, there was just so many”. 581
Covert operations, in which undercover police purchase drugs from premises, were sometimes used to get evidence that drug supply
was taking place at a premises. In 14 instances in which police used the Act in Cabramatta, police noted in event narratives that they had
conducted undercover drug buys from the premises. In other instances, police would put the premises under surveillance, sometimes for
several days, or they would conduct intermittent random surveillance over a period of a few weeks or months.
In relation to all but a couple of occasions in which the Drug Premise Act was used in Cabramatta, police had prior intelligence on the
premises, either from community sources, police observations or prior drug related intelligence on the occupants or premises. However,
one particular matter, in which police went to a house to investigate a shooting incident and discovered a large quantity of heroin, was
markedly different in this regard. This incident is discussed in “Case Study 4”.
In the table below, we have quantified the number of times particular sources and types of information about drug premises in Cabramatta
were noted by police in event narratives. As we have noted in our chapter on “Methodology”, event narratives are free text fields, and
police are not required to note any particular aspect of their use of the Act. This table therefore only provides an indication of the types
of information police had, and is unlikely to represent an exhaustive list of the sources police relied upon in relation to suspected drug
premises.
577 Ibid.
578 COPS event narrative, Cabramatta LAC, Drug Premises Incident 1.
579 Interview, former crime manager, Cabramatta LAC, 21 August 2003.
580 Focus group, Cabramatta police, 2 July 2003.
581 Ibid.
110
NSW Ombudsman
Review of the Police Powers (Drug Premises) Act 2001