EDITORIAL: The Justice Blow report into questionable hiring practices in the NT Police Force has exposed a truly dysfunctional organisation still reeling from its ongoing racist reckoning, with the report offering a rare glimpse inside the fresh chaos and turmoil where the most senior members at the highest levels are at each other’s throats, accusing one another of cover-ups, of being incompetent in their roles, of lying, improperly promoting friends and mismanaging conflicts of interest.

There is no way to overstate the damage this report has had on the already fragile Northern Territory Police Force, its members and the trust every Territorian should have in its police service.

It shows an organisation paralysed in the face of its challenges, its senior and most experienced officers’ morale shattered and the culture of a once-proud police service left to rot from the inside out.

The review – or “inquiry” as it was initially dubbed – did not even complete its task the way in which the public expected by fully investigating the allegations of mismanagement around hiring processes, but still somehow laid bare startling truths about the lack of professionalism in our police service and the disunity in the ranks.

It’s a rudderless ship on the brink of mutiny, helmed by a man who was so afraid of what might come out of the review into senior job appointments that with one hand he provided Justice Blow the powers as his delegate to investigate police out of necessity, and with the other called his lawyers to have them respond to all of Blow’s enquiries into his personal conduct.

We could not make this up. Nor could it be any worse for the NT Police overall and Acting Commissioner Martin Dole personally.

The first order of business now has to be getting rid of Dole. It won’t fix everything, but the report has laid bare what happens when the leader is not trusted by his troops and exhibits no integrity or even the slightest traces of bravery.

And, sorry everyone, but it goes without saying the next police commissioner cannot be anyone remotely linked to this holy mess and will need to come from interstate.

The next step is for the Chief Minister/Police Minister to do what she called for seven times while in opposition, but rejected immediately after being sworn in last year: order a full judicial public inquiry into the state of the NT Police.

Not only has the public’s trust and faith in this institution been shattered, its own members are still reeling with the most senior and experienced officers taking long leaves of absence due to stress and embarrassment, or jumping ship into other departments and taking their policing experience with them, or lying in wait with a dagger between their teeth for the first opportunity to exact revenge.

The greatest fear we have in all of this is that our Chief Minister is not up to the monumental task ahead of her. This is as serious as it gets in any jurisdiction, which she previously said she understood, but which her actions betrayed.

Lia Finocchiaro is the Police Minister who two days before establishing the Blow “inquiry” told Territorians on radio there was no need for a review into Michael Murphy’s executive appointments because it “will all come out in the wash”.

She then ordered the “inquiry” after feeling pressure 48 hours later, telling us all that “we need this process to be undertaken so that everyone can move forward”.

“It’s been a very troubling period,” she added, “and what I can’t have is uncertainty in a police force who has a very big and important job to do.”

What was delivered this week with the Blow report is the most glaring, steaming pile of uncertainty the NT Police has ever had to publicly deal with. She needs to accept responsibility for this, despite the report publicly released while she’s poolside interstate after being in her possession for some time, for reasons that have not been properly explained.

Blow report revelations devastating despite half-arsed job

Lia promised an “inquiry” amid the fallout of the Murphy appointment scandal but then saw to it that Justice Alan Blow was not sworn in as a commissioner under the Inquiries Act and therefore did not have the powers he needed to thoroughly and independently investigate these serious allegations of impropriety at the highest levels of the police. That’s not our opinion; Blow said so himself in the report.

Lia wanted this to be the usual NT-style “inquiry” where nothing real comes of it, a routine exercise where she can say the “recommendations” will be addressed and it’s time to move on.

What Blow produced, in terms of investigative material, was akin to the type of report disgraced former ICAC Michael Riches used to deliver, which is to say Blow did not properly investigate anything, refused to weigh the facts against the allegations, and only fed more uncertainty.

What is certain is that more will come out on all of the failures and shortcomings of this investigation soon enough and that will further destabilise our law enforcement agency and further erode the public’s trust.

But almost in spite of himself, Blow did identify trouble, which was made all the worse by not drawing any firm conclusions and leaving the shit to hang over everyone.

While he anticipated a few people who missed out on promotions would be upset, what he heard shocked him, remarking that “it is a matter of concern that so many senior officers expressed concerns about such matters in the course of this review”.

Those matters, which were backed up in the report with evidence, involved widespread cronyism, undeclared conflicts of interest, failure by the executive to develop its own senior recruitment policies and follow them, failure to provide details for why one candidate was chosen over others, hiding final selection reports from the minister and Administrator who sign off on appointments, friends acting as referees while also on the recruitment panel, and no overarching elements for how the selection panel made its decisions.

Chief among the limited findings was that ‘merit’ was “not the over-arching principle” for senior promotions, despite Dole trying to get his lawyers to shut that line of questioning down after someone else officially representing the NT Police disclosed it to Blow.

The NT Police, it has been shown, are run as arrogantly and unprofessionally as the Darwin Waterfront Corporation, picking and choosing which public service hiring rules it follows on a whim and then failing to follow those rules and standards when actioned.

Justice Blow said the shambles had “affected the culture and morale of the NT Police”, with senior officers experiencing “heightened anxiety, depression, self-doubt, sleeplessness, embarrassment and stress” as a result of the chronic mismanagement, with one senior officer taking a long period of personal leave and others being transferred out of police for their own sanity.

This makes the NT Police Force as an organisation untenable.

The dark moments of everything that has come before have finally bubbled to the surface demanding action.

Before the dark days of the Jamie Chalker reign of terror there was the Bravos affair, which started the fracture in the force.

Then there was Murphy, his lies, his cover-up of racism, his protection of the five lying officers dutifully continued by his deputy Dole and his eventual sacking for misconduct. (Let us make this clear here: Murphy was in no way exonerated by the Blow report despite what state media the NT News reported this week, clearly without reading the report.)

Before all of that recent madness was John McRoberts, the only former commissioner to see the inside of a jail cell for his corruption.

All of the chaos and dysfunction over the last decade has set the stage for what the NT Police force is facing today, the darkest chapter in the history of the organisation, which couldn’t have been imagined just three years ago—as bad as it was then.

The NT Police is failing the public and its own members every day it’s allowed to continue in its current form.