Audit Finds Vic Cops Faked Results Of Over 250,000 Breath Tests In 5.5 Years

Get ready for some staggering numbers: of roughly 17.7 million breath test results logged by Victoria Police over a 5 and a half year period, over 250,000 were faked.

In a statement released this evening, Victoria Police released the findings of a joint investigation by Road Policing and Professional Standards Command that found that a bunch of cops had regularly not actually been testing motorists.

The findings found that 258,463 preliminary breath tests, representing roughly 1 in 67 tests, were faked.

The investigation, undertaken after Victoria Police received reports last year that cops were “[placing] a finger over the straw entry hole or [blowing] into the straw themselves”, used statistical analysis centred around “complex algorithms together with considerations around the length of time it would take to administer one test and a succession of tests.

In slightly less opaque wording: it seemed a lot of officers were doing successive tests way faster than they should be able to.

According to Fairfax, it was first brought to their attention after the Transport Accident Commission flagged anomalies in the data they were receiving.

The head of Victoria Police’s Professional Standards CommandAssistant Commissioner Russell Barrett, said that it’s likely that the widespread faking had to do with meeting quotas:

There could be a number of reasons but the main rationale I believe is to hide or highlight productivity. Whatever reason our workforce may come up with, it isn’t acceptable.

Barrett has said that due to the fact that this sort of faking means these tests are simply being done in the absence of a driver, no drivers would have wrongfully received penalties from the falsified results  – although that would still mean that motorists that otherwise would have been actually tested and potentially caught driving over the limit, were not.

In the statement, Victoria Police say that the faked results have primarily come from “general duties and highway patrol members“, adding that it is “not a practice found to be performed at supervised drug and alcohol bus testing sites.

Fairfax has noted that cops are not given individual breath testing machines and thus it is not likely possible to pinpoint falsified results to individual officers.

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