To Protect And To Serve

Almost every month in New South Wales the news features stories of police corruption and a service seemingly under attack, both from the criminals it tries to put away and the people it has sworn to protect. So what is the true situation? Are the reports we read just media sensationalism, or is the New South Wales Police Service really in trouble? And if it is, what’s gone wrong?

Tim Priest was just a good cop – a policeman who gave everything he had to fight crime on the drug-ridden streets of Cabramatta – yet who found himself waging the biggest battle against the organisation he worked for. Eventually, he could stand it no longer and took the courageous step of speaking out about the corruption, the politics and bureaucratic bungling, chronic lack of resources, and crazy policy decisions that are endemic to the New South Wales Police Service.

For this, he earned himself the unenviable nickname of “The Whistleblower” and ultimate found himself railroaded out of the force.

However, parliamentary inquiries and the evidence of other “ordinary cops” subsequently proved that Tim Priest did indeed speak the truth and, perhaps more shockingly, what the newspapers revealed was merely the tip of the iceberg. While drug-related crime spiralled out of control, morale among the rank and file police plummeted, and experienced cops found themselves at the mercy of a promotions system that left them nowhere to go but out.

Priest teams up with Richard Basham, forensic anthropologist and a man with deep insight into the police service through his involvement in a number of criminal investigations and advisory boards, to reveal the “untold story” of the Police Service. This book will take you behind the scenes of a police service on the verge of catastrophe . . . and leave you wondering what can be done to save it.