Australian federal police are using discretionary powers to stop investigations into one in four allegations of police misconduct, documents show.
The AFP holds broad powers to intervene and take no further action on internal investigations into allegations against its members.
The powers, which have been delegated by the AFP commissioner, Reece Kershaw, have previously been criticised as opaque and lacking accountability.
Documents released to Guardian Australia under freedom of information laws reveal the discretionary powers are being used at significant scale. The AFP received 2,596 allegations of misconduct or improper police practices between 2019 and 2020 and 2023 and 2024. One complaint might contain multiple allegations.
About 707 of those allegations did not proceed under the discretionary powers. Of those, 467 allegations were dismissed before an investigation had begun.
The FoI documents show the powers were used 54 times to not proceed with current investigations into category four allegations, which involve allegations of corruption. A further 107 investigations were stopped for category three allegations, defined as matters alleging serious misconduct.
Another document obtained by Guardian Australia showed complaints of corruption against AFP staff for which the discretion not to proceed was used included incidents of alleged misuse of authority, abuse of office and fraud.
The powers were designed to avoid investigations of information that is “trivial” or to avoid duplication of matters already in court, according to the AFP Act.
But the powers can also be used where the AFP deems a complaint to be frivolous or vexatious or not made in “good faith”, according to the AFP Act. They can also be used where the AFP deems the person making the complaint does “not have a sufficient interest in the AFP conduct issue”.
This year the commonwealth ombudsman found that the powers had been used to not proceed with the investigation of a complaint of serious and corrupt conduct due to concerns about the reliability of a witness.
“We were unable to see any records detailing how these concerns were weighed against the seriousness of the allegations,” the ombudsman said.
The ombudsman said documentation was also missing in another case, which was dismissed because there was no link between the complainant and the subject of the complaint. In that case the ombudsman noted the AFP had acted “without recording what inquiries were conducted or relevant evidence was obtained”.
The Police Accountability Project, a Victorian-based group, said the powers gave the AFP widespread discretion to discontinue complaint investigations and demonstrated why “police should not be investigating police, both at a state and federal level”.
“The decision to discontinue a complaint made against the police should not sit with the police itself,” said Gregor Husper, the project’s principal lawyer. “At the very least the AFP should be subject to full public transparency, monitoring and performance criteria on how it dismisses complaints.”
The Greens senator David Shoebridge said the discretionary powers made a “mockery of a rules-based complaints system”.
“The community has long called for independent investigation of police complaints but the AFP are going in the other direction with a less transparent and less accountable force as the result.”
The AFP said it was using the powers appropriately and they were subject to appropriate oversight. “The AFP’s use of these powers is overseen by the commonwealth ombudsman,” a spokesperson said.
The spokesperson said it had made changes that increased the circumstances in which the powers were used, after recommendations by the ombudsman.
Those changes mean that the powers are being used to, for example, take no action on matters where the AFP received information that may have been considered to be a complaint, but where preliminary investigations established no actual complaint was being made.
It also disputed any characterisation of the use of the powers as an intervention by the commissioner because the powers are typically delegated to more junior AFP members.
