One bitter bloodbath has been won, now Lanyon has a bigger battle

Photographs of six commissioners adorn the boardroom at Police Headquarters – the latest, outgoing commissioner Karen Webb, hasn’t joined them yet. They’re distinguished and serious, bedecked with medals and tassels and ribbons, without any trace of the bloodbath they endured to end up on that wall.

There’s no politics as bitter as NSW police politics. Leaks. Rumours. White-anting. There hasn’t been a commissioner race in the past 25 years that hasn’t been consumed by all three, waged through the media, or through weaponised complaints, or through internal investigations – including covert surveillance of rivals.

The ambitions of some of the highest-profile police in NSW have been thwarted by it; Clive Small, who investigated backpacker killer Ivan Milat; Nick Kaldas, who investigated the assassination of MP John Newman and has since run investigations for the United Nations; Catherine Burn, who now holds a senior job at Australia’s overseas spy agency.

Webb’s tenure as the first female commissioner was dogged by leaks and white-anting, which was part of the reason she departed almost two years before her contract was due. Multiple police and political sources say she left at the urging of Premier Chris Minns, who wanted to replace her with Lanyon, although Minns insists the decision was hers.

New commissioner Mal Lanyon says he never leaked against Webb or anyone else. Last week, he was subject to a leak himself, about a police watchdog investigation into his decision to take friends on an operational police boat on New Year’s Eve in 2023. Webb is said to be shattered by how her own colleagues worked to undermine her, and Lanyon admits he feared the latest leak would stop him getting the job.

That one of Lanyon’s key priorities was to unify the police executive – announced at his first press conference, which was otherwise dominated by questions about his drunken altercation with paramedics in Goulburn and a New Year’s Eve police boat trip with friends – shows just how much of an issue this has become.

“Conflict between the leadership team has an adverse effect on the people that do all our work, our officers who do a brilliant job every day, but it also impacts on the perception the community sees of the police force,” Lanyon told the Herald.

Key players such as the powerful Police Association (which backs Lanyon) believe that the “NSW Police Force Game of Thrones”, as one officer put it, is putting people off joining the force, which is facing serious recruitment and retention problems already (Webb’s loyalists say the association never seemed so worried about leaks when she was the commissioner).

Minns’ unprecedented interference in the job – Webb is the first commissioner to have her tenure cut short since the power was given to the government rather than parliament – hasn’t helped either. Few in the organisation believe he had nothing to do with Webb’s departure; the message is that the police chief can be white-anted out of the job.

Theories abound about why police politics is so bitter. Some say that while senior executives in professions such as banking can bounce from company to company, there are far fewer options for career police officers (few forces appoint externally). Some say the promotions process funnels only the most ambitious officers into the senior ranks.

When asked on Wednesday, Lanyon said there was no greater honour than being police commissioner. “Generally, by the time that someone is going to be an applicant for a police commissioner, they may have had 35 years in the police force,” he said. “It only comes up once every five years … it’s hotly contested.”

On Wednesday, Lanyon introduced his priorities. They include tackling organised crime, recruitment and improving social harmony. His bid to create a trusting environment at Police HQ is the most ambitious of them all.

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