By Maeve Bannister in Canberra

YOUNG, inexperienced police officers in the ACT are using the sexual assault and child abuse division as a “training ground”, an independent inquiry has been told. 

Australian Federal Police detective superintendent Scott Moller is concerned about the inexperience within the territory’s police sexual assault and child abuse team (SACAT) which then puts pressure on senior officers.

Supt Moller was the lead officer who investigated Brittany Higgins’ allegation her former colleague Bruce Lehrmann raped her in 2019, inside the Parliament House office of then coalition minister Linda Reynolds after a night out. Mr Lehrmann denies the allegation.

The senior officer told the inquiry SACAT was a “training ground for budding detectives” to learn their strategies.

He said officers were “very young and inexperienced” and while the organisation took pride in the fact that the division was used to provide training, this also presented challenges.

“One of the problems that I see from an organisational perspective is… we’ve depleted the experience to an extent where we have very young officers running investigations with minimal or less than ideal direction from a senior officer,” Supt Moller told the inquiry.

“What I’m saying is… it’s diluted, in some respects, that experience level in ACT Policing.”

Supt Moller said “very few” officers in the division had completed an AFP sexual assault training program. He admitted he personally had not completed the program.

“Obviously, there’s a place for the academic aspects of training, but much of the training in ACT Policing is derived from experience,” he said.

“The difficulty we’re seeing now is we don’t have the vast amount of officers to pass that experience on (and we’re) left with very, very few… to build that experience in the teams.

“The training (officers) are given at the moment is learned on the job.”

Supt Moller said there was “absolutely” room for improvement when it came to police training in sexual assault responses.

The senior detective earlier denied an accusation he showed bias in favour of Mr Lehrmann.

Top silk Mark Tedeschi KC, representing ACT Director of Public Prosecutions Shane Drumgold, drew the senior officer’s attention to a comment he “liked” on a LinkedIn post in December 2022.

It followed the announcement prosecutors would drop the charge against Mr Lehrmann due to fears about the impact of a second trial on Ms Higgins’ mental health.

Supt Moller liked a comment that said: “Mr Lehrmann is innocent until proven otherwise.”
The comment went on to say the former Liberal staffer did not deserve to be “negatively labelled for the rest of his life” and the author was “deeply shocked” by some of Mr Drumgold’s reported comments on the case.

Mr Tedeschi suggested it was “entirely inappropriate” that Supt Moller had liked the comment in his capacity as a detective superintendent of the unsolved homicide squad.

He suggested this showed a bias from the investigator in favour of Mr Lehrmann.

“No, I don’t agree with that. What I believe it shows is that I liked the comment, I agreed with the comment,” Supt Moller said.

“I’ll accept that in hindsight I probably shouldn’t have liked the comment.”

Open or closed, Moller bats away the questions