If you complain about a NSW police officer, the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission is the independent body you are told to go to. Set up in 2017 to replace the Police Integrity Commission, its job under the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission Act 2016 is "the independent detection, investigation and exposure of serious misconduct" in the NSW Police Force, and oversight of the far larger number of complaints that police investigate themselves.
It is not a regulator in the licensing sense. It cannot discipline or sack an officer, and it rarely lays charges itself. It investigates, watches over police investigations, reports, recommends and sends briefs of evidence to the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Fewer investigations, more staff
In 2018-19 the Commission completed 104 investigations of its own, counting preliminary enquiries, preliminary investigations and full investigations. In 2023-24 it completed 28, and in 2024-25, 35. Over the same years its staff rose from 108.60 to 131 and its expenses from $23.2 million to $27.8 million, before inflation.
In its first year the Commission said it was "constrained by a budget that does not allow us to take on all the investigations we would like". In Regulator Review's assessment, that explanation no longer fits. Its 2022-23 budget bid was approved in full, ten new positions followed, and every proposal it made for 2025-26 was funded. Its accounts record spending on staff below budget, because of vacancies, in every year from 2020-21 to 2024-25. Its annual reports do not explain the fall in investigations.
Its 2024-25 report states: "There were no prosecutions in 2024-25 arising from Commission investigations." It served no court attendance notices that year or the year before. It did refer two investigations to the Director of Public Prosecutions in 2024-25; whether to prosecute is the Director's decision.
Most complaints go back to the police
Complaints assessed rose about two and a half times between 2017-18 and 2024-25. The Commission received 7,607 complaints in 2024-25. It says that "in most instances" complaints are referred to the police for their management. Its annual reports do not say how many.
It sets no service targets. None of its eight annual reports contains a target for how quickly it will assess a complaint, finish an investigation or review a police investigation. It publishes no measure of what complainants think of it. Average assessment time was 38 days in 2022-23 and 54 days in 2023-24, which the Commission called "a significant increase". For 2024-25 it reported 40 days, on a different measure.
The Inspector of the LECC, who examines complaints about the Commission, has upheld none. But the Inspector has recorded, in a relatively small number of cases, "what appeared to be legitimate concerns" about complainants not being kept informed, delays and inadequate reasons, particularly when the Commission took no action or sent a complaint back to police. In 2024-25 half the complaints the Inspector received included a complaint that the Commission did not investigate. The Inspector cannot change those decisions, and the Commission publishes no way for a complainant to ask it to reconsider.
A watchdog that has to ask
Much of what limits the Commission is in its Act. If it thinks a police investigation was not done properly, it can only request another; the Commissioner of Police "may, but is not obliged to," agree. Over six years it made 124 such requests. Police reinvestigated 45 times.
When police kill or seriously injure someone, police investigate. The Commission monitors. It may sit in on interviews of the officers involved only if they and the senior police investigator consent, and the Commission has reported that every officer asked has refused. Apart from a narrow exception, it must wait until the police investigation ends before deciding whether to investigate misconduct itself. That is why, when 95-year-old Clare Nowland was tasered in Cooma in 2023, it said it could not then investigate. The officer was later convicted of manslaughter.
In 2023 police began refusing the Commission material on critical incidents. The Court of Appeal upheld the Commission's position in 2024, but a parliamentary committee reported in 2025 that access problems continued and recommended the Government consider amending the law.
What it has changed
In Regulator Review's assessment, the Commission's systemic work is its strongest. Several pieces changed practice: its work on the Suspect Targeting Management Plan, which police stopped using on young people in late 2023, its push for mandatory body-worn cameras, and parts of its strip search inquiry. It has also reviewed police handling of domestic violence by officers and of failed prosecutions.
Its public register now lists 299 recommendations. On 11 October 2026 police had fully supported 143, supported 48 in principle and 12 in part, and not supported 57. Thirty-one were awaiting a police response and eight were waiting on advice from another agency. One hundred and three were recorded as implemented.
Its biggest current case is Operation Makalu, into the policing of the Sydney Town Hall protest of 9 February 2026, which drew more complaints than anything in its history. It opens in public on 19 October 2026, followed by about five weeks of private examinations; public examinations of senior officers are to follow.
Reporting
The Commission's Act lists what its annual reports must include. Apart from one figure in 2018-19 that appears to measure something else, they have not given the average time taken to deal with misconduct matters, and no year since its first counts the disciplinary action that followed its investigations. Its 2024-25 report says it finalised the review of 2,411 police investigations; a table a page later gives 1,562. The way it counts complaints has changed twice in four years.
The grade
Regulator Review's proposed grade is D. The Commission is hemmed in by a statute that leaves police to investigate themselves and lets them say no, and it has fought that in court and in Parliament. But the part of the job it controls most, investigating serious misconduct itself, has shrunk as its resources grew, it sets no standard for the people who complain to it, and its reports leave out things its own Act requires.
The full analysis and sources are in the accompanying report.