A police officer has been jailed for stealing more than $200K cash seized as evidence from her western Sydney police station for almost 5 years without being caught by her colleagues who failed to carry out audits.
Tracey Lee Butler, 58, a senior police officer who was responsible for evidence at the Mount Druitt Police Station, will now face at least 18 months of jail time for stealing cash in evidence to fund her gambling habits and a credit card debt.
The police are supposed to be on the legal side of the blocks, but not this time.
According to an investigation, everything goes all the way back to 2021, when the police couldn’t track a sum of $18,000 that had to be returned to an accused person entitled to their cash back. Coincidence, you may think. That’s what they thought at that time, too.
Wait till you find that a number of cash exhibits were not accounted for over the years.
She was arrested in November 2022, denying any involvement as if she didn’t know a thing about it. Later on, she pleaded guilty, admitting she’d stolen $209.730 from over 40 evidence bags. All this was going on between 2017 and 2022.
As Judge Guy Newton stated, it was standard for police stations to audit all their cash evidence. It should happen monthly and be done by a supervising duty officer. At Mount Druitt, they seem to have had their own standard since this hadn’t been done there.
The interesting part? It appears all audits had been carried out in the exhibit office by no one else but her. Yep, no duty officer or supervisor was ever there during audits.
How come a senior police officer allowed herself the liberty to steal all that money? Butler appears to have stolen the money to fund her continuous gambling habits and, eventually, pay off debts. No kidding about debts since her bank accounts were overdrawn every month.
Further findings showed that she lost almost $170K on gambling. What’s more, her lawyers claimed she was not fully aware of her actions and their consequences.
Of course, Judge Newton dismissed such arguments and even pointed out that her colleagues’ failure to carry out audits didn’t make her less guilty.
He added: “It could be said the offender opportunistically took advantage of deficiencies in the system… in the expectation she would not be caught.”
As we can see from this story, the offender stole a large amount of money instead of executing her duties like a real police officer and an honest citizen, for what it’s worth.
Until then, Butler had worked as a police officer for 22 years. But now, she’s facing a two-year and seven-month sentence, plus a non-parole period of 18 months.
Shortly after her arrest, she was suspended without pay, which is obvious. Later on, she was also removed from the police force.
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