Phillip Arantz

Who is Phillip Arantz?

Philip Arantz was a Detective Sergeant in the New South Wales Police.

In the 1970s he was involved in a long-running and highly publicised battle with the NSW government after his dismissal from the Police Service, and Arantz claimed that he had been victimised for his whistle-blowing actions, which had exposed systematic police corruption.

In 1971, while working on a computerisation program, the computer expert discovered that the NSW police service had been systematically under-reporting crime statistics for years. The obvious inference of this revelation was that police were trying to conceal corruption, which allegedly extended up to the Police Commissioner himself, and the widespread police involvement in organised crime.

Arantz took his allegations to senior police but they were dismissed out of hand. Eventually Arantz, now recognised as one of Australia's pioneer "whistle-blowers", realised that Norman Allan was at least aware of the scheme, if not directly involved in it, and that he wanted to suppress Arantz's revelations.