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 th

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