Queensland police officer Geoffrey Owen Acreman, who was on secondment to the Crime and Corruption Commission at the time of the altercation in 2015, was demoted from detective inspector to senior sergeant, according to papers filed in the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal.

The latest case of misuse of QPRIME was revealed as the Crime and Corruption Commission’s annual report said the issue is a “significant” problem facing the Queensland public sector.

In 2017-18, the CCC received 762 allegations relating to the misuse of confidential information, representing 9 per cent of all corrupt conduct allegations received, with 354 (46 per cent) of those allegations related to Queensland police officers.

In evidence, then-Inspector Acreman admitted he had grabbed the oven seller by the throat in response to being “physically grabbed” by him, as his wife and the seller’s girlfriend looked on.

The tribunal heard then-Inspector Acreman failed to report the incident to police immediately after the incident, or the next day.

Instead, he used QPRIME to look up the man’s details and returned to the premises to search for the registration number of his vehicle, QCAT was told.

The seller’s car was not at the premises when then-Inspector Acreman returned.

But when he spoke to a resident at the address and identified himself as a police officer, he was led to check an address around the corner where the vehicle was located.

Then-Inspector Acreman also failed to attach an intelligence submission to his QPRIME look-up to provide an official explanation of why he had looked up the man’s details and told the tribunal he did not know how to do it, saying “...QPRIME and I are not good bedfellas”.

In evidence, then-Inspector Acreman said he intended to ask a colleague who was off sick to submit the intelligence submission for him but by the time she came back to work, he had “forgotten about the whole thing”.

He told the tribunal the reason for looking the man up on QPRIME was because he wanted to find out “who the hell he [was]”, whether or not he had “attacked anybody else” and to establish if he was domestic violence perpetrator.

During the hearing, it emerged the officer separately looked up official documents on a folder on the QPS computer system about himself, in relation to a complaint made against him by the oven seller.

He told investigators at the time he was concerned the documents could have contained different “massaged” information about the complaint.

Then-Inspector Acreman told his supervisor: “There’s a statement there from the bloke that’s making the complaint against me, and it’s different from the allegations that were put to me.”

When asked what he meant, he allegedly told his supervisor: “I reckon it’s an earlier version and has been ‘massaged’, so goodness knows what the one will look like that gets put in my disciplinary brief.”

He was then asked if he had found his own disciplinary file in a drop folder to which he allegedly responded: “Yeah, and I’d like to know who else has had a read of it. So much for my privacy.”

Then-Inspector Acreman’s supervisor told him not to go looking for documents or he “may find [himself] in more trouble”, but he took screenshots of the documents in the folder and emailed them to himself, QCAT heard.

In delivering her judgment, tribunal member Joanne Browne said she accepted the officer’s evidence that he accessed QPRIME because of concerns the complainant might behave aggressively towards other people, but found there was “no official purpose” for him to access the information.

“I find that Mr Acreman accessed official and confidential information ... without an official purpose related to the purpose of his duties as a police officer,” Ms Browne said.

“... I am also satisfied that Mr Acreman’s conduct is misconduct because he accessed … information on the QPS computer system without an official purpose, and without authority, emailed the confidential information to his private email account.

“[His] conduct was improper and does not meet the standard of conduct the community reasonably expects of a police officer,” she said.

Ms Browns said that Senior Sergeant Acreman and the QPS could make further submissions to address whether a demotion in rank was still appropriate, and if so, the period of time for the demotion.