Victoria's former top policeman has become emotional recalling the stress and pressure of the gangland wars and what lives might have been saved if different decisions were made.
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Asked about one particular slaying at the height of Melbourne's underworld killings, Simon Overland's voice broke and he struggled to continue as he considered the what ifs.
Police had a killer under surveillance for other crimes and had thought about arresting him, Mr Overland told an inquiry into the police use of informers on Wednesday.
"We made a decision not to because we figured that charges of those nature wouldn't be serious enough to put pressure on him to roll and so we didn't do that," he said.
"And in the end someone died."
Mr Overland said real life policing wasn't as neat and simple as it appeared in the movies.
Challenging and difficult decisions are made - sometimes they're right, others they're wrong and sometimes officers don't know, he said.
Mr Overland believed recruiting gangland lawyer Nicola Gobbo as a police informer and later as a witness was the best of a bad set of options.
He feared she would be killed if she continued to work along underworld figures without police intervention to recruit her as informer 3838.
And simply walking away wasn't an option either because she knew too much about the major players, he said.
Not knowing the alternate outcome to a decision was the problem, he said.
"We might not have recruited Ms Gobbo - she might have gone on to live a long and happy life (or) she might have been killed the next day," Mr Overland speculated.
"You try and make the best decision at the time.
Australian Associated Press