Seven years for manslaughter of NSW cop

A MAN who pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of a police officer shot dead during a Sydney drugs raid has been sentenced to seven years in prison.

Philip Nguyen, 57, was sentenced in front of a packed courtroom in the Supreme Court on Friday for the shooting death of trainee detective Constable Bill Crews at a basement car park in Bankstown on September 8, 2010.

In handing down the sentence to a court room littered with red ties as a mark of solidarity to Const Crews, Justice Elizabeth Fullerton described him as "a son, brother, uncle and a mentor".

She said she accepted without qualification that his family felt his loss on a daily basis.

"There is no lessening of their grief," she said.

Nguyen pleaded guilty to manslaughter and to wounding Const Crews, 26, with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.

The court was told Nguyen produced a pistol in the basement after Const Crew and seven other officers executed a search warrant.

"What followed was a sequence of five shots fired from three guns in the space of seconds," Justice Fullerton said.

The court was told Nguyen fired the first shot, hitting Const Crews in the arm.

The 26-year-old fired three shots in return before a fellow detective fired once, accidentally shooting him in the neck.

Justice Fullerton said Nguyen "had no right to arm himself with a loaded pistol and no right to shoot".

"Although he didn't fire the shot that killed him, he caused his death."

The court was told Nguyen claimed that he believed Const Crews and the other officers were robbers.

But Justice Fullerton found it would also have been "reasonable" for him to have thought they were police because they identified themselves as such when entering the carpark.

She said Nguyen, a Vietnamese refugee, had turned to drugs since his wife's death in 2001.

Although expressing genuine remorse for Const Crews' death, Nguyen had shown "determination to continue to involve himself in some way with a drug milieu", she said.

Justice Fullerton was unable to find he had positive prospects of rehabilitation.

She said that aggravating factors, such as Const Crews' position as a police officer, "overwhelmed" any contrition.

She sentenced Nguyen to a maximum of nine-and-a-half years, backdated to his arrest in September 2010.

His earliest date of release will be September 7, 2017.

Outside court after the sentence was handed down, Const Crews's father Kelvin said he was disappointed at the sentence.

"It doesn't seem to us to be appropriate for our family, for the police, for the community," Mr Crews, who also served as a police officer, told reporters.

"He has given his life in the line of duty, we have been sentenced to life. The sentence that has been given down has been nothing to what we have been sentenced to."

"He was the world to all our family."

NSW Attorney General Greg Smith SC acknowledged community concern about Nguyen's sentence and said he would ask the Director of Public Prosecutions to consider lodging an appeal against it.

NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione said his first thoughts went to Const Crew's family when the sentence was handed out.

"No father should have to bury their son," he told reporters.

He said a review of the events that occurred on the night of the shooting had been undertaken and "we do all we can to learn from it".

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