Keystone Kops. Jacques Clouseau. Theophilus Goon. These are the names that come to mind after hearing of the most recent example of incompetence displayed by the Australian Federal Police.
Last Friday, the commissioner of this force, Andrew Colvin, confessed that some members of his force had illegally accessed a journalist's phone records in the course of an investigation into a leak.
As per the law, this would have required Colvin or a senior AFP manager to seek a "journalist information warrant". But the AFP personnel in question did not bother with these little niceties.
Some of Colvin's excuses would be ludicrous if the matter was not so serious. "Put simply, this was human error," he told the media.
{loadposition sam08}Which led veteran journalist David Marr to comment on the ABC's Insiders programme today that the next time he was hauled up for an offence in court, he would simply tell the judge, "It's human error, your honour", because that seemed to be a way of exonerating oneself.
Colvin also claimed that what was accessed was the records of calls, not the content. Now any tech neophyte can tell you that metadata can provide a pretty effective idea of the person and what the call was about.
The journalist in question has not been notified. Indeed, whether he/she will ever know that the AFP got its mitts on his/her metadata is doubtful.
It's worth noting that while the Commonwealth Ombudsman was notified of this lapse on Wednesday, Colvin waited until Friday afternoon to tell the media about it. That's the time which politicians pick to release any news which they want to slip under the radar.
Remember, this is the same outfit that received a healthy boost in its funding from former prime minister Tony Abbott.
This is not the first major AFP screw-up of recent times. There is an almighty list of bungles.
In 2015, the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union was raided by the AFP, but after the ACT Supreme Court threw out the warrant used for the raid, the AFP ended up paying the union's costs.
In 2014, the force raided Channel Seven in search of evidence to prove that the TV network had paid paroled drug-smuggler Schappelle Corby. A government inquiry labelled the raids "incompetent and too costly".
In 2010, the same AFP earned the wrath of a judge when it emerged that they had bungled an investigation into three men who were sending money to the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers separatist group.
The same year a judge in the Solomon Islands threw out evidence in a murder case because the AFP had "forgot" basic procedures, including reading the suspect their rights.
Back in 2009, the AFP triumphantly announced that they had taken over an underground cyber crime forum only for hackers to break into the AFP's own computer system.
The AFP and Victoria Police took over an underground hacking forum, r00t-y0u.org, which had about 5000 members, and began using it to gather evidence against the members. But the group was aware that something was amiss and hacked into the police system, leaving the AFP with some egg on its collective face.
And finally, the case of Dr Mohamed Haneef was another glorious screw-up, with the doctor falsely arrested on charges of terrorism and the government ending up with a massive bill.
Given all this, one needs to ask whether the government should re-examine its funding priorities for law enforcement going forward.