Queensland policing: Queenslanders deserve better

There’s a lot of debate in Queensland about assaults on cops and armed robberies.Statistics show that assaults on cops are increasing exponentially as are armed robs. The recent tragic murder of Detective Senior Constable Damian Leeding responding to an armed-robbery-in-progress call on the Gold Coast has placed these issues at the forefront for many law-abiding Queenslanders.

The Courier Mail (30 June 2011) suggests Queenslanders lack, or have lost, respect for police. In a somewhat weak suggestion it says that Queenslanders should ‘let the women and men in blue know just how much we appreciate their efforts in keeping us safe’. Is that all we’ve got? The Queensland Police Union (QPU) which represents sworn police below commissioned rank blames rampant drug and alcohol-related violence and wants more cops, more weapons and tougher laws as long as the latter won’t apply to cops. We’ll come back to that. The Queensland Police Commissioned Officers Union is just invisible.

Who’d want to be a copper? In Queensland, the same Courier Mail article reports that ‘more than 100 police a week successfully sue the state government for on-the-job injuries, both physical and psychological.’ Danger and violence do go with the territory though, and if people enter the Queensland police service believing otherwise they are deluded. As a young copper in the seventies, I was once bashed in the face with my own handcuffs and again beaten badly in the eighties while I was working alone. The sound of a rifle pointed at my face being cocked from point-blank range still echoes in my memory, and that was just one of the times I faced a disturbed person armed with a loaded firearm.

Civil libertarians always see things differently to cops and say aggressive cops escalate situations and cops themselves are part of the problem. Is that true? Who can forget the horrific video of the bashing of citizens and tourists in Queensland police custody on the Whitsunday Coast that were released last year? Earlier this year I personally earned the ire of local police by publicly exposing an incident where three male police Tasered a lone, seventeen-year-old girl within 45 seconds of their arrival at an incident. She was waving three knives and pleading with cops to shoot her, suggesting apart from being suicidal that she may have also been suffering a mental illness. The girl suffered head injuries when she fell to a hard floor and had to endure court proceedings, some might say, to protect the police from their actions. 

There is also the anger-fomenting conduct of some cops who insist on parking speed-camera vans on downhill sections of road where even Saint Francis would speed, to be sure, like the police in Toowoomba on 29 June 2011. Want respect? Be reasonable, not mean, sneaky and nasty. Times are tough, cost of living is hurting most Queenslanders and an unnecessary speeding fine could make a family on the breadline or some innocent little guys or their Mum go without. 

There has also been a lot of talk in Queensland about random drug tests for police after Queensland’s alleged police watchdog body, the Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC) recommended it. Let’s talk about alcohol and drug testing. Let’s talk about the way cops, generally, love imposing the law on everyone else but not themselves.

On industrial sites all over Australia, workers have been routinely drug-tested for years. Even my local car mechanic is randomly tested. This week Queensland police learned drug testing for them might be on the cards and we got to listen to their union squeal. Druggie cops can relax though because the CMC might have talked about the Queensland police taking on a pro-active approach to ‘managing and dealing with substance abuse risks’ by adopting random drug-testing but acting-Police Minister Andrew Fraser actually seems to have fudged it by saying it was ‘probably inevitable’, whatever that means.

Police commissioner Bob Atkinson was also undecided about being decisive when he said, ‘It’s something we have to look more closely at now, and it may well be introduced.’ Queensland Police Union president Ian Leavers though, was predictably predictable when he said ‘random drug testing would eat into the force’s operational budget eroding the already stretched ability of police to protect the community’. As I said, same cracked record.

Leavers does however like ‘targeted testing’ instead of random testing. Is that so cops can tip off their mates when the ‘targeted testing’ is on? For many years in Queensland, P-platers, taxi-drivers, bus-drivers and truck-drivers have been required by law to have a zero blood-alcohol reading. On-duty cops, armed with lethal Glocks and Tasers and driving high-powered cop cars do not. They only need to keep their blood-alcohol below .05. Now where’s the fairness in that? How can anyone respect that?

Just once, Leavers, I would love to hear you say something about improving the standards of the police you represent. May I make a suggestion? That the QPU take an active role in advancing the professionalism of its members and try rooting out the one or two bad apples the QPU constantly says are the only ones in the 10,000 strong barrel who cause all of the problems. Now that would be novel. That community would greatly benefit from a police union leader who doesn’t pretend he thinks all cops are angels and who can see that making police behave better and more professionally would be a good thing for the Queensland Police Service, the community, and my state. Now that might earn some respect.

But do some of these factors explain why Queenslander’s have become more violent towards police? I’m not sure, but none of this police conduct excuses the increasing incidence rates of violence against police and other emergency services workers. The alarmingly commonplace frequency of attacks on Queensland ambulance officers and paramedics is probably the best measure of the unprecedented and true extent of this new violence. As a former police officer, I support the QPU in its view that violence against police is escalating. I say a rethink needs to be applied and I don’t pretend to have all the answers. 

While I agree with the QPU that it is realistic to blame some of the violence on drug and alcohol triggers, I think a deeper analysis will sheet the blame home to an increasing population of people who share a lack of social controls including an absence of discipline and a lack of empathy and respect for others. It’s time to start putting parents who put their children’s upbringing ahead of all else on a pedestal. Contrary to some opinions, most young Queenslanders are polite, well-mannered, humorous, articulate, informed, socially interested and good company; even when they’re having a night out.

Are the younger generation problem children? No, but the world could be in safe hands if we help them to benefit from our wisdom: that’s our job, by the way. Some of the controls my generation were influenced by, like religion, are now missing from our society although the flip side of that seems to be that most of the formerly socially-invisible and endemic horrors like child rape and relationship violence are well and truly outed, both very good things. 

A majority of the police I know are of the rank of sergeant or lower and generally do a great job. Some are saints and do a better than excellent job. It is only the odd copper I come across who could use better manners or needs to take a trip to China to see the effects of a society where writers are unable to criticise police. Things have improved in many respects since the bad old days pre-Fitzgerald but there are some things that will never change.

Have violent criminals been given a green light in Queensland? You could say they’ve been welcomed with a red carpet.Let’s talk about violent crimes and the public’s perception that armed robberies on the Gold Coast are completely out of control. Well, they are. For a start, bad guys from all over Australia must be flocking to Armed Robbers’ Paradise because they will all know that the number of cops on the beat on the Gold Coast is pathetic for such a high crime area. Then they will also know that Queensland police aren’t usually allowed to chase anyone who runs away in a motor vehicle. So that’s helpful.

They may also know that in Queensland most police have no specialised training in how to respond tactically to an armed-robbery-in-progress situation that is no less lethal, as we’ve seen lately. Unlike the Australian military where discipline and training for combat situations are everything and our aviators, sailors and soldiers are up there with the world’s elite, there is apparently no specialised tactical training in armed robbery response is being provided to Queensland police stationed from Brisbane’s Northside to the NSW border. Now that’s truly tragic.

The bad guys may also know that the Queensland Police SWAT equivalent, the Special Emergency Response Team (SERT) is confined to barracks in Brisbane. That’s right, we keep our specialist heavily armed SERT team safely confined to barracks so they don’t catch armed robbers? As if that’s not bad enough, the bad guys will also know that Queensland police have no air support. In Queensland there are no police helicopters.

Then there is the lack of technology provided to Queensland police officers. Most Queensland teenagers have smartphones. Police cars should have at least this basic level of technology as standard, but most don’t. What is happening with the Queensland police Mobile Services Project? I don’t know because my local Assistant Commissioner, a former detective who is in charge of that project, won’t meet me to talk about it. Why do some Queensland police officers still have to purchase their own GPS units?

Armed robberies are about opportunistic crime. How do we stop armed robberies? By a range of measures. But firstly, if the Queensland Police Service had a police commissioner who understood evidence-based methodologies he might know that research shows that only 15 to 20 per cent of armed robberies are likely to be solved after-the-event. So throwing all of the Queensland Police Service resources on the Gold Coast at the CIB is doomed to fail and is the predictable and wrong approach of a Commissioner who is no more than a detective who has surrounded himself with other senior officers.

Too many detective mates of the current Police Commissioner are being promoted to positions way above their level of competence and for which they have no recognised public or private sector managerial or ‘professional’ qualifications. That’s got to stop. Unless a detective can show other qualifications that demonstrate development towards professional public sector management, why promote them to the most senior ranks of the Queensland Police Service?

On the Gold Coast there are some 900 to 1000 liquor outlets, add to this the number of 24-hour servos, late-night fast-food outlets and convenience stores, that’s a lot of targets. We need police who are specialists in target-hardening to work with the public in these sitting-duck outlets, to help them to look after themselves as much as possible. That’s being done, but not to the degree it must. Target-hardening needs to be stepped up and if that means pulling back in retired police with this specialist background or paying competent consultants who are not police, then let’s do it.

On the ground, we need to gear up the troops and have seasoned police who have been trained in armed-offender responses doing patrols in hotspots in unmarked cars. These cops need to be vested up, weaponed-up with shotguns like their opponents have, and ready to go in cars that can pursue with GPS units installed and with radios that work. We need to activate SERT. Let’s have these fully-weaponed up highly trained assets mobile and roaming the hotspots looking for trouble, 24/7.

The recently published CMC’s report proves that many drivers of vehicles that evade police pursuits are car thieves who are not to be found at the address attached to the vehicle’s Queensland Transport records. Who does not remember the stolen yellow Holden Monaro sedan that was allowed to ram a police car in a service station then continue to drive unrestricted around the Gold Coast area for at least a week while it was being used in crimes because someone in the QPS came up with a no-pursuit policy?

I’ve written about two situations where criminals driving stolen vehicles have committed crimes only to be ‘observed’ by police, despite late night and low traffic situations being highly favourable for a short chase unlikely to result in anything other than an arrest. Citizens should be outraged. Part of policing is catching bad guys. Part of catching bad guys is chasing them, on foot, in cars, in boats and in the air.

The CMC report also confirms that the customary penalty for drivers who fail to stop for police is about the same price of a big night out for a teenage driver: $300.00. Is that a real deterrent? No. If police are to continue to be stopped from pursuing stolen vehicles which are used to commit crimes, specialist ground-air units to track these vehicles and arrest offenders when they are stopped must be formed, as has been with success in some U.S. states. Until this is done, the no-pursuit policy must be relaxed for competent police drivers who have been trained to chase safely and have performed hundreds of high-speed pursuits without incident.

When an armed robbery happens, police need to be able to hit the area with sufficient officers to be able to mount an effective investigation. The number of police on the Gold Coast is well below sufficient to properly investigate violent crimes and too many police are simply going from job-to-job writing in notebooks. We need to get serious about catching dangerous crooks that put weapons in people’s face. This can be greatly assisted by having enough police on the beat.

In Queensland, senior police have yet to be forced to manage under the clear understanding that there is a nexus between ineffective management and misconduct. Instead, the ‘bad apple theory’ is trotted out at every turn and the top police are allowed to squirm off the hook. The failure to implement a system that develops competent police managers who are held responsible for identifying underperformance and misconduct and doing something about, is what is really wrong with the Queensland Police Service.