Domestic violence case management is not the “core business” of policing, and other agencies should take on greater roles in this, Queensland’s acting police commissioner says.
The Queensland police service on Tuesday released a 100-day review of its operations and structure, finding that the police have been the victim of “significant mission creep”, with officers increasingly tasked with non-core functions such as mental health response, domestic and family violence case management, and prisoner transport.
At a press conference on Tuesday morning – before the report was made public – the acting police commissioner, Shane Chelepy, said the state had seen the “fundamental role of policing changing to [addressing] societal issues”.
“If you look at domestic and family violence and mental health issues and other social issues, our role of policing has expanded into those societal and social issues. What this report says is that’s very important, but police are not the ones who are trained to do that,” he said.
The report recommends the police service “transition some DFV responsibilities back to the Department of Families, Seniors, Disability Services and Child Safety (and appropriately funded NGO)”.
Women’s Legal Service CEO, Nadia Bromley, said the state had recently banned coercive control, an acknowledgment that domestic violence was considered a serious crime.
“We know that domestic violence makes up a significant amount of the violent crime committed in Queensland,” she said.
“Most Queenslanders would expect the police service to be the frontline response to violent crime.”
Chelepy said the police force needed to better define where its role started and stopped.
Asked if parts of the response to domestic violence or mental health crises were outside “core business”, he said that police would still attend callouts, but would seek a clearer referral process to other agencies “once we’ve done our job and kept the community safe”.
He said there should be a greater role for “wraparound services to reduce that repeat calls for service that we see”.
“The reality is, police are there to do policing. We’re there to keep the community safe … there’s a time in that response where the best support to be provided to the member of the public is through a specialist of another organisation, not a police officer.”
The report notes that calls for service for domestic violence represent the single largest source of demand, representing 34% hours in the computer aided dispatch system. In some districts, it can represent up to 70%.
Bromley said very few domestic violence services operated over the weekend, or early in the morning, and that without enormous investment no other system outside the police force was resourced to respond.
“If the work is transferred to organisations that aren’t available when they’re needed that will compromise the safety of Queenslanders. The response needs to be 24/7 and unless the agency responsible for responding to domestic violence is available then, then people won’t get the safety they need. They won’t get the immediate response,” she said.
The police minister, Dan Purdie, a former cop, said shifting resources back to crime detection and prevention would help QPS “refocus on their core priorities of fighting crime”.
“I look forward to working with the other ministers and those departments through cabinet, and likewise, to build better systems to help our police refocus their attention on fighting crime,” he said.
“We need to build that capacity.”
The government recently introduced legislation into parliament to reduce the paperwork burden on police responding to domestic violence incidents. If passed the laws would permit police to issue an on-the-spot order to an alleged domestic violence offender, a proposal that some experts fear could put vulnerable women at greater risk of harm.
Queensland police’s commissioned officers’ union president, Kerry Johnson, and Queensland police union president, Shane Prior, welcomed the findings of the report at the Tuesday morning press conference.
“I want the Department of Health to actually start dealing with this mental health issue that we’ve got in society and not … [leave it] at the feet of police. Things have got to change,” Prior said.
The report makes 65 recommendations. Chelepy said they included reducing the size of the police executive leadership team from 44 to 26 and a reduction of the senior executive. No jobs would be lost in the change, he said.
In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. Mental health support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978. Other international helplines can be found via www.befrienders.org
