Page 4068 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 22 October 1991
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There is not much point in having a lot of police around on duty - paid for by the Commonwealth or paid for by the ACT - from 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, because a hell of a lot of crime happens at night and on weekends. At the Estimates Committee, Assistant Commissioner Dawson agreed that the majority of assaults occurred outside normal hours. In fact, when one looks at the figures provided on burglaries, the majority of burglaries, which are prevalent while people are at work or away from home during the week, occur outside normal office hours.
There was a question of security as well, and questions were raised at the public meetings and in the Estimates Committee as to what would happen when the watch-houses closed and police cars had to go into Civic, often for up to four hours. What would happen, with only one car in Tuggeranong, when there were two disputes - perhaps a domestic dispute out at Chisholm and a big pub brawl at the Kambah Tavern? According to Mr Connolly, cars would have to come from the rest of Canberra to attend to those matters. What happens if the car from Belconnen comes in and something goes wrong in Weedon Close, Belconnen, and police are needed there because there is a stabbing? These things do happen.
In recent years Canberra has become, for a number of reasons, an increasingly unruly and violent society, as evidenced by other figures given to the Estimates Committee. The number of prosecutions the DPP did increased from about 8,500 to about 14,000 over the last financial year. That is indicative of the fact that Canberra is not the nice, safe little country town it used to be 20 years ago. We need a police force that is able to do its job properly.
The police, and I know many of them from my days as a prosecutor, take great pride in their job. They were at the meetings, too, and I was somewhat upset, to put it mildly, at threats made that they could not speak out, threats by this Government and this Attorney-General that police would be disciplined if they did. If any police spoke out, and several did at the Tuggeranong meeting, it was because of pride in their job, the fact that they want to do their job properly, that they want to protect the Canberra community and were concerned that they were being deprived of the ability to do that. That was a very real problem.
Another factor is the industrial issue of occupational health and safety, and I have referred to this on a couple of occasions in this house in recent weeks. If police get into a nasty situation and other police cars have to come to bail them out, if other police are not on duty there can often be a life-threatening situation. I have been involved as a prosecutor in situations where police response was slow, but at least it came.
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