Page 3820 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 8 November 1994
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If you had the overzealous police officer that Mr Moore is concerned about, who was minded to give a lot of young people in Civic a hard time, that police officer would have to be making copious notes. If there was ever a complaint raised by a young person, the IID would go to those notes. Indeed, if he had not kept those notes, it would disclose that a criminal offence had been committed by the police officer. That is a fairly serious provision. It is, in my view, a quite strong safeguard, and one that goes well beyond the Commonwealth Act.
We put that safeguard in because we thought we had to extend it from indictable to summary. The essential reason for that, much as Mr Stefaniak adverted to it, is that the distinction between indictable and summary in community policing is fairly meaningless. In the Commonwealth policing role it does mean quite a lot. It really is the dividing line for the AFP's principal role at the national law enforcement level - serious fraud, drug related offences, counter-terrorism-type offences and arms smuggling offences; the sorts of laws that, according to the AFP's annual report, the AFP focuses on. If you look for summary offences laws under Commonwealth legislation, you find that they tend to be what you might call regulatory sorts of laws relating to the filing of documents or inspectors not doing things - fairly minor matters which are certainly not the core function of the AFP. The AFP felt that it was quite appropriate in their national law enforcement role to have this limited to indictable offences.
It is very different in the community policing role. There has been an increasing tendency, both before and after self-government, to blur that distinction between summary and indictable offences. There are many examples of Acts where it is not immediately clear whether the Act discloses a summary offence or an indictable offence. An example that I have used in the public debate would be that the beat squad officers turn a corner, and around the corner they see two young people apparently brawling in the street. Does that disclose the indictable offence of assault or does it disclose the summary offence of fighting in a public place? Members will recall that the police had some concerns about the difficulty of proving assaults. Often, if you have an all-in melee, usually occurring under the influence of alcohol, it may be difficult to charge anyone with assault because they were all willingly having a go at one another. The Government brought before the Assembly, and the Assembly passed, a summary offence - an offence with a considerably lower penalty than that for assault - of fighting in a public place.
Before the police know whether to charge someone with assault or fighting in a public place, they are really going to have to question the two people who are involved in the fisticuffs. It would be very difficult for them to have to form the view that an assault has been committed before they could trigger the questioning for the name and address. Indeed, the possible downside of doing that - and I am sure that it would be an unintended consequence - is that, if you did limit the power to ask for name and address to an indictable offence, there could well be a tendency for the police officer to go for the indictable offence, the more serious offence, in order to trigger the additional power. That would be a very undesirable practice.
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