Page 3749 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 29 October 2014
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That is one incident report. I will turn to another. I will go to a paragraph within this report:
Members directly involved in the incident participated in a debrief the following day to discuss the incident and any learning outcomes. In relation to the use of force, members raised the benefit they would have if they had a Taser present when the Subject first presented to them at the front of [X]. Constable X in the first instance did not draw her firearm as she was cognisant of the numerous members of the public (including children) standing behind the subject in the department along with numerous nurses and wardsmen following closely behind the subject. Constable [X] stated that the Subject was only 4 metres from her when she raised her knife and advanced on her and she believes if she had a Taser available she would have drawn and deployed.
That is another example where our front-line police have said that if they had had a taser they would have been safer. Let me quote from another report:
The Sgt did not intend to use the TASER device against any person or to attempt an arrest. It was quite obvious that the group was particularly hostile and intent on acts of violence, and the Sgt was concerned that any act of force would lead to an immediate violent confrontation in which he would not have been able to defend himself against sheer weight of numbers. Fortunately, the threat of the taser combined with continuous verbal communication was able to resolve the situation.
Separated from his vehicle, the Sgt did not have access to OC fog canisters, and his normal OC canister would not have been sufficient against the large groups. Use of OC, or any other option, would have likely had the same effect of inciting violence as the TASER.
There are a significant number of examples here. It is clear that, as much as Simon Corbell would try and say differently, there is politics that he wants to inject in this. He wants to be the man that makes the decision rather than saying that this should be an operational decision. We have seen the evidence; we have now seen three years of tasers being rolled out to sergeants in our community. The learnings are there. It is time for the police minister to say, “Chief Police Officer, you have the call. The priority here is keeping your officers safe. The priority here is keeping the community safe. Should you feel the need to deploy tasers further, you have my authority, you have my imprimatur, to do that.”
That would be a good thing. It would be a vote of confidence in our police. Certainly it would be sending a message to them: “We care about your safety; that is a priority for us.” It would send a very clear message also to the Chief Police Officer that he would be able to do that at his discretion without having to double-think and second-think the politics from a minister who is clearly hesitant to give this sort of direction.
There is a different approach between the government and us. Our priority is to make sure that the community is safe, but our priority also is to make sure that the police officers charged with that are safe. We listen to the voice of those front-line officers, represented here today by Dennis Gellatly, who clearly are calling for the further deployment of tasers to keep them safe.
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