Disaster waiting to happen
OPINION Published in the Herald Sun on 7 April 2022
By Wayne Gatt
LAST week, a 15-year-old girl was reported missing in Wallan by a concerned relative.
There was reasonable intelligence to suggest where she may be found.
This should have been a straight up-and-down case of going out to this place, ascertaining the girl was safe and reuniting her with her family.
It's a 10-minute job.
However, given the scarcity of police and the demand they were under, no police officer in the entire Police Service Area was free to respond that morning, that afternoon or that night, to a missing 15-year-old girl.
It took 24 hours for a crew to respond, to find her and to ease the considerable concerns of her family.
If that's not indicative of a crisis in police staffing, what is?
It may have been easier to provide the girl's family with some answers as to why they had to wait so long for a response, if this were an issue specific and confined to that PSA.
It's not.
It's happening everywhere and it needs to change.
The Staff Allocation Model, which was introduced in 2016 and signed up to by the state government, Victoria Police and The Police Association, is a forward-thinking, forward-looking system that seeks to address these staffing shortfalls before they affect community safety and the community's right to a timely police response.
It was designed, as both the Premier and the Police Minister have said ad nauseam in recent years, to end the "boom bust" cycle of police number allocation and to make it an academic, rather than a political exercise.
Don't get me wrong, the allocation of 2729 extra police by this government was the "boom" that preceded a long period of "bust" when it came to police numbers.
It was both the solution to a lack of investment in police for several years and the reason the allocation of police numbers required reform via a more sustainable and consistent model.
The SAM is that.
It is guided by expert modelling which takes into account several critical factors that drive policing demand in Victoria.
The number of police it says Victoria needs over the next four years is 1500.
I want to be clear; we are not bidding for 1500 police over four years, we are calling on the government to honour the model that it introduced, which says that's what Victoria requires to keep the public safe over the next four years.
That need accords with what our own members told us in the 2021 Policing Issues Survey.
Three thousand police contributed to this survey.
When it comes to questions on staffing and resources in police stations, the feedback given to us by the 586 sergeants and 151 senior sergeants surveyed was both damning and enlightening.
More than 60 per cent said their staff regularly do not get to jobs, more than half said they struggled to get vans on the road, 76 per cent indicated jobs were regularly held for 15-30 minutes and almost as many said jobs were regularly held for 30 minutes to an hour.
More than half said they were regularly held for longer than an hour.
When it comes specifically to priority one jobs, our most important call-outs, nearly half said that they were regularly held for between 15 and 30 minutes, 21 per cent said they were held for 30 minutes to an hour and 13 per cent said they were regularly held for more than an hour.
That, of itself, shows that what happened last week in Wallan wasn't an aberration.
I have no doubt that these damning statistics would be reflected in response time data.
That is, if Victoria collected it.
Which poses the question: why don't we?
If every other state and territory can do it, why can't we?
Perhaps more pointedly, why don't we want to?
The public has a right to know how quickly their police are responding, or not responding to their calls for assistance.
Our members are telling us, but no one is telling you.
On Monday the Premier dodged a question about the SAM's forecast for 1500 police over four years, with an observation that Victoria had the biggest police force "by actual headcount" than any other state.
Firstly, this is a curious analysis.
The Productivity Commission's most recent figures show there are 16,307 full-time sworn operational police in Victoria and 17,564 in NSW.
Secondly, the model that the Premier himself is a signatory to, SAM, aims to allocate police in Victoria according to the drivers of policing demand here in Victoria, some of which have been created by the Premier and his government.
Comparisons with other states are quite simply redundant.
The Chief Commissioner just last week heralded the introduction of a new, more community-focused approach to policing in Victoria.
This is a fantastic and much-needed shift.
But if you don't have enough police to respond to a missing 15year-old girl within 24 hours and you're holding priority one callouts as often as our members tell us, how are you going to find enough police to walk the streets and engage with their communities?