Issues in Contemporary Policing
Speech by Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty APM
Address to the SA Press Club
26 October 2006
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Dr Andrew Southcott, Federal Member for Boothby;
Paul Holloway, South Australian Minister for Police,
Rob Lucas, Shadow Minister for Police;
David Ridgway, Shadow Minister for the Environment;
Colleagues from the South Australian Police,
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen……….
Thank you and I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of this land – the Kuarna (Gar-nah) people and acknowledge their Elders both past and present and their connections with this land.
As many of you would know, I spent some years working here in Adelaide during the days of the former crime commission – the NCA - and have many fond memories of the city.
Today I want to talk to you about some of the contemporary issues facing the AFP on both domestic and international fronts…in areas such as national security, recruitment and international policing.
Some of you may be aware that earlier this month I addressed the National Press Club in Canberra, where I talked about some of the complexities surrounding the work being carried out by the AFP-led International Deployment Group. I’m sure many of you have closely followed the meeting of the Pacific Island Forum of Ministers and the difficulties in places like the Solomon Islands.
For those of you who may not be familiar with my comments, I spoke about some of the difficulties associated with policing in a ‘foreign policy space’ and how this is challenging some of the traditional notions of policing.
Whilst we are familiar in our own country of the separation of powers in our Constitution, the AFP finds itself policing in parts of the world trying to do Australian government’s business in a similar way as at home but faced with extraordinary challenges as the theatres of operation are quite different.
For example, the riots in the Solomon Islands on the 18th and 19th April this year, were quite calculated and divisive in terms of what they were aiming to do. The person ultimately charged with being allegedly responsible, a person by the name of Charles Dausabea, was actually appointed Police Minister after he was charged and shortly after the formation of the Sogovare government.
So, working in what I call imperfectly governed democracies, creates its own sets of challenges.
That also means for us as an organisation, it does present unique set of challenges and nothing we do in the AFP is achieved without the co-operation and collaboration we have particularly in Australia with our state and territory counterparts. What results, however, are challenges in workforce planning. How many police do you suddenly need in the Solomon Islands and East Timor and, without assistance from State and territory police, we couldn’t be there in the critical mass numbers that we need to be.
But is also means when in Papua New Guinea with 200 police and a successful Constitutional challenge to your presence there, as in the Winge challenge, suddenly we have 200 police back in Australia. The whole dynamic of all we are trying to do here is something we’ve never had to grapple with before.
But, as frustrating as some of this may be, it is important we remember the role and function for which we are deployed in these countries and it is about stability. It’s about creating an environment which will then provide opportunities for investment, economic growth, provide opportunities for employment and most importantly provide opportunities for future generations of those countries and that’s what we are trying to do.
Workforce impacts
Recruitment is one of the major challenges confronting many policing agencies today.
In just the past week, both the AFP and SAPol have featured in the news in relation to recruitment issues because one of the things not apparent, is that policing skills are much sought after, not only in Australia, but is a situation unique to the world at this point in time.
The UN is trying to recruit 7,500 police to maintain its operations throughout the world and we know most UN police are deployed in the Middle East. In fact we have Australian Federal Police in Jordan training the Iraqi police. We have our police over in the Sudan working with the UN and many would be aware we have our police working in the immediate area; in Timor-Leste you would have seen violence has again erupted over the past 24 hours,.
Policing skills are now much sought after and while we have about 5700 police at present, we expect to grow to 6000 by the end of next year. It also means we are looking for the same resources everyone else is too.
One initiative that must be applauded has been taken in South Australia, and that is recruiting from the UK. Policing is a skill that can be acquired in many jurisdictions with different experiences, and diversity in our own community means diversity in our police force and opportunities for people to come to our police forces from many parts of the world provides unique opportunities for us to represent our community in a better way than otherwise we might have done.
In September this year, the Prime Minister announced that $500m be allocated to an extra 1200 personnel to the International Deployment Group. However, we need to be careful not to rob Peter to pay Paul and take police from one part of the community in Australia and move them to other areas, so we are trying to work through that at the same time. However, in saying that, the police in offshore communities gain experiences not possible here.
What we’re trying to do is change the mindset of how security is actually achieved and the UN is also working through this. It’s about creating a secure environment; for example, in the Solomon Islands in those first couple of years of RAMSI, nearly 4000 weapons were seized off the streets and almost 7000 arrests were made.
But, most importantly, it was the community themselves who said ‘We’re now better off because of the intervention” and that, obviously, has to be our objective. We are not there because of us – we are there to do something for them, a fact often lost in political rhetoric we hear from time to time by people who are motivated by other things.
It’s not a one way street as those police who go away and serve in these missions come back and provide services to own community in Australia, much better for the experience and much richer for knowing they’ve worked in an environment where they’ve had to use their ingenuity and help the community…….so it’s always good to bring that experience home and use it here.
Aviation Policing
One area of significant growth over the past couple of years is in aviation policing. We’ve moved towards creating an airport uniformed capability at every airport in Australia and we’re moving to joint investigation teams. The idea behind this is that security at airports across Australia will be uniformly applied; people can travel across Australia and will see the same uniform and the same practices in place. It will take us some time to put it all together but we will get there.
More than six million passengers come through the Adelaide airport each year. More than the entire population of Australia travels through the airports of Australia every year.
What we need to understand is that aviation is critical to the infrastructure to Australia. We tend to move too quickly from one subject to another because of the volume of information we are given
every day. It seems trite to say but important, that had the attacks planned for Heathrow been successful, if a number of planes were simultaneously taken out of the skies and crashed down onto highly populated cities in the US, we wouldn’t be sitting around this room today talking about anything else but the problems facing the aviation industry. So security in the aviation industry is critical - it is critical to Australia because we rely so heavily upon it.
That’s why we’ve joined in partnerships with agencies and companies like Qantas and Virgin to work through some of the issues and to work with airport operators and airline companies to make sure we have a seamless approach to security while, at the same time, enabling people - the travelling public, to get on with their lives and their business.
And to that extent, security is a collaborative effort. One of the things we are working on together, and the Minister would be aware of this through the Australasian Police Ministers’ Council, is to try and standardise those principles and practices in place for private security in our country. Many who have travelled the country from one place to another would know the varying experiences and skill levels in the private security industry are quite discernible, and we need to move to a structure that enables us to apply those skills and abilities in a more uniform way.
To achieve that, one of the things we’re looking at emulating are some of the successful overseas models. In the UK there is the Griffin model where the police use the services of private security agencies to bolster their numbers for specific purposes. If a crisis occurs, these people can be allocated certain duties to assist police thus utilising avaiilable skills in the most appropriate ways. That project is largely focused on a section of the business centre of London which produces 8% of GDP each year. There are 2000 people listed out of the private security agencies to work with the police in situations such as the underground bombings last year. It works quite well and we need to reach a model which works just as effectively in our country of which the airports are very much part of.
Other Partners
We are engaging academic organisations to have an objective appraisal of some of the work we have done. Nearly two years ago, I asked Flinders University and University of Queensland to join together to do a study on the work we are doing offshore in places like the Solomon Islands - to measure the difference our work has made to the community.
I believe the more we look at our work from an academic and objective perspective, it will enable us to empirically and confidently say to government, ‘This is what we are doing, this is why we are doing it and this is why we want to go down the path of more strategic plans and more strategic issues”.
Even though this project is a three year longitudinal study it has already thrown up issues about our planning and training at our International Deployment Group in Canberra before we send people off-shore and has required us to inculcate different cultural aspects to our work. Examples include increasing the number of pidgin speakers, the need to increase our understanding of specific work systems, and other things highlighted in the first 12 months of the study which were incorporated very quickly into our training program.
The other area of collaboration is the Business Government Advisory Group. This is a group of CEO’s of most of the major corporations in the country representing the financial, primary industry (particularly minerals) transport and tourism sectors, to try and work together through what is the new security environment. The goal is to create a trusted information sharing network where ASIO will communicate the latest threats and intelligence to these private enterprise establishments that can be provided through open source channels. I think this is a way of the future.
Another way of the future is the Australian High Tech Crime Centre, established four years ago, where we have established a relationship with each of the major financial institutions. Ten years ago, banks would never have shared the information on how they planned to create e-commerce or internet banking techniques. Now, we work co-operatively. The board is chaired by your own South Australia Police Commissioner, Mal Hyde, who put it on the agenda five years ago for all the Australian Police Commissioners to look at.
The fact that police are working so closely with the private sector is the way of the future and something we probably wouldn’t have thought possible some ten years ago.
The other partnership I think is very important and, if you have seen today’s Australian newspaper, you would understand why…and that is with the Islamic Community.
If we are not careful, we risk raising a generation of Australians who have a bias against Islam. As I travel around the country and speak to different Islamic communities, you hear more and more stories of treatment of the Islamic community by members of our own wider community that really is substandard ….vilification….. and picking them out of the crowd because they dress or speak differently. If we do not get a handle on this now and teach the values that we were brought up with to the future generations, then we do risk a bigger problem in our own future than what we have had in the past.
I think while on this subject – when we talk about terrorism, we tend to talk about physical infrastructure in society and the damage that is caused to it – whether it be the economic damage of a plane being taken out of the sky or the economic damage of a train or buses or tall buildings being blown up.
There is also, in my view, an equally important piece of damage that is caused and that is the intellectual damage that is caused by the way these issues are presented to our own community.
If we are not careful, the way we treat the issues of security and terrorism can in fact incite others to become involved.
One of the less focussed issues about the bombings in London last year, are the attempted bombings on the 21st of July. The bombings on the 7th of July are quite well known to all of us… in fact we would recall there was an Australian woman who was on the double decker bus when it was blown up.
But that bus was blown up almost by accident – that bomber had intended to go on the tube but the tube was blocked for maintenance so the bomber had to divert his activities to another route and he had to get on the bus. He decided when the bus was held up because of the other bombings having been detonated, that he would detonate his bomb on the bus. That is all factual.
The difficulty for me is that the 21st of July bombings attempted to do exactly the same thing – three trains and one bus. Which means those people who attempted to detonate those bombs emulated what happened on the 7th of July - which means that they, for whatever reason, embraced the idea, embraced the notion and tried to do a copy-cat offence.
The worry there is that whatever we do in the treatment of terrorism, in the treatment of people’s rights, in the treatment of people as human beings, we cannot do anything that might encourage or inspire others to take on the cause. I do think the media has a very big responsibility here in helping us not to damage the intellectual infrastructure in our community.
Front page stories like threats against the Australian cricket team were really carryovers of a story that had questionable background from the United Kingdom. It was the story of a friend of a friend of a friend of an alleged bomber that made the front pages and drove our media here for more than 24 hours. It is important to understand that the object of terrorism is to ‘kill one and frighten ten thousand’.
If we carry the story and we don’t understand it, or if we carry a story which is false, the objective of the terrorist has been achieved by creating fear in the community - so we have to be responsible for what we do.
From the policing side, maybe we have to move into new arrangements with the media, but I have to say it is very difficult because of the competitive nature of the media today. It is more competitive than it has ever been and you have seen recent changes to media ownership structure in the past few days.
We have to plead for some better co-operation regarding the issues that are written about. There are always two sides of every story, there is always something that will grab the news – but I think one of the things that really does need to be addressed is, are the headlines now creating the opportunity or the motivation for other people to embrace these ideas?
Because, while ever we have any inequality in our communities there will always be people in our community who feel marginalised or disenfranchised. We don’t want to provide them with more reasons to feel further marginalised or further disenfranchised to the point where they will take their own life in order to kill many others.
So, in conclusion, the emerging issues that are concerning us, and many other people, include pressures on marginal, susceptible economies that will fuel instability in our region; changing trends in demographics; the environment and health – such as access to proper water – will lead to substantial shifts in government priorities and resource allocations, in countries in our region, and there will be subsequent implications for law and order.
Conflicts driven by religious, ethnic, economic and political disputes are likely to continue; and trans-national crime will be facilitated by rapid and largely unrestricted flows of information, capital, ideas, goods, services and people across borders.
The trick and the key to establishing security for us now and into the future will be to stop and understand it, learn from what we have done in the past, be honest with ourselves and work together in order to overcome it.
Thank you.