The Canberra Times Business Series
From Protecting the Capital to Combating Terrorism: Today’s AFP
National Museum of Australia, Canberra
Speech from AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty APM
Wednesday 1 August 2007, 12.30pm to 2.00pm
(Check against delivery)
I acknowledge at the outset that I am providing this speech today on the land of the Ngunnawal people and acknowledge their elders, past and present and their connection to the land.
Thank you very much for the invitation to join you here. I think it is important that, in the position that I hold that, because I do so many things nationally and internationally, that I always come and do the things that are at home, because there is no more important place than home. And, of course, this is where I and my family live, so policing is very important to me here. But can I acknowledge The Canberra Times and the Australian Institute of Company Directors? Thank you for the invitation to be here.
As a passing comment, I note that every member of my executive team, including myself, undertakes the Australian Institute of Company Directors course and, for those of you who haven't done it, I can recommend it. It is a great course in terms of corporate governance, but it's also a great course to improve your learning of business, particularly for us in the policing environment. It was excellent and we continue to use that. As people get promoted into the executive brief they come and do the course.
I want to talk to you today about two matters. One is community policing that we're doing here in Canberra – how we're doing it and what we're doing – and also some aspects of the international and national work of the organisation. And I have to say that I was not expecting the recent events to be a bit of a lead-in to today's speech, but it does highlight the focus on the organisation and the work of the organisation.
One of the things that is very important to me with our organisation is that the community trusts us. If you understand the principles of policing, one of the most important principles is that we have trust between ourselves and the community. Without that trust, the work of the police dissipates very quickly. We are very fortunate in this country that by and large our police forces are highly regarded. The overseas experience in some countries is not exactly the same.
By and large, our communities are law abiding, but it is still important that we have that relationship with the community where trust is one of the most important values. When things like the events of the past couple of weeks occur, one of the reasons why you seem me in the media correcting misrepresentations or false reporting is because if I see that it is going to breakdown the trust the community has in the organisation then, to me, that is a critical issue for the organisation. It is something that we have to risk-manage but, at the same time, it is important that we don’t lose the sponsorship and support of our community.
The work that we have been doing here in Canberra in the past two years has been quite interesting. As you know, we lost our Chief Police Officer Audrey Fagan a couple of months ago, but Audrey started off what we call the Suburban Policing Strategy, and for those of us who are residents of Canberra, it is actually producing some very significant results. What we have done is provided the city into five policing zones, but subdivided those five policing zones into 22 smaller zones. What we are trying to do is increase the presence of police and also try and engage with the community in a much more proactive way.
The object of policing is crime prevention, and I will talk to you about crime prevention a little bit later on when I talk about terrorism, but the idea of policing is to prevent crime. If you are successful at that, then the corollary is that the more successful you are at preventing crime, perhaps the less police you need in your community.
While that sounds like a conundrum in one sense, it is actually true. The better you are at the job you do and at preventing crimes from occurring, then the less police you need and the less order that you need to provide to the community. So our aim has to always be to prevent crime before it happens. So our Suburban Policing Strategy has been aimed at trying to engage the community in a much more proactive way and try and give people in the police organisation, here in ACT Policing, specific responsibilities dealing with certain schools, whether they be high schools or primary schools, to engage in community level meetings, to re-promote the Neighbourhood Watch initiatives and to also reintroduce the Safety House concept for young children to be able to go to. We have had the strategy in place since November last year when Audrey launched it and Andy Hughes has continued the strategy as the interim Chief Police Officer.
We have done some examination of the strategy after its implementation and we are very happy with the results that we are getting. We do survey the community to get the community’s feedback on what we are doing. I will just outline a few of the statistics, something that I could do at a lunchtime meeting rather than a dinner meeting, and if you think I am being a bit stiff and formal, we did not expect quite as much media attention today. I thought I was doing an exclusive for The Canberra Times! For the people of Canberra we have had more police on the streets and a much more visible presence. You would have seen a couple of weeks ago I launched the new police vehicles. A few of the statistics: since we started the new strategy on 15 November last year to 30 April this year, there were 2,076 beat patrols. That compares with only 283 the previous year. We have gone from 1,521 targeted patrols to now, in that six month period, having 6,994 targeted patrols. This does not include response work. This is about engaging the community before crime occurs.
It is actually having an impact on the crime statistics. The financial year statistics for 2006/2007 demonstrate that burglaries have dropped by 11 per cent and total offences against property crime have declined by 5 per cent. Robbery offences are down by 2 per cent and, most importantly, the one that we were trying to get the community to work with us on, and the business community, motor vehicle theft has dropped by 6 per cent. That is the recordings for 2006/2006 financial year. Obviously what we are hoping is that the Suburban Policing Strategy will improve those statistics as we move on.
They are the recorded crimes. The clear up rates have also improved markedly. The clear up rates with burglary rose by 34 per cent. The clear up rates for offences against property rose by 28 per cent and property damage clear up rates rose by 35 per cent. So, something is working that obviously wasn’t working before. Yes, we have got additional resources in ACT Policing.
I was just explaining at the table, we are going through a phenomenal level of interest in the AFP. It is something that I am proud to boast about when I talk to my commissioner colleagues from around the country. We have, as I speak to you today, we have 3,160 people trying to come into the AFP, competing for something in the order of about 700 jobs that will fill between now and the end of next year. That is an extraordinary level of interest. We also have one of the lowest attrition rates of any police force in the country and, again, my belief is that that is for a number of reasons.
One, obviously, is the nature of the work we do, but here in Canberra what we have done is we’ve gone out and campaigned deliberately to try and recruit local people to join the police. We have got two classes in the college at the moment and I think 95 per cent of those two classes are Canberra locals, which to me is a fantastic development, because when I became Commissioner in 2001, one of the biggest problems we had, was people were joining ACT Policing from Sydney and Melbourne and Perth and the first thing they want to do is just get back to where they came from, get back to their family environment. So we have reduced that significantly and, I think, the long term strategic policing for Canberra will be we’ll have more local people doing the work locally. That is what you need. You need people who are going to be in policing to live and work in the community that they are serving so that they better understand the community, better understand the threats to the community, but also better understand the anxieties that are created in the community by, you know, the policing response or the lack of it.
I will just turn to the international situation. We have had a deliberate strategy. Stuart mentioned in the opening that we have got 80 officers working overseas as liaison officers in 27 different countries. It has been a very deliberate strategy, going back to my concept of crime prevention, to try and attack crime at its source. It has had an unbelievable dividend for us. We deliberately focused on heroin-producing countries back in the early part of this decade and we put more resources into Thailand, into Burma. We were the first western police agency into Beijing in China. We have now opened up our third office in China in Guangzhou and we are negotiating with the Chinese for a fusion centre that we want to open up in the south-western provinces of China.
But it really had a big dent in terms of supplier reduction for heroin, which is produced in that Golden Triangle region of Asia, and it had a significant impact on heroin overdose in this country, along with a lot of other things; along with the development of treatment centres, along with our better understanding of the market, a better understanding of how to deal with heroin in a different way. We also had commensurate with that problem HIV Aids, which hasn't gone away as a problem, particularly in our region, and we ought not forget that. But we were able to ameliorate some of the things that were happening with the large supplies of heroin that were coming to our country.
The biggest threat in terms of drug activity obviously is amphetamines, but don’t fall for the three card trick. It is not all about ice. It is just as much about ecstasy. One of the reasons why ecstasy is such a problem for us is that we pay such a high price for it here in Australia, compared to what they pay for it in Europe, and so the drug syndicates are very much prepared to bring it to our shores because of the high price we pay compared to what is paid overseas.
But we have had some significant international results in that area of work. The arrest of Tony Mokbel in Greece was a very good display of being able to work in a country where we did not have a liaison office. We covered that from Belgrade.
In the last couple of months you probably would have seen us - this was related to the plane crash at Yogyakarta - we have been working very closely with the Indonesian National Police for some years now, since the first Bali bombing, which is five years ago in October this year, but we were able to arrest Abu Dujana. That was a significant arrest for us and for the Indonesian National Police, because he was in charge of the military wing of Jemaah Islamiyah. We believe he was responsible for part of the planning for the 2002 Bali Bombings, but certainly was a key figure in the bombing of our Australian Embassy in Jakarta in 2004. Also arrested was a person who you probably have never heard of, Zarkasih, and he is who we believe to be the temporary emir of Jemaah Islamiyah. So the Indonesian National Police have him in custody now and we are hoping that the inroads that have been made by the Indonesians in the arrest of some 200 members of the Jemaah Islamiyah’s terrorist group since the first Bali bombing is a significant inroad and perhaps one of the most significant in the world in terms of dealing with a terrorist group.
We also have a large number of, as Stuart said, police offshore working in places like East Timor and the Solomon Islands. We are building the International Deployment Group, as we call it, to a force of 1,200 by this time next year. At the moment we have about 600 police placed offshore in those missions and they have been working in, as Stuart mentioned, Cyprus. They have been there since 1964, but they’re also, as I said, in East Timor, in the Solomon Islands. In the Sudan we’ve been doing work. We’re about to deploy to Afghanistan. So there is a significant feature about that work that is different to, I guess, the opportunities in other police forces, which goes back to the attraction of the organisation.
But all of that work too, is focused on ultimately, our own security here. If we build up and develop up the capability of the police forces in the surrounding region, we make it better for them to be able to deal with the problems that they have to deal with and it has a dividend for us here. I don’t know that we actually see that dividend in perhaps the way that we should do.
We don’t just do these missions and deploy and think we’re doing a good job. We actually engaged Flinders University – we engaged a lot of universities, University of Canberra, ANU, we engaged Queensland University – to actually do empirical studies on the work that we do so that it is not me going to the government and saying, “We’re doing a good job here”. It’s an objective, academic examination of the work we’re doing and the impact that it has. I think that’s important. It’s important for me to be able to give confidence back to the community about the work we do, and very important for me to able to justify the investment that government has put into the organisation. As Stuart mentioned, the budget has quadrupled really in the time that I’ve been Commissioner. That’s taxpayers’ money and taxpayers need to know what we’re doing with that money and that we are producing results.
Let us talk about some of the future crimes. I gave a speech in The Hague earlier this year about climate change and crime which I would love to expand upon, but I think for the media here I wouldn’t want to be misquoted saying “The Commissioner thinks there’s going to be big crime associated with climate change”. If I talk about generalities though, if there are large movements of people, if people are displaced and need to go to other places where the land mass is much easier for them – and I am talking about tiny Pacific Islands that will potentially suffer in, I'm talking about 30 to 50 years' time – obviously that displacement is going to have an impact on populations. It will potentially add tension to existing ethnic tensions that might be there. Diasporas potentially would be created where people, displaced people will need to go. We need to turn our minds to that from a policing perspective and I won’t speak out of my discipline in front of the media, but there are obviously other social aspects about that as well.
The internet has created a whole new challenge for us. We have the Australian High Tech Crime Centre based here in Canberra, which was our first foray into going into partnership with the private sector. We have a large representation of the private sector in the High Tech Crime Centre because we didn’t know the business of banking on the internet. We needed to bring that expertise into us and we had a longstanding – in fact, the National Australia Bank has been perhaps our longest-standing contributor to the Australian High Tech Crime Centre. But it is important because the impact on business of a cyber attack is just absolutely catastrophic.
There are significant challenges right around the world in terms of cyber crime. We had a case in the US where 45.7 million identities were stolen from a retailer that actually vacuumed all of their credit and debit card customers’ details and then distributed it or on-sold it or used it for identity theft later on. People talk about Second Life. You have got to be careful what audience you have when you talk about Second Life. I was in a part of the world where they thought I was talking about Christianity, but the online virtual world Second Life 10 months ago had something in the order of 300,000 residents. Today there are in excess of seven million residents on Second Life. People are taking on identities as avatars. It runs its own currency. It actually transacts $US1.7 million every day on Second Life. Second Life is only one example of a virtual world that has been created. It does pose its challenges to us.
I know people are very interested in what we’re doing with terrorism and what we’re doing with, you know, listening devices and telephone intercepts and search warrant powers, but all of that will be challenging in the virtual world, because the anonymity and the ability to transcend jurisdictional or geographical boundaries is just phenomenal. We have seen the embracement of technology by organised crime in transnational crime syndicates in a way we have never seen it before. People sort of skim over some of the things that we’re actually witnessing now. We skimmed over the thwarted attacks at Heathrow. I don’t think we actually understand the economic impact of seven or nine 747s coming out of the skies simultaneously over populated cities of the United States. Lockerbie took seven years to investigate the crime scene and put it back together. It is something that just came and went and, if you remember SARS, I remember SARS, we were talking before about Singapore, I remember going through Singapore when SARS happened and to see all the idle aircraft sitting on the tarmac was frightening. It just shut down the aviation industry.
What we had with the thwarted attacks at Heathrow was a new type of approach by potential terrorists to bring these planes out of sky using liquids rather than metal. What did we do after September 11? We shored up all of our aviation industry with metal detectors. What did the alleged terrorists do? They moved from metals to liquids. That is the environment we are in. We need to actually understand that. There is a significant change that has now happened to the way we do policing and it comes back to that crime prevention. When you’ve got a crime scene and when you’ve got a crime that’s happened, you can deal with the crime scene. You can deal with the evidence and the forensic examination of the scene that is in front of you, relate that back in history to events that occurred that led up to that crime being committed, but what you expect from me is in this terrorism environment is to stop these things before they happen. You don’t want a bomb going off in this country. To actually stop that from happening we’ve actually had to think about how you’d do that.
If you said to me, “Commissioner, what will it take to stop Canberra from having any armed robberies in the next 12 months or this financial year?” Think about it. If I stood here and told you there will not be one armed robbery in Canberra for the next 12 months you’d say, “Mick you’re having a lend of yourself” and I would be having a lend of myself. I can’t guarantee that. But what you’re asking me now to do is to stop a terrorist attack from happening in this country. It’s a huge challenge and what it means for us is changing the notion of how we do the work we do; using intelligence as evidence, trying to decipher information and work out what’s information, what’s intelligence. It’s an enormous challenge. The expectations of the policing organisation are enormous and that is why we’ve had to change the focus of how we do our work back to the basics of crime prevention, but we’ve also needed the laws to be able to deal with this.
The courts need to change their attitudes as well. Once upon a time when you’ve got the murder weapon, and the victim and the witnesses who say they saw the weapon being fired and a ballistics examination saying that is the weapon, that is the smoking gun, as you’d say. What the courts are going to have to deal with now is a very, what I call, an inchoate crime, a very embryonic stage of a crime being committed, and that is going to be a challenge for all of us.
We haven’t worked that one out yet, as you can see from the Press over the last couple of weeks, but we’ve got to get there and we’ve got to get there together, because it is our community and our quality of life that we’re trying to protect.
Thank you very much.
(Ends)