Plus, how domestic violence is destroying our police force – author Pettina Arndt   

Some months ago, Australia’s most senior judge, Chief Justice Stephen Gageler, warned of a global diminution of trust in institutions, including our courts, which he said were portrayed as “partisan, political institutions.”

Speaking at a West Australian legal event, he advised the judiciary to “stick to their knitting, and only do law, and to do it in a very distinct way according to orthodox legal method.”

There’s another critical part of our judicial system where members would love to stick to their knitting, and that’s our Police Force. Our law enforcement agencies are in trouble, losing increasing numbers of officers and struggling with recruitment, as police officers across the country complain about frustration and burnout.

The force has been hijacked. Police now find themselves working for a partisan political institution devoted to feminist ideology and involved in policing that largely has nothing to do with keeping people safe. Rather, this vital institution promotes an agenda that labels marital acrimony as domestic violence and enlists the force in the ongoing war on men.

Most police want only to return to their knitting. They want to fight crime. But police authorities are catering to the whims of politicians and the media, who are determined to keep police on the front line of their gender wars.

“The system is broken. Police face an impossible situation. Officers are caught between political pressure, risk-averse policy, and media narratives that punish them no matter which way they respond. It is no wonder so many leave the job.”

The speaker knows all about these pressures. He’s a former Detective Senior Constable who spent 15 years with the Victorian police trying to walk this tightrope. Ironically, his initial troubles stemmed from a period where he was under severe stress because the unit where he was working was totally gutted, as staff were moved to newly created domestic violence teams. The strain of doing his job in the understaffed unit had such an impact on his mental health that he burnt out and required a period of leave to recover. All this ultimately led to the disintegration of his marriage.

He then found himself on the receiving end of precisely the type of allegation he’d been policing for so many years. His wife enlisted the help of some former colleagues to lodge false violence allegations, which ended up not only driving him out of his job but also out of the state, as she set up breaches of her protective violence order, which could result in him being sent to prison.

I’ve made a podcast with this former cop – I’ve called him “Adrian”. We also included an ex-police officer from NSW who has an equally horrendous story of fighting false allegations. These two men represent the dozens of police officers who have contacted me over the years who have been wrongly accused, including some still in the force and too nervous to be interviewed.

Compelling stories told by the true victims at  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR0BhvXtszY&t=5s

Here are the ultimate witnesses to a system on its knees. They have first-hand experience of the immense damage being caused to our justice system by incentivising false, unchallenged allegations which provide women – and it is almost always women – with unparalleled power to drive a former partner out of their lives and those of their children.

These former police officers’ discussions with me show how false allegations are tearing apart the social fabric of Australia and undermining the credibility and professionalism of our police services.

All this passes unnoticed in our culture with its feminist-controlled media, blinkered politicians and people in power all determined to pretend it isn’t happening. It is disgraceful that our media and politicians rant about the struggle police are having in controlling violent house invasions and adolescent gangs in Victoria and Queensland, without a word about the dangerous diversion of resources to policing false and trivial domestic violence matters. What a farce.

So, what do these falsely accused officers reveal about our troubled police forces?

One striking moment in our conversation was Adrian speaking with great enthusiasm about an earlier point in his career where he was required to attend extra training in a domestic violence risk assessment system being implemented in the Victorian police force. He was so hopeful that this new system would allow police to do proper evaluations of violence allegations to determine the truth. But instead, he found himself caught up in the current tick-a-box system, which totally ignores an alleged perpetrator’s side of the story.

The ultimate irony was that when some of his colleagues helped his wife embellish allegations she was making against him, they drew on examples taken from their domestic violence training manual to create truly horrendous accusations about his behaviour.

The other ex-cop who was part of our discussion – I called him “Liam” – also had harrowing tales of a wife who made various historic assault accusations against him. When police were called, the investigating officer initially told him that he’d determined the allegations were false and that he would have them withdrawn. But when this officer returned to his police station, he was overruled by senior officers who said that because Liam was a former police officer, he had to be held to a higher standard. He was charged with four counts of domestic violence assault dating back 8 years.

Eventually, the matter was heard in court, and the allegations were dismissed by a very experienced magistrate who was scathing about the charges, saying that they were clearly designed to gain advantage in a family law matter and should never have ended up in court. They were dismissed due to insufficient evidence, with costs made against the police force.

The very next day, Liam’s ex-wife went back to the same police station and made new allegations, which led to another protective order. That too was ultimately dismissed, but only after the violence order had influenced family court proceedings, denying him contact with his children. Liam is currently involved in a malicious prosecution case against the NSW police. (He’s part of an organisation called Kilo4Delta, which has ambitious plans for change, including a malicious prosecution class action.)

Both men are aware of many other cases of officers who have been similarly falsely accused. I’ve been talking to another NSW officer still in the force, who was married to a very violent woman who regularly threatened to destroy his career with rape and violence allegations and to make sure he never saw his son again. Once, he ended up having stitches in the hospital after she threw a wine glass at him.

When they eventually split up, it turned out she had been reporting to domestic violence services that he had been physically and sexually abusive during their marriage. She made a report to police claiming he had threatened her with his work firearm, but he was luckily able to disprove this with video recordings from his phone and home security.

Since he was able to document her years of violence, threats and false allegations, there was such overwhelming evidence against her that she was eventually charged and convicted of a string of offences, and he ended up with custody of his son (after paying crippling legal fees using his inheritance.)

But his case is unusual. As Liam and Adrian explain, most police officers lose their careers after false allegations, with management keen to be seen as tough on rogue members.

Of course, our media loves stories of police officers as wife abusers. Just look at this breathless report from The Guardian, gloating that an investigation had revealed “11 NSW officers had been investigated for domestic violence, in some cases more than once!” Never any suggestion that any of these allegations could have been false.

Yet on the rare occasions police dare speak out about the issue, the truth sometimes emerges. “We receive multiple false claims per year against our officers, which halts their careers and requires significant resources for defence,” said Queensland lawyer Calvin Gnech, speaking at a Senate Inquiry into domestic violence. Gnech had been doing work for the Queensland Police Union for over a decade.

Recently, there has been some welcome resistance emerging in police management, with some prepared to point out that the current swamping of proper police work is unsustainable.

Domestic violence case management is not “core business” of police, declared Queensland’s Acting Commissioner Shane Chelepy at a press conference last July, announcing the findings of a 100 Day review into police operations and structure. He warned that DV is contributing to “significant mission creep” as police are forced to take on roles for which they are untrained. Besides, he added bravely, “Most Queenslanders would expect the police service to be the frontline response to violent crime.” This is a very welcome acknowledgement that policing domestic violence rarely has anything to do with genuine violent crime.

Last year an article “Law Enforcement and Public Health” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice compared policing in Australia to Canada and the UK, and noted Australia’s framing of domestic violence as a “wicked problem” which requires comprehensive police-led interventions, leading to heavier police reliance for holistic support and diverting time from acute enforcement to non-priority tasks like counselling. The other countries use more integrated interagency models (e.g., co-responder teams with health professionals), which mitigate police strain.

The evidence of a police force in trouble is overwhelming:

• Across Australia, there are more than 4,500 vacancies for police officers.
• Queensland faces its worst officer exodus in five years, leaving nearly 1400 positions unfilled across the state.
• Police Federation of Australia CEO Scott Weber said the shortage was ‘the worst I’ve ever seen in my 30 years of policing’.
• The Queensland Police Union president, Shane Prior, confirmed that DV workload is “directly correlated” to officers leaving the force.
• A study of 492,393 DV events in NSW Police reports found that emotional or/verbal abuse was the most commonly recorded abuse type (33.46% of events).
• Each DV incident takes frontline officers between 4 and 6 hours to resolve.
• A study of Australian frontline officers showed DV-specific stress as a likely contributor to burnout.
• It is mainly mid-career, experienced males who are leaving the force, to be replaced by young women.

Recently, The Guardian did a major promotion of a two-year investigation into police domestic violence enforcement failures, claiming the force isn’t doing enough to protect women in trouble.

It’s certainly true that police sometimes under-respond to genuine domestic violence, responds Adrian. But he points out such media stories completely ignore the other side of the story – the over-response to allegations that are false, exaggerated or simply normal family dynamics reframed as abuse.

That over-response is inevitable in a policing culture shaped by pressure, politics and ideology. It’s crippling our police force and diverting help from those who need it most.

Campaigns by feminist groups, often bordering on the hysterical, ensure that the captured media and many politicians put unwarranted pressure on our senior police to devote increasing resources to domestic violence. This is having a very unhealthy effect on the independence of our police, who feel pressured to devote scarce resources to an exaggerated problem, rather than prioritising those resources as they see fit.

We need our police forces to prioritise the most serious crimes. Domestic violence allegations, which are often based on trivial behaviour or are fabricated, are NOT our most serious criminal threat.

We must demand an end to this ideological crusade and a return to proper policing.