By Ivan Ray CEO/Secretary, CAA Inc

An interesting statistic jumped out from the reading of electoral material trying to project the likely outcome of the next State election: 48% of Victorians surveyed felt that Youth Crime and Bail Laws were the number one issue affecting their voting intentions.

While I don’t think anyone will be surprised by this finding, thinking more deeply about why we have such a problem raises interesting questions.

The highly effective Police in Schools program, cancelled in 2006 by Chief Commissioner Nixon, has always been a puzzling decision, but even more so when six consecutive Chief Commissioners have also failed to reintroduce the program.

There are attempts to deliver a facsimile of the original program, but apart from not being independently evaluated, the impact and effectiveness of this in creating a special bond with children, therefore influencing their future behaviour and values, is questionable. Most police activity in schools seems sporadic and defeats the advantage of scheduled interactions children can rely on. One of those six Commissioners even declared his support for the program and announced it would be reintroduced, only for it to be quietly shelved again.

This clearly showed that this particular Chief faced internal pushback, stymying any progress in this area. Apparently, kids aren’t important enough.

This is particularly strange given the purpose of Policing is to reduce crime and violence in the community, so why shelve a proven program, particularly when the State faces horrendous youth crime figures that translate into a reality of fear for the community? The program was the only one of its type in Australia to undergo rigorous University evaluation, and while that evaluation was critical of the program’s management, interestingly, the program lives on very successfully in other states, and they all have lower per capita crime rates of youth offending.

That matrix cannot be ignored.

Why cancel a project when the management is the problem? Logic would suggest that replacing the management, not scuttling the whole successful program, would have been the sensible course. Since the cancellation of the program, there has been a steady and sometimes dramatic increase in juvenile crime over the last two decades, and this cannot be just a coincidence.

Recent discussions with another CAA member highlighted a difficulty that I was not aware of until now. Police working in schools sometimes found themselves ostracised by staff, particularly the Teachers’ Unio; not all schools but some.. The argument goes along the lines that the teachers are the only ones who do the teaching, not some other group; in this case, police. The threat of encroachment on the teachers’ perceived turf seemed to be rampant in the lead-up to the cancellation of the program and, in part, of the pushback against its reintroduction, rather than what we had assumed was pushback from within the Force. Chief Commissioners can be pressured by a compliant Government to accede to union demands.

Ironically, many teachers have voiced their support, telling us that in schools where the program operated, students were more respectful of them, of each other, better behaved in class and easier to teach. 

Those teachers also felt safer. The shocking reality is that the children’s and the community’s welfare to live with less crime is not even a consideration in the demise of this program; it is purely political, as is its failure to be reintroduced, supported by lame excuses.

Moreover, the Union, you would anticipate, would welcome the support of the police in the classroom to protect teachers and deal with problems beyond the remit of the schools- that is, beyond the school gate – allowing them to focus on teaching in a safe environment.

We also wondered why the Police Association was so silent on this issue, which would help reduce the workload and stress on its members; belatedly, we suspect we now know the answer: politics.

This suggests that the crime tsunami we are now experiencing is, in part, at least, caused by Union interference and lack of political will rather than reluctant Chief Commissioners.

We suspect this is not the only area that has been impacted by Union pressure on policing via the Government. In the mid to early 2000’s a seismic shift in Police training occurred, and it is difficult to understand how this improved the training outputs. Moreover, we are not aware of any research to determine the program’s success or failure, as members of the Teachers’ Union became the primary instructors at the Police Academy.

We have no doubt they are capable of teaching students the theory and principles of law, but having ‘never faced an angry man’ they would fail miserably at teaching recruits the ethos of policing and how the law should be applied, and, most importantly, how police power to exercise discretion should be exercised, the importance of discipline within the organisation, and how to survive in the real policing world, the most critical of all skills taught.

That can only be effectively delivered by those who have experienced first-hand the issues confronting police and cannot be metered out in some theoretical form that would have no hope of emulating real-world experience, and that experience lies with experienced street police officers who have served a substantial amount of time at the sharp end of policing.

The police law Instructor managing each recruit squad of Recruits must be an experienced member, not below the rank of Sergeant, with broad operational experience.

Perhaps this training change has had a serious adverse impact on police graduating from the academy and the spike in Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI) over the last decade. It certainly should be subject to investigation.

Without the imparting of real-life experiences in the field and how to resolve them, the graduates are ill-equipped to deal with the stresses of policing; hence the escalation of PTSI. They don’t know what they are in for.

It is not too much of a stretch to view these two areas together as they may indicate a systemic failure forced on policing to the detriment of the Teaching Staff and the school communities, and the case of the individual police members diagnosed with PTSI and the impact on their lives, careers, and families, when both areas could be substantially improved by a responsible government and Chief Commissioners who would stand up to outside adverse influences.

Not to be overlooked is the huge financial impost that failures in these two areas impose on the Government Budgets, and it may well be that these issues could be a useful exercise for the Auditor General to investigate.

There is an old adage and lessons to be learnt: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, applicable to both areas.

It is now time for the political parties endeavouring to contest the right to govern to come out and address this issue; at this stage, there is no alternative plan to the status quo, which leaves a huge void on the issue most likely to influence voters in 50 odd days.  

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Ivan Ray

Co-founder and Deputy Chair/CEO of the CAA, a former Police Inspector with 32 years of service in Metro Uniform, Traffic Metro and Highway Patrol, Crime Cars, and CIB. Former Editor of Police Life and long-serving Public Relations Officer of VicPol. Founder and Life Member of the Blue Light Disco movement, Life Member of the Blue Light Federation, and completed his Police career as an Inspector after 6 years as a Patrol Officer. He then ran his own Business for 20 years until retirement. Ivan co-founded the CAA with former Victorian Chief Commissioner Kel Glare, and built the CAA into an influential voice for Victorians.