Page 1046 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 20 March 1991
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The Bill allows for the Minister to declare and notify prescribed places. This definition ensures that the Minister is satisfied, before he acts, that the place is equipped with facilities suitable for the care and detention of intoxicated persons. The Bill, of course, provides that a police station may be declared as a prescribed place and allows for ministerial appointment of authorised persons.
Clause 6 gives guidelines for police officers or authorised persons to judge the behaviour of intoxicated persons. It also allows discretion for an authorised person or police officer to take the detainee to another prescribed place if there is insufficient space, or if the detainee's behaviour warrants his or her removal, or if the interests of the detainee would be better served by being taken to another place. So it allows wide discretion in that respect.
Clause 6 also provides for detainees to be held until they cease to be intoxicated or for eight hours, whichever occurs first. Clause 7 ensures that intoxicated persons will not be detained under clause 6 if their behaviour constitutes an offence under law. So it is not meant that people who are intoxicated would get off with other crime as a consequence of their intoxication.
Clause 8 ensures that detention in a police station is a last resort. That really is one of the prime aims of the legislation - to move people to other places where they might be treated differently from criminals who find their way into the cells in the normal course of police work. Of course, this reinforces exemptions under clause 6; namely, that, while temporary detention at a police station is acceptable to determine whether another prescribed place is available, it is unacceptable unless there is no other place available or it is impracticable to take the detainee home, which, of course, relieves the Territory of the responsibility of care - there are significant benefits in that, I suggest - or the behaviour of the detainee is such as to warrant not taking him or her to another prescribed place.
Clause 9 allows for reasonable restraint to protect the detainee and other persons from injury or damage to property. Clause 10 allows for a search and for police or an authorised person to take the person's belongings, with a provision to ensure that they are returned on the detainee's release. There was some comment that perhaps there ought to be penalties for authorised persons or police officers who do not comply with the provisions of clause 10, but it is held that these administrative arrangements would be better looked after by the management arrangements within establishments, whether in the police force or in the prescribed place; that is to say, if somebody does not comply, then it becomes a disciplinary measure for management to deal with.
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