Page 1265 - Week 04 - Thursday, 8 May 2014
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
Perhaps most important is that a committee will give the opportunity to the Canberra community to provide its opinion on what the right balance should be. What is the acceptable balance of law enforcement and risk to safety that Canberrans think is appropriate? In the end, the police force are there to serve the community, both to protect them from crime and also to protect them from the risk of death or injury that could result from enforcing the criminal law. A committee is a good way to let the community have its say, and I commend the referral to the Assembly.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for Police and Emergency Services, Minister for Workplace Safety and Industrial Relations and Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development) (10.27): The government will not be supporting this motion today. Police pursuits constitute an important public safety issue as well as a law enforcement issue. There is no doubt that there needs to be an appropriate balance between the community interest in maintaining law and order and apprehending offenders while at the same time ensuring that people in the community are safe. Mr Rattenbury’s motion is, regrettably, a further attempt to revisit previous discussions on police disputes in this place.
I want to start first and foremost by rebutting the accusation that there has been no review of police pursuit policy here in the ACT. In fact there have been repeated reviews, and I will draw members’ attention to this in the course of my comments.
As I publicly stated in April 2012, the government supports police being able to determine when they need to pursue. Police are the people at the coalface. They are dealing with particular operational requirements when they make decisions about whether to engage in a police pursuit. The community and the government are well aware of the impact on innocent people when police pursuits end in a fatality, which is why ACT Policing applies comprehensive guidelines on urgent duty driving and pursuits. Police in the ACT do not pursue as a matter of course. They make an assessment as to the nature of the incident they are attempting to address and the safety of the broader public.
In March 2013 the Australian Institute of Criminology released the report Motor vehicle pursuit-related fatalities in Australia, 2000-11. This paper provided the results of research into motor vehicle pursuits, and the deaths that can result, in order to form an evidence base on which to better understand and respond to this issue. It looked at the number of motor vehicle pursuit deaths Australia wide that occurred between 2000 and 2011, the characteristics of people who died in a police pursuit, the characteristics of pursuits that resulted in the fatality, and the number of police pursuits each year and the death rates from police pursuits.
Between January 2000 and December 2011, across Australia there were 186 fatal pursuit-related vehicle crashes, resulting in 219 deaths. This is an average of 17 crashes and 20 deaths per year. When compared to the number of pursuits that occur each year, less than one per cent of pursuits are fatal.
The report found that innocent people comprised 37 per cent of deaths, or 81 deaths, in the study period, of which 17 per cent, or 37 deaths, were of passengers in the
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video