We need more police. True or false?

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A graph says more than 1000 words.
 
2574 police stats2574 homicide stats
 
 
As related reading we suggest “Things are not always as they seem” by Kathleen Potts and Fiona Wade, of the Police Federation of Australia (PFA).
 
Sources: Police and population numbers are from the National Analysis of Police Numbers at 30 June 2017, from the PFA. The homicide numbers cover the two years from July 1, 2012 to June 30, 2014, and come from the Australian Government’s Institute of Criminology.
 
 

5 COMMENTS

  1. False. We do not need any more police just police who are going to work.
    Remember the issues in the NT are mostly Indigenous crimes. We need to control the Indigenous. Where are we going to get the funding for extra police when the NT is broke?

  2. I object to Fred the Philistine’s assertion that “the issues in the NT are mostly Indigenous crimes. We need to control the Indigenous.”
    Besides the overtones of blatant racism, his statement makes it appear that crime only occurs by Indigenous people against Indigenous people, and seeming makes crime in the NT to be only an Indigenous issue.
    His solution, namely controlling a group of people on the basis of their ethnicity, is somehow proposed as an acceptable approach to law and order in Australia. I firmly disagree with all of these points of view – this is a NT issue, not an Indigenous issue. If my neighbour is murdered by their partner, it affects me, my neighbourhood, and my community.
    Secondly, murder as a crime isn’t one that can be deterred in the same way that speeding and vandalism are deterred with increased police presence.
    I don’t have the statistics, and I would like to know them if there is public access to them, because I assume that alcohol and a history of domestic violence between the murderer and the victim are substantial contributing factors to our high rates of murder in the NT. Perhaps the police can make a difference by intervening in those factors.
    But there are much wider issues of social dysfunction that create environments of stress that increase harmful alcohol use and increase family violence: Issues like social inclusion, poverty, and racism are enormous issues that I would argue drive a lot of the crime rate in the NT, and increasing police numbers won’t do anything to impact those.

  3. Unfortunately Shannon, Fred may be correct.
    You can call it racism all you want, but what do the facts say? If you look at policing numbers based on the percentage of Indigenous population in smaller towns, it is disproportionately higher.
    You say that 67% of homicides were domestic vilonce, what percentage of those were Indigenous victims or perpetrators? Look at the daily court lists, look at incarceration rates, especially in our youth detention facilities.
    Identifying the issues is the first step towards solving them. While crime is not only an Indigenous issue, the stats, as sad as they are indicate that while not “only” an Indigenous problem, it seems to be the “primarily one”.
    Unfortunately by shooting the messenger, and labelling people who are prepared to state the obvious, nobody will be prepared to step up and start to tackle the issue. Is that not what we want, to reduce the amount of violence, murderss, incarceration?
    How good would it be if the amount of deaths caused to Aboriginal women by their partner equaled the number of deaths caused to non Indigenous women by their partner. That would equate to a hell of a lot more Indigenous women still alive today.
    It was found that there was a massive difference in employment between Indigenous and non Indigenous, therefore identified positions were created to fix that imbalance.
    It was found that rates of homelessness amongst Indigenous were higher than non Indigenous, so billions were allocated to try and rectify the problem. See the pattern?
    Unless we are prepared to identify the problem and be honest with ourselves, the problem will never be fixed. And looking at those stats, it is a massive problem.

  4. Local 1: Your last paragraph says it all.
    And Fred, Aboriginal people have constantly been subject to all sorts of social experiments and are still subjected to and you want more.
    Come up with realistic solutions mate, not racist rubbish all the time.
    The Aboriginal voice has been killed off by government policies and what we see is a result of hopelessness felt by Aboriginal people saddled with the rubbish CDP among other things, that causes more hardship than good, enforced by a pompous, out of touch Minister of Indigenous Affairs.

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