Ceaseless SAPOL failures – cops have had a gutful

SAPOL is suffering a staffing and leadership crisis which threatens to hijack the exceptional standards of policing South Australians have, for decades, come to expect. And the worst part of all this? SAPOL’s response It would be comical if it weren’t so abjectly dangerous

The warning signs of this crisis have long been clear to not just Police Association members and journal readers but also the broader community

First, consider the numbers:

• Since late last year, three police officers per week, on average, have resigned from SAPOL

• Since mid-2022, a total of 159 officers have left the job.

• In that entire period, SAPOL has only managed to add an extra 79 recruits.

• SAPOL fell short of attrition by a staggering 90 officers in the 2021-22 financial year

Ultimately, the data shows not only zero growth but also a shocking regression in SAPOL’s sworn full-time equivalent staff since 2018

No one need wonder why SA is suffering spikes in domestic violence, shop thefts, assaults and related offences.

SAPOL has delivered extraordinary mismanagement, which hits home when you begin to realize just how long it would take for a dedicated recruiting drive to cover the officer shortfall, let alone concentrate on growing the force

The answer is not months, it’s years

And that’s not even accounting for the ongoing higher-than-average attrition rate, with members continuing to resign at alarming rates.

To put this into perspective, in 2015, the rate of non-retirement resignations was 50 to 60 per year.

As of mid-February, there had been 32 resignations in the previous 10 weeks alone There has been almost the same number of retirements in that period

What’s even more amazing is that, apparently, no member of the SAPOL executive leadership team saw this coming

But, then again, should we be surprised?

At one stage, the alarming exodus — and SAPOL’s ongoing recruitment failures — was blamed on a recent phenomenon the media have reported as “The Great Resignation”

That’s not the sort of response one would expect if there was a real understanding of the issues and their impact on the police force

And any attempt by SAPOL management to blame its problems on an unavoidable COVID-19 fallout conveniently overlooks the horrendous impact of its own policy failures during the last three years.

In fact, the association and its members spent much of the last few years challenging SAPOL — often successfully — on many of its corrosive COVID-related policies

We highlighted that deploying members as proxy SA Health workers would eventually erode public confidence in policing, burn out officers, and make it more difficult to recruit good people in the future.

It turns out, cops don’t like being taken away from front-line duties to spy on shoppers at QR-code checkpoints It turns out they don’t like having their annual leave cancelled to cover the inevitable front-line shortages either

And the only thing less surprising than all that is the inevitable outcome, which is good young men and women looking from afar and deciding to say “pass” when it comes to choosing a police career.

But SAPOL ignored most of these warnings.

Indeed, there is now a monumental fallout from COVID-19, one which was mostly avoidable and almost entirely of SAPOL’s own making

But COVID-related mismanagement is by no means the only chink in SAPOL’s armour We also warned the executive that its district policing model had failed in other jurisdictions and would likely fail here, too.

The DPM was originally designed to centralize SAPOL’s previous local service area model. But it has essentially amounted to fewer cops policing greater areas

As with many ill-considered, corporate-style centralized models, it has only succeeded in the erosion of standards and service delivery to the community

Inexplicably, Grant Stevens maintains to this day that nearly five years of the DPM is not a big enough sample size upon which to judge the model — because it has never been adequately staffed!

I’m not even close to exaggerating when I say this is the sort of circular logic that comes out of SAPOL almost every day

Further, we warned SAPOL many years ago that ending a century-old standard of recruiting police officers based on merit and instead undertaking a 50-50 gender model was a flawed direction which most police officers and most of the community opposed.

A SAPOL spokesperson recently told The Advertiser that the current SAPOL recruiting campaign, dubbed Calling All, “has worked really well”

That spokesperson went on to announce that SAPOL’s recruiting was, in fact, undergoing a complete overhaul

This sort of doublespeak truly damages SAPOL’s credibility

The reality is that the current condition of SAPOL represents a fundamental failure in governance, owing to hubris and the absence of self-awareness — and police officers on the ground have had a gutful of both

Last year, the association requested the creation of the Premier’s Taskforce — a panel of significant association, SAPOL and government representatives, charged with the long-term assignment of bringing our police force back to a position of strength

That taskforce is now underway and I will front the panel with a submission in the coming weeks.

This taskforce represents a once-ina-lifetime opportunity for SAPOL to fix its long list of problems and, in that quest, give it a fighting chance of gaining government support and funding

By Brett Williams