Visitors to Canberra often remark that they never see police. Those of us who’ve had to report a traffic accident can attest that even if you walk through the doors of a police station and up to the front counter it’s a rare thing to see a police officer (one normally comes out if you wait long enough).
The Canberra Times today has a doom and gloom story on the state of Policing in our crumbling Territory with the lowest crime clearance rates in the country.
We do, however, have a new new policing agreement which Simon Corbell promises will fix things.
The ABC reports that the new numbers are still going to be below the promised national average. They also have a completely un-intelligible piece of plod-speak from Commissioner Keelty on the subject of looting ACT Policing for the foreign deployments beloved of the Howard Government.
“What we’re also doing is minimising the impact of deployments to places like East Timor and the Solomon Islands by not drawing so much on ACT policing resources until such time as the national side of the AFP can provide additional resources to the ACT to draw upon that, so we’re keeping the numbers.”
UPDATED Bill Stefaniak has put out a media release (mysteriously dated 7 November 2006) pointing out that the year late agreement is being based off a two year old review and reduces the targets the police are being asked to meet.