Tory Shepherd: Are bigger guns the answer?
Grant Stevens badly timed and ill-thought out move to arm SA cops like the over-militarised US forces will tarnish his officers and miss the terrorists he’s aiming for, writes Tory Shepherd.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
- Stevens: SA needs anti-terror unit armed with rifles
- How to get the most from your Advertiser subscription
Around the world, marches against police brutality continue. Unfortunately, it’s in the context of those protests that SA Police chose to unveil their latest hit squad, which looks, um, brutal.
It is also unfortunate – or perhaps, unthinking – that Police Commissioner Grant Stevens said the heavily armed crew could be turning up at Black Lives Matter rallies.
The 48 Security Response Section officers sport semiautomatic rifles, pistols, ballistic vests, tasers, pepper spray, batons, and a bad-arse look.
Commissioner Stevens is entirely correct that it would be naive to think Adelaide is immune to a terrorist attack, as he wrote in The Advertiser this week.
Australia’s intelligence agencies consistently warn of the high risk of attacks on so-called “soft targets” by homegrown terrorists, hellbent on violence in the name of Islam, white supremacy or generic disgruntlement mutating into murder.
Commissioner Stevens said the weaponry was necessary and that it was “alarmist and untrue” that the SRS officers had a special licence to shoot to kill.
“Police have the authority to use force to prevent the loss of innocent lives. But that force must be proportionate to the threat faced,” he wrote.
The threat is real. But is the response itself proportionate? Are bigger guns the answer?
Experts are worried about the militarisation of Australian police forces, after watching US cops increasingly buy up used military equipment – including grenade launchers, and even military aircraft.
This is happening even though terrorists increasingly use mundane things like cars or knives to kill. It seems intuitive to want to armour up in the face of uncertain times and unpredictable threats. But intuition can be a fickle friend.
Studies have found muscling up police can tarnish their reputation, increase tensions, and make the force more attractive to the trigger-happy recruit.
One published Princeton study found there were “no detectable benefits in terms of officer safety or violent crime reduction” but that public opinion of police was eroded. It also found, in the US, that heavily armed police units were deployed more often in black communities.
In an article published in the Australian Defence Journal in 2017, army Captain John Sutton said the police and military forces were becoming increasingly intertwined, and that sort of boundary blurring was historically associated with repressive regimes. He argued police equipped with defence weapons and vehicles saw themselves as “akin to special-force soldiers”.
Monash University Professor of Criminology Jude McCulloch wrote in June adopting a military culture sees police switch from seeing themselves as a service, to seeing themselves as a force.
“Where police adopt a military philosophy, the community is divided into those to be protected and those seen as a threat … the line between being presumptively seen as a threat or considered deserving of protection is most deeply etched in race,” she wrote.
In the patchwork of police forces in the US, some are the descendants of slave patrols, and some have a history of allying with the Ku Klux Klan.
University of Technology Sydney’s Professor of Law Thalia Anthony and University of Western Australia’s Professor of Criminology, Harry Blagg, wrote in The Conversation recently about the role police played in massacres of Aboriginal people, in dispossessing them of land, and in dismantling families.
MORE NEWS
Hundreds of police head to SA-Victorian border
Hackers hook public servants in cyber crime spree
Horrific crash driver may have been ‘manic or psychotic’
They make a distinction between the British Model, the bill “policing through consensus and walking the beat”, and the Irish Model – suppressing dissent. Often Australia’s history was closer to the second model, they wrote.
Commissioner Stevens points out “properly equipped” police have prevented more people being killed in recent attacks. But he doesn’t look at the counterfactuals.
What if having more cops with guns increasingly alienates Aboriginal people? What if all those semiautomatics help create a gun culture? What if having heavily-armed police intensifies the resolve of a lone wolf to martyr themselves? What if the confronting sight of officers makes people hesitate to reach out to police, or give information? What if more people join the force just to get their hands on those weapons?
Why not have the starries in the wings, waiting to swoop, and put the bobbies on the beat?
