Wayne Gatt: Police can’t support a plan for a CBD injecting room

Police cannot support a CBD injecting room when the Richmond facility is plagued with problems that remain unresolved.

Last week, I spoke expansively about what our members see as the priorities that will help them to do their job better, keep them safe and keep the community safe over the next five years.

We compiled 59 recommendations in 23 key areas in a transparent and digestible way and released them to the politicians contesting the 2022 state election.

Why?

Because the priorities of our members align with the priorities of the community, the voters will choose who leads us.

As I told the media last week, we are an apolitical organisation. We support policies that assist our members and the community, not the parties or political representatives who endorse them.

Among the recommendations we put forth in our policing priorities document, titled “Emerging from Crisis – the changing face of policing” we call for the abandonment of the plan to create a second medically supervised injecting room in the Melbourne CBD.

Drug users are still on the streets of Richmond near the safe injecting room. Picture: Jason Edwards

We don’t do this lightly, or without reason. In fact, we say that reason has been neglected in the government’s plan for the development of this facility.

The persistent problems that have plagued the Richmond medically supervised injection room shouldn’t be ignored and should certainly not be replicated in a much more intricate, more densely populated district.

You only have to speak to residents in North Richmond and police in the Yarra area, as we have at length, to hear about the damage to the amenity of the area, as well as the altered perception of safety and the impact on crime in the surrounding streets, to know that creating a similar facility in a capital city will create more problems for the community than solutions for users.

We’re not saying definitively no. We’re saying not like this.

I’ve visited Sydney’s Kings Cross injecting room and spoken to police in NSW about how they view that facility. Their feedback is vastly different to that of my members in the Yarra area.

If the government is looking to replicate a model, it should be one that is working well, not one that has been plagued with problems from the start — problems that remain unresolved to this day.

The persistent problems with the Richmond facility shouldn’t be ignored. Picture: Jason Edwards

As police, we have a duty to tell the community what we know from our experience in Richmond. Equally, we believe the government has an obligation to share with it, ahead of the election, how, where and when this facility will operate.

Those key details will dictate changes to policing in the city. It’s likely we will need to call on additional resources to manage the safety of the area in which the facility is located. We need to know now where that will be, in order to adequately plan for tomorrow.

This leads me to another community black spot – police response times. You don’t record what you don’t care about, and as it stands, Victoria Police and the government do not publish police response times.

Well, our members care about it and we think the community does too, because by not recording how long it takes police to attend to serious community safety incidents, we have no way of assessing if we’re meeting its expectations.

By extension, we have no way of improving, and that’s not good enough.

Whether police are responding to call outs in time should not be a subjective exercise. If we care about governance and community satisfaction about the service we’re providing, we need metrics rather than sentiment surveys.

CBD traders such as Theo Roussos are also opposed to a proposed injecting room near Flinders Street Station. Picture: Jason Edwards

You may have also heard me talking about the need for the provision of adequate protective equipment and earpieces for my members who are called on to attend demonstrations.

We shouldn’t have to ask for this because workplace safety laws require it.

Watching police get pelted with projectiles during protests last year was extremely tough to watch. No other workplace in Victoria would allow its workers to be sent into such a volatile and unsafe environment without adequate protection. Our members faced this very scenario almost weekly throughout the pandemic.

When police can’t hear their colleagues or the instructions being delivered by their leaders over the noise of the crowd, their safety and that of the community is in peril.

The physical safety of police at these events is as important as their psychological safety after them. That is why we are calling on political parties to ensure that the BlueHub – a bespoke and highly effective psychological support service for injured officers, that has been trialled in Victoria, can be maintained over the next four years. If you’re serious about the safety of workers, like ours, you have to invest in their health.

These are common sense and safety-driven recommendations. They’re there, in black and white, for the consideration of our political leaders and the community.

When it comes to protecting and enhancing community safety, transparency has great utility.

Wayne Gatt is the secretary of The Police Association Victoria

Originally published as Wayne Gatt: Police can’t support a plan for a CBD injecting room