Retiring policeman David Raymond says it’s time for police to return to being cops

People don’t become cops to be babysitters. They want to combat crime, but these days spotting a patrol car is harder than a game of Where’s Wally, writes Kylie Lang.

Sergeant David Raymond with one of his former police dogs. Picture: Qld Police

People don’t become police officers because they missed their calling as babysitters. They want to combat crime, but these days spotting a patrol car is harder than a game of Where’s Wally?

When police presence is a proven deterrent to crime and to general lawlessness, we should be seeing more of the thin blue line, not less.

Instead, juvenile offenders are having a field day, not to mention idiots breaking rules on our roads and putting lives at risk.

The handing down this week of the Queensland Police Service’s 100-day review reveals a bleak picture.

Officers are overworked, burnt out and poorly supported.

Any Year 12 kid considering career options is unlikely to be excited by the findings, while officers wondering if it’s time to quit may have their answer.

Queensland Police Union President Shane Prior. Picture: Liam Kidston

As for the rest of us – our lived reality has been confirmed. Less than a third of Queensland’s police workforce provides a visible response in the community.

This is staggeringly poor.

The 187-page report shows “significant mission creep”, with officers increasingly tasked with extraneous work such as non-critical mental health responses and
prisoner transport.

Queensland Police Union president Shane Prior says our state’s officers are “doing every other government department’s job”.

He’s not wrong. Just ask Sergeant David Raymond.

Six weeks shy of retirement after a 36-year career, Sgt Raymond says “the accountability for us has gone up a million times since I started”.

“We are expected to have a duty of care for everything – including little kids wandering the streets at night because their parents are neglectful.

“Child services staff finish at 4pm so we get stuck with a child, even an infant in nappies, at 1 and 2am until we can find their parents.

“Similarly, if somebody is sleeping rough, it’s our responsibility to make sure they can get to a place of safety – but this also is not our job.”

Sgt Raymond, 59, is officer-in-charge of the Cairns dog squad, and first contacted me in 2013 after an opinion column I’d written about society’s lack of respect for police.

He wrote to thank me and share a little of his experience – which had included being first at the scene of gruesome murders, saving a child from a swollen river and resuscitating people who had attempted suicide.

Cairns dog squad officer-in-charge David Raymond. Picture: BRENDAN RADKE

He’d been hospitalised for injuries incurred in the line of duty but didn’t want sympathy because he was proud of the career he’d chosen and believed in “making the world a safer place”.

As Sgt Raymond prepares to go back to being just Dave and join his wife in their book-binding business, he came across the column I’d written 12 years ago and wanted to see how I was going.

Naturally, I was keen to gauge his opinion on the QPS review.

“It is a step in the right direction, and we should see some positive change within two years as the recommendations are implemented,” Sgt Raymond says.

The first recommendation is to establish and operate integrated wellbeing networks to provide police with holistic support.

Sgt Raymond is fully behind this, and also calls for more recognition of unsung work.

In fact, it’s his effort founding a concept called Project Recognise that lands on page 106 of the review.

The project uses a QR code to record commendable work, and Sgt Raymond has since extended it to community members who go above and beyond.

I’ve long thought the renaming of Queensland Police from Force to Service in 1990 was detrimental to its core function.

I understand why it was done – to repair reputational damage after the damning Fitzgerald Inquiry confirmed top-down corruption – but to call policing a service is to diminish its potency.

Sgt Raymond agrees and identifies a missed opportunity in the QPS review.

“This would have been the perfect time to return to being the Queensland Police Force,” he says.

“When I think of service industries, I think of hotels and restaurants,
and none of these have an almost 100 per cent dissatisfaction rating with their customers.

“Yet when it comes to the police, people are so quick to criticise and fail to recognise how much other stuff we do on top of proper police work.”

Last month the Crisafulli government announced there were more than 680 recruits in training at QPS academies and more than 1880 applicants in the recruiting pipeline.

The challenge going forward will be to deploy them where they are needed most and to retain them.

Kylie Lang is Associate Editor of The Courier-Mail
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Originally published as Retiring policeman David Raymond says it’s time for police to return to being cops