The life and crime-fighting of top cop, Katarina Carroll
She’s been undercover, beaten by a mob while on duty, planned drug stings and a high-stakes summit of world leaders. Now Katarina Carroll is set to become Queensland’s Police Commissioner.
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Katarina Carroll is looking in the rear-view mirror of her life as she drives along the Pacific Motorway, visions of the red dirt and green fields of her hometown on the Atherton Tableland bubbling up.
There she is, a long-limbed girl planting tobacco; there’s Mum, Antonija Bosnjak, in the kitchen before dawn, making meals for the pickers on the property in the tiny far north Queensland town of Innot Hot Springs.
Then the present roars into view.
“Look at this idiot, look at this idiot!” says the soon-to-be Queensland Police Commissioner, surveying the road behind her. In seconds, a speeding car overtakes Carroll’s, then pulls in front with metres to spare before weaving its way back and forth through the traffic.
“Oh my God, look at that idiot,” she says again as another car makes the same crazy manoeuvre in hot pursuit. Carroll shakes her head. “And you wonder why people die,” she says.
More memories. Just short of 30 years ago, Carroll’s childhood friend, Paula Bevan, was killed in a similar scenario.
Two young men were “playing chicken”, speeding along a highway in the Tableland when one collided with Bevan’s car. The recently married Bevan, 28, was only headed 100 metres up the road.
Carroll was a detective in Townsville’s Criminal Investigation Branch at the time. She admits the death of “my best friend in life” made her angry. “Angry, angry, angry.”
But Carroll came out from the haze of grief, drawing on the resilience she reckons was forged working long hours in the tobacco fields of her youth.
It’s a trait she called on in the aftermath of “fearing for my life” when she was pummelled and kicked after trying to break up a drunken mob in Townsville.
It’s been with her when her career has meant she’s lived away from her young children. She used it three months into her left-field appointment as Commissioner of the Queensland Fire and Emergency Service when the enormity of the job ahead became clear. And she’ll be digging into that resilience again as she becomes the state’s 20th top cop – and the first woman in the role.
First, though, she has to become a police officer again, having resigned as Assistant Police Commissioner in 2014 to take up the Newman government-appointed QFES job. On Monday, July 8, she’ll be sworn in – as a constable.
The first time Carroll held that rank, she was 19 and told by her senior sergeant that women weren’t meant to be police and she’d fail. This time, the 55-year-old will be constable for a few minutes before being made Police Commissioner. “It’s got to be some kind of Guinness world record,” she jokes.
The quick pace won’t end there. She’s already got a “little list” of things to do; boosting morale, shaking up her executive leadership team, stemming the tide of low-level, first-time offenders going through courts and building a case with the Queensland Government for an improved budget. “It will be a quick-changing whirlwind in the first couple of years,” she says. “I think the police service needs to prepare for that.”
ONE BIG, HAPPY FAMILY
Pork is sizzling on a spit as night falls and the Bosnjak clan gathers at Katarina and Michael Carroll’s home on Brisbane’s southside. There’s home brew and sauvignon blanc, potato bake and salads, a Croatian capsicum sambal and Carroll’s “famous” pavlova for afters.
A tribe of kids – including the Carrolls’ Connor, 17 and Martine, 14 – are in the house and the adults are in camp chairs in the back yard paying out on the Police Commissioner-to-be.
“When Katarina was growing up, she was always focused,” says her older brother Robert Bosnjak, 56, a maintenance specialist with BHP.
“Her nickname was the General,” adds his teacher wife, Pauline, 47. Carroll looks surprised but her police inspector brother, John Bosnjak, 52, nods and his wife and fellow police officer, Jo Bosnjak, 55, laughs. “Oh yes,” says Robert, “she was definitely the General.”
Stories flow of school holidays spent working the tobacco fields alongside their Croatian migrant parents, the day Carroll tried the produce and got sprung by their now 90-year-old father, Ivan – “He was not happy,” recalls Carroll – and that time she cheated death after jumping on the back of a tractor to surprise Ivan.
She fell off, under a soil leveller being towed behind. The soft earth saved her. Carroll does an imitation, Wile E. Coyote-style, of her position after it rolled over her and everyone laughs.
There’s much guffawing, too, when Michael, 52, tells of the first time he saw the young constable Bosnjak when she came to pick up John – Michael’s best mate – from Brisbane’s Nudgee College to take him to the movies.
“This tall, long-legged blonde bombshell came walking towards us,” recalls Michael, who owns a concrete truck business. “I give Johnno a nudge and said, ‘Jeez, that’s all right, isn’t it?’ And he said, ‘Steady, that’s me sister’.”
Says Carroll: “I didn’t have anything to do with him for many years. They were juvenile delinquents!” The couple gives each other an affectionate look. It’s a close family, with all siblings living nearby and sharing the load of looking out for their parents who still live on the Tableland. Her sisters-in-law sing Carroll’s praises. “She’s personable, relates to everybody,” says Pauline. “Salt of the earth,” says Jo.
It wasn’t until late 1998 that Carroll and Michael got together, spurred on, says Michael, by Antonija, now 83, or “Mumma Bos” as he calls her, pushing for grandchildren. Carroll, who speaks fluent Croatian, takes on her mother’s accent to the crowd’s delight: “Katarina, will you ever marry? Katarina, all your cousins in Croatia are doctors and lawyers but they still are married, they still have children.”
It’s a less jovial mood, though, when talk turns to what is known in the Bosnjak family as “the Great Escape”.
It was 1972 and Ivan and Antonija had decided to take their Australian-born children, all under 10, to visit relatives in what was then Communist-run Yugoslavia. The couple had not been back since they married in secret after World War II, then fled across the border separately before making their way to Australia.
The homecoming trip was cut short when word came through in the middle of the night that the Communist authorities were after Ivan. As a teenager, he’d escaped the Communist Partisans only to be strongarmed into the fascist militia, the Ustase. “He didn’t like either,” says Robert. (The Bosnjaks were so enamoured of democracy, they named their sons after the US’s Kennedy brothers).
Says Carroll of that night: “We just threw everything into a suitcase and people drove us through the hills. We went to Split and hid because there were police everywhere, they were waiting for us at the airport.” They scrambled onto a boat to Italy, Ivan waiting in the shadows until the last minute. “It was terrifying.” Friends who had looked after them in Yugoslavia were executed; an uncle was jailed.
Little wonder Carroll’s parents were against her becoming a police officer. “It was a very different police service where they came from but we got over that glitch,” she says.
It’s been 36 years since the young Katarina Bosnjak walked into the Queensland Police Academy.
A few years later, she was in the licensing branch, watching, wide-eyed, as corrupt police were caught in the Fitzgerald Inquiry. She felt the opprobrium from the public towards police and experienced the upheaval of the reform that followed.
She’s posed as a street sex worker in Fortitude Valley, luring men who broke the prostitution laws of the era, planned covert drug operations and been proposed to by a now convicted murderer while undercover.
She’s been flogged in a Townsville street, dug into the murky world of organised crime and investigated cops doing the wrong thing.
She’s been in charge of uniformed police in Cairns, and controlled “all the toys; the dogs, the boats, the planes, the special emergency response team” in Operations Support Command. In 2010, she was made Assistant Commissioner of the Far North Region before taking on the high-profile role of planning and operations for the G20 Summit. No one got shot, no bombs went off, protests were controlled and German Chancellor Angela Merkel and then-US president Barack Obama went home safely.
She fitted in motherhood, and an arts degree in justice administration, an executive master’s in public administration, a graduate diploma in applied management and the company directors’ course. In late 2014, she was thrown a curveball, plucked from the police service to knock a disparate band of urban and rural fire officers and emergency workers and volunteers into shape, just after a report found the fire service had a toxic and hostile culture towards women.
She did it, and four-and-a-half years later, Carroll is about to become Queensland’s top cop. So, what, I ask, as the pork enters its final stage of cooking, are the troops saying about Carroll’s appointment?
“Lots of good,” says John. “She’s been around for so long.” But it’s not all good. Paul Caton, a family friend and police sergeant who is here for dinner, volunteers something that happened at his station. “The day it was announced, a couple of constables walked in and said, ‘Katarina’s only got that job because she’s female’. I said, ‘Hold it right there, you don’t know this new Commissioner. She’s worked her way up … she’s done more than you guys will ever do. So don’t let me hear you saying that again’.”
Carroll listens quietly. “Isn’t it funny,” she says with a weary look, “that that [attitude] is still out there.”
BUILDING TRUST AND PROVIDING DIRECTION
Carroll is making her way towards an outdoor gathering of QFES staff when she sees the baby. She makes a beeline for Olivia Parker-Douglas and, in seconds, the two-week-old is in her arms.
Carroll asks Olivia’s parents, senior firefighter Julia Parker, 31, and station officer Paula Douglas, 39, about her health – “She’s eating, sleeping, pooing, all those things?” – then sets off with Olivia in her arms, showing her off to a group of officers before handing her back.
Stephen Smith calls the crowd together to farewell Carroll.
The Assistant Commissioner for the South Western region (just promoted to be the head of QFES Human Capital Management) recalls that when Carroll joined QFES, the newly created department was “in name only”.
Now, it’s a cohesive group. “She’s provided us with direction and secured our future.”
Carroll is relaxed as she addresses the team, peppering her praise with a few jokes. She talks about the “transformational journey”, the high regard the department is now held in by government and the community, and the changing climate that has resulted in Queensland being hit with cyclones and unprecedented bushfires in quick succession. “We rallied as an agency,” she says.
James Massey, first officer with Sugarloaf Rural Fire Service, says Carroll has built trust between the various services. “She communicates with everybody. That’s one of the things that had been sadly lacking; you were just pawns on a board and they just moved you around. Now you know they value what you do.”
Megan Stiffler, the South Western region chief superintendent, recalls seeing officers meeting the boss for the first time, arms-crossed, surly at an outsider being appointed to the job. Carroll “turned them around” in minutes.
“She brought business acumen, created rigour around operations but she brought humanity, too.” Warwick-based inspector Hemmo De Vries, says: “She’s changed a lot of the culture and the thinking of a lot of the boys. She’s very astute, very strong, good thinking and problem solving.” Says Smith: “You absolutely get what you see; genuine, connected. Which brings people along.”
As Carroll is leaving, Michelle McLeod, the Toowoomba fire communications manager, approaches. “Can I just say thank you so much. You’ve been an inspiration.”
It wasn’t always this way. In the first few weeks of her tenure, an email circulated calling Carroll a “disgrace” for taking the job.
“It was upsetting,” she says. “It happened a couple of times.” Carroll admits that at the three-month mark, she went home to Michael and said, “I don’t know if I can do this. This is tough.”
She says the backlash was more about her being an outsider than a woman. “I get that,” she says.
“I went through it in policing after the Fitzgerald Inquiry when they brought Noel Newnham in from Victoria to QPS [as Police Commissioner].”
Carroll decided to dig in, applying for the job permanently after the state election that led to the Palaszczuk Government. She started getting a leadership group in place. Deputies, executive directors and assistant commissioners were replaced.
The same will happen at police. “There’s about 15 in the senior executive and there will certainly be a changeover,” says Carroll. “I want people who are positive, passionate, ready-to-go for what is going to be a very, very busy time. If they can’t bring that to the table, some will self-select and with others, I will have a conversation about, ‘Do you really think you’re up for the next three to five years?’.”
There’s already been a shift at the top, with Deputy Police Commissioner Bob Gee recently made the head of the newly formed Youth Justice Department. Carroll says he’s a friend, a friendship not damaged by the fact he applied for the police commissioner job and missed out, as did another deputy commissioner, Steve Gollschewski.
She says she will work closely with Gee as she develops strategies for one of her big-ticket items: keeping first offenders out of courts and prison. “Constantly locking people up is not always the answer. Now, you never go soft on serious crime. There are people who should not be walking amongst us. [But] the evidence is clearly there, if you can do things early in children’s lives you will improve their life dramatically. Police do have some part to play in that so it’s about having that shift.”
It’s a politically aware target, too, with the Palaszczuk Government under pressure to get children out of watch houses and the LNP Opposition on the case. Carroll avoids talking politics except for acknowledging it’s part of the job. “It’s more political, definitely, because it’s highly visible.”
She’s not promising securing a speedy boost in police funding. “You can’t go to government and ask for additional funds without evidence that you’ve improved or innovated.” She’s already asked her deputies to find “efficiencies”. “It may come to a point where I go to government and say, ‘We’ve done everything we can but now is the point where we need additional funds because we’ve done this, this and this’.”
Improving morale is a top priority. Some police tell her spirits are very low, others say discontent is only in pockets. “I think there is definitely room for improvement,” she says. She plans to tour the state, meeting with the rank and file “so I can get a sense of what’s happening”.
She’s keen to learn more about the “bad apples” that outgoing Police Commissioner, Ian Stewart, has expressed frustration at being unable to get out of the force. He sought special government powers to personally sack them, but was denied by both sides of politics. She’ll reassess. “I need to be in the organisation to see who they are, what’s been done and where something different can be done.”
Having come into QFES as a result of findings of sexist, toxic behaviour, Carroll backs the recently formed police unit, dubbed Juniper, tasked with investigating predators and bullies within the ranks. But cultural change needs to be pushed service-wide.
“It’s got to be constant and driven. You cannot have the conversation, implement something and think in two years’ time it will be fine. You’ve got to have your foot on the pedal constantly.”
Her time at QFES also reinforced that decisions made at the top need to be explained to the frontline and that communication is two-way. “It’s not just the information, it’s the fact that they can push up and ask questions and get an answer back.”
Carroll recently asked for the results of her psychological testing that was part of the application process for police commissioner. She reckons the test got it about right. It found she’s not a fine details person. “I said, ‘Totally agree, that’s why I have good deputy commissioners to do that’.” But it found her emotional intelligence was high.
“They said I like getting information to make decisions, however I won’t just depend on that, I will listen to intuition and years of experience to make decisions. And they said, I’m a macro, rather than micro manager. I empower people to make decisions.”
HOLDING COURT
One court away from the action, watching at a discreet distance, tennis mum Carroll is assessing how Martine is faring against a rival seven years her senior. “She’s not quite into her rhythm yet,” Carroll says. “She’ll take a bit to warm up.”
Martine is the reigning 14 and under Australian Clay Court doubles champ with partner Sydney Stone and came fifth in the singles. When Martine turns 15, she’ll be in the country’s top 150 female players. Martine goes on to win this match, held on the Gold Coast as part of the national Junior Development Series.
Carroll’s son, Connor is a rising cricketer, recently chosen for Queensland’s under-19 metro squad. “The kids love sports, so did Michael and I, so I suppose it’s just natural,” says Carroll. “And it means less time on [video game] Fortnite.”
Carroll sometimes wonders what she might have achieved if she’d continued playing tennis. She was a “special talent”, similar in style and strength to former world No.1, Steffi Graf, says Billy Lee Long, 81, her coach from her years at the Catholic Mount St Bernard College in Herberton where she boarded.
He regrets not suggesting to her parents she pursue the sport – or javelin – but he knew they were not wealthy and “you’ve got to be careful you’re not putting a dream in their mind that they can’t afford”.
Carroll says a solid job was more important and she’s glad she and Michael can afford to help their kids. As QFES Commissioner, she earned $419,000 in 2017-18, with outgoing Police Commissioner Stewart on $614,000, both more than the Premier’s pay packet.
Michael phones, and the couple discusses the sport parents juggle; she’s with Martine, he’s going to watch Connor’s cricket and she tells Michael to remind Connor that they are going to the 50th anniversary dinner of Michael’s rugby union club, Sunnybank. Carroll shows me her greying roots in her blonde hair. “This is what I’m getting done this afternoon,” she says. “Never get time for hair, or nails.”
She has got a new outfit, though, picked up after noticing she wore the same dress when she received the National Telstra Business Women’s Award for Government and Academia in 2015 and the inaugural Griffith University Outstanding Alumnus Award in 2018. She hates shopping but is happy with her $80 purchase, marked down from $240.
There’s an easy charm about Carroll, on show here in the way she chats animatedly with Martine’s friends and their parents about matches won and lost.
Her friend, Noela Grant, 57, who joined the police the same year as Carroll and shared a house, says “she’s the sort of person who lights up the room ... she’s always positive, easy to get on with”.
Grant says Carroll always had the smarts to go far but is in awe of her ability to excel at family and work. Carroll says Michael deserves credit; he’s joined her on postings, having to sell businesses in the process, and cared for Connor in Brisbane while she took Martine with her to Cairns for two years from late 2010 to take up the assistant commissioner’s role.
She knows, though, that many women fail to reach middle or senior management because of motherhood or caring for parents.
Carroll studied the trend in her 2012 executive master’s. She has ambitions to address the imbalance in police because it’s at the higher levels that “you influence strategy and policy”. Policing numbers for June 2017, the most recent available, show that of the 310 commissioned officers, 30 were female, or about 9 per cent, and there were 3244 female officers of the 11,969 in the service, 27 per cent.
But Carroll is not one for setting quotas. She rejected the concept at QFES because fewer females than males apply and many women falter at the physical test. And that’s non-negotiable.
“For me, it’s more about equality,” she says. “If you can do the job, you should get the job, man or woman. The public has to have confidence we can do the role.”
After 159 years, Queensland has decided there’s a woman capable of being Police Commissioner.
Carroll knows the microscope will be on her, critics waiting for her first clanger.
She’s been here before. Thirty-six years ago, when the senior sergeant told her she would fail, she replied, “I think you’ll find I’ll probably do quite well”. Once more, into the fray. ■
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