Queensland Police service welcomes Police Liaison Officer’s for annual conference
Tracey Pere grew up on Cook Island and used to clean police stations – today, she’s a senior police liaison officer using four languages to help keep Townsville safe.
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Tracey Pere grew up on Cook Island and used to clean police stations – today, she’s a senior police liaison officer using four languages to help keep Townsville safe.
Know as PLOs, police liaison officers are employed by the Queensland Police Service and often do high-visibility patrols in cop cars, but they are not police officers.
Some PLOs are employed to help the police engage with specific communities, such as Aboriginal Australias, Torres Strait Islanders, Indians, Pacific Islanders, and more.
In Ingham, PLO Michelle Jardine works within the Italian community she grew up in.
“Recently, I helped an 18-year-old apply for personal identification that was lost during the Ingham floods earlier this year,” Ms Jardine said.
“His mother called me to tell me how thankful she was for the PLOs.”
Ms Pere has been working as a PLO for two years, and is based in Townsville.
“I used to be a cleaner for Kirwan police station as well as Townsville police station and all the police stations around Townsville,” Ms Pere said.
“I had actually been observing while I was cleaning. I come from the Cook Islands, and I come from a church where my job was to distribute food packs to the community, and I was doing that for seven whole years and when I saw the PLOs at Kirwan station going out into the community and engaging with different groups of children at school, I actually went and approached the OIC of Kirwan station and asked if I could bring our church distributions to the station and get the PLOs to distribute it into the community and that’s how I got interested in being a PLO.”
Ms Pere said her background as a schoolteacher served her well in the job.
“I really enjoyed teaching English within the African community with the women’s group, and I like also going into the schools and just engaging with the children and doing truancy (school attendance) follow ups for the principal,” she said.
“I speak four languages and becoming a PLO if you do speak another language, that’s
a bonus for us, and for our community, because we also help police do translations as well.”
Those four languages are: Cook Island Maori, New Zealand Maori, Tahitian and English.
Ms Pere said she’d definitely recommend the job.
A police liaison officers can earn between $72,000 and $79,000 a year, according to employment listings.
Acting Commissioner Shane Chelepy flew into Townsville on Tuesday for the start of a three-day PLO annual conference, which the police hope will help them nail down on the success they’ve been having.
“We have over 70 PLOs from right across their state coming together,” Commissioner Chelepy said.
“To undertake some professional development, but also to talk about what works
right across our communities. We have nearly 200 PLOs right across the state.”
Commissioner Chelepy said the PLOs help the police “better understand the cultural nuances” inside minority communities.
“They also do a fantastic job engaging with young offenders and their families … that prevention phase is so critical for us. And I can’t, I can’t thank them enough for the work they do.”
If you’d like to learn more about QPS PLOs, visit https://www.police.qld.gov.au/careers-with-the-qps/police-liaison-officers.
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