Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll today announced his appointment as assistant commissioners. Brian Swan, Katherine Innes and Brian Connors were also promoted.

It is still unclear where Assistant Commissioner Wheeler will take up his new position.Further announcements on the placements are expected in the coming days, as well as another appointment announcement.

Commissioner Carroll said in a statement that she was looking forward to working with the officers in their new roles.

“The Queensland Police Service is undergoing an important transformation with the service alignment program to better align resources based on capability and service delivery," she said.“I know these highly regarded officers will be valuable members of the executive leadership team, as we steer the organisation through significant change.”The assistant commissioners will take up their new positions in the next month.

See our in-depth interview with AC Wheeler below. 

LAST MONTH: 

HE’S been a voice of calm amid the chaos across the past 12 months.

But Gold Coast police Chief Superintendent Mark Wheeler is quick to admit his reassuring exterior hasn’t always been reflected by his internal dialogue this past year.

“When I got the phone call from the State Disaster Coordinator saying: ‘You need to shut the borders, you’re going to have about two days’, I said: ‘Sorry, what? What do you mean shut the borders? You mean shut the borders to NSW?’ … I had a bit of an out of body experience,” he tells the Bulletin exactly one year to the day he took over the city’s top policing job last January.

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In a wide-ranging interview, the Gold Coast’s top cop reveals how he ended up back on the beat alongside junior constables doing COVID compliance checks just weeks into his new gig, the war-room planning done from his dining room table to work out exactly where the borders would close and his plans for the city’s police force in 2021.

In a rare insight into the senior officer who has become the face of the Gold Coast’s fight to keep COVID out of Queensland, Mr Wheeler also shared his memories of working in some of Queensland’s most remote communities and his career-long obsession to be posted to our city.

BOY FROM BOWEN TO CAPE COP

THEY make ‘em tough in North Queensland, or so the staying goes.

Born in Brisbane, Mr Wheeler grew up in Bowen and like many small-town boys, left school young to take up a trade — later becoming a registered builder.

“I left school pretty early … I got a trade, and that was four years,” he says.

“I moved to Brisbane and I thought this is a pretty hard life. Being a tradie and back then, it wasn’t overly well paid, but for me it wasn’t about the money, I just wanted to try something different.”

When he applied to join the police at age 22, Mr Wheeler didn’t think he’d get in without having gone to university or finishing school.

“But then I did, so I thought I’ll do five years and see how that goes,” he says, almost 30 years later.

His first appointment as a junior constable was to Cairns but that wasn’t quite hot and sticky enough, Mr Wheeler wanted to see the country further north as soon as he could.

After a year in Cairns, he headed to the remote indigenous community of Aurukun, about 800 kilometres away.

COPS PATROL BRISBANE RESIDENTS IN LOCKDOWN ON THE GOLD COAST

“I heard a lot of stories about Cape York and as soon as I could, I applied to go up there because I wanted to experience it and experience a place that a lot of people would never even visit in their lives, let alone live and work there,” he explains.

Aurukun has long had a reputation for unrest including mass riots following an alleged murder on New Year’s Day 2020, but policing was as much about trust as authority up there, Mr Wheeler says.

“Some of the challenges those places have got are still there now and will be for some time to come. There are some really sad stories in and around those communities but there are some wonderful people,” he says, having again worked in the community for another two years later in his career.

“I enjoyed the independence of working there, you didn’t have a cavalry of police to call up and help you on a job. Sometimes it was just you and another officer or just you on your own for a period of time, so you really had to learn to talk to people, because you could not do things through authority in those communities, you really had to do it through acceptance and credibility with the people that were there, hoping they understood you were there to help them.”

Mr Wheeler later worked at Yarrabah at the then juvenile aid bureau, before becoming the officer in charge of Pormperaaw.

And like every young officer working in the far north, he quickly learned not to get bogged twice after spending a night in a police car in the middle of nowhere.

MINISTER’S MAN

AFTER stints at Airlie Beach, Charleville, Toowoomba and other internal roles within the QPS, Mr Wheeler was in 2016 appointed as the ministerial liaison officer to then police Minister Bill Byrne and later Mark Ryan.

“It is pretty far removed from policing … It’s not a political role in any way shape or form … but you are a conduit between the Minister and the Queensland Police Service,” he explains.

“Every bit of information that goes into the Minister’s office, it has to be right.”

On leaving front line duties for the job, Mr Wheeler says: “At the time, I was completely out of my depth. I’d gone from being very operational, running police stations to a very corporate role.”

But Mr Wheeler learnt to swim pretty fast and was soon promoted to the Queensland Police Commissioner’s chief of staff, working under both Ian Stewart and Katarina Carroll before taking on the Chief Superintendent role on the Glitter Strip.

CALL OF THE COAST

“ONE goal I’ve always had was to work on the Gold Coast, I actually applied to come here in 1997,” Mr Wheeler says.

“I’ve been coming here since I was a baby, my grandparents were married down in Coolangatta and they lived in Miles St, just near the checkpoint, actually.”

On January 6, 2020, Mr Wheeler finally got his wish, telling the Bulletin at the time his first order of business was to meet with police keeping our community safe.

“A real priority for me is their safety and wellbeing. There’s over 1000 police on the Gold Coast. We need to look after them as best we can, by providing them with the right equipment, the right training, sufficient resources and support when things go wrong,” he said 12 months ago.

And he seems to have made a pretty good impression.

Now, if you hear Mr Wheeler’s name uttered in any police station around the Gold Coast, officers almost universally respond in the same way – with glowing praise, predicting the boy from Bowen’s next promotion.

But ask Mr Wheeler about his reputation and he politely declines to make any comment but quickly changes the subject to how hard everyone else has been working.

“I’ve only ever looked at the job in front of me,” he says.

POLICING A PANDEMIC

EVEN Nostradamus could not have predicted the year that would unfold on the Gold Coast and around the world.

Within Mr Wheeler’s first few weeks in the job, a public emergency was declared in Queensland.

“I remember it was a Friday about lunchtime when I got a phone call to say: ‘Hey, you need to go and help Queensland Health. We have a bunch of people on the Gold Coast in quarantine, they’ve all returned from China. We need police to go around and knock on the doors to tell them they need to abide by their quarantine conditions,” he says.

So what did Mr Wheeler do? He strapped on a gun and headed out with the Gold Coast’s most junior officers to do COVID checks.

“I thought it was a good opportunity to work with some of the operational staff,” he says.

“I told them: ‘I guess you know what you’re doing, so I’ll just follow you’.

“We knocked on a couple of hundred doors over the weekend to make sure people were home and if not, where they were. I remember finishing on Sunday afternoon thinking: ‘Thank god that’s over. If we have to do that all the time it’s going to be tough’.”

It wasn’t long after that Mr Wheeler was sitting down at his dining room table, staring at maps of the Gold Coast working out how on earth he was going to have police officers man all the borders that were soon to be closed.

“I went home that night and I got a map out, I downloaded it from Google Maps and I looked at all the entry points and thought we had into Queensland, I thought: ‘There is the M1, the Gold Coast Highway, probably one out to the west and one somewhere else.’ I thought we might have four or five entry points we might have to worry about. But when I counted them up and came up with 15, I had a second out of body experience,” he jokes.

The last time Queensland police shut the state borders was on January 29, 1919, during the Spanish flu pandemic.

“It was exactly 101 years since the border was closed and then it was just razor wire,” Mr Wheeler says, having researched the history of the closure, looking for some guidance in what to do more than a century later.

In 1919, there was a quarantine camp at Rainbow Bay, where people had to pay to enter, he says.

There were complaints about the food and way people were treated, even back then.

“What that says is what we’ve had to do to keep the community safe is interfere with people’s patterns of life, their freedom of movement and to some degree their liberty and whether you do that in 1919 or 2020 people react in the same way,” Mr Wheeler says.

Some hundreds of TV, radio and newspaper interviews later, Mr Wheeler has remained dedicated to informing the public about what is happening.

He says he never wants the community to fill a void of information with fear or misinformation.

“One of the disappointing things for me through all this has been some public commentary from people who don’t have all the facts. People who were saying we are going to lose the street. And when we see a tragic incident like we saw with the alleged stabbing of a young man last year in Cavill Ave, to have people say that was caused because police were in quarantine hotels or on the border is simply not true,” he says referring to the death of 27-year-old Raymond Harris.

“On that night in particular, we had 21 staff in that area. There could have been a police officer standing five metres away and it still could have and probably would have occurred, so to blame a single event on what we’re trying to do to keep the community safe is not right, particularly when it upsets and concerns the community.

“Are we challenged and pressured? Of course we are. As are most government agencies at the moment … I don’t think any government agency or any business is set up to immediately deal with a pandemic. Simply saying: ‘Get more police’ is not that simple.”

And as for the second round of border closures imposed in December, Mr Wheeler says that hasn’t stopped him planning for 2021.

“My goal is to continue to have front of mind the welfare of our staff. Whether you are the admin officer in our office, a district duty officer out on the road, getting them the best possible equipment and the best conditions they can safely work in is important. And when mistakes get made, if they’re genuine and everyone makes mistakes, it’s not about crucifying people, it’s about saying: ‘OK how do we improve so that doesn’t happen again?’ I’m about helping our staff understand we are there to support them,” he says, adding a good start is through simple measures like providing shade for staff manning the borders.

“Policing is not a safe job, it’s a risky job at times, but all you can do is minimise the risk as much as possible.”

alexandria.utting@news.com.au