Police Commissioner Grant Stevens admits police won’t go to every crime call-out

The Police Commissioner has defended the level of policing on Adelaide’s streets after the release of alarming new crime data – but admitted officers don’t go to every call-out.

Police Commissioner Grant Stevens has urged shop owners to have “perspective” if they believe officers should attend incidents of property damage, as new figures show offences in the heart of Adelaide have more than doubled in a decade.

The state’s top cop on Wednesday was forced to defend his force’s response to growing criminal and anti-social behaviour in the CBD and North Adelaide.

Mr Stevens said a lack of officers is not to blame despite admitting police do not attend every call-out.

Traders and industry chiefs said problem areas included parts of King William and Hindley streets, Rundle Mall and North Tce, especially around the railway station or Parliament House. Mr Stevens, who insisted South Australia was among the safest places in the nation, said city shops needed “perspective” if they believed a police officer should attend if they were a victim of property damage.

Police Commissioner Grant Stevens. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Naomi Jellicoe

“If you are a victim of property damage and there are no suspects present and there’s no likelihood of any significant forensic evidence, it’s not necessarily the case that a police officer is going to attend,” he said. “There are other ways to report that type of crime and it will be assessed and investigated accordingly.”

Analysis of monthly police data shows crime has more than doubled in the past 12 years to its highest levels since 2010. Police dealt with almost 8500 crimes last year compared to nearly 3800 offences in 2010 – which was the lowest in that period, according to publicly available data.

Officers investigated almost 87,000 city crimes in the past 12 years. As authorities consider reforming city liquor laws, criminals left victims seriously injured in 352 incidents – a 12-year high across the CBD and North Adelaide.

That is a 350 per cent increase since the three years from 2015-17, when the average yearly total of serious assaults causing injury was just 78. Police figures show the surge of violence is still increasing, with almost 300 assault-related incidents in January and February this year, 30 more than in 2022.

Since 2010, almost 18,300 assault-related crimes have occurred across the CBD and North Adelaide, along with 25 murders or manslaughter crimes, the data shows.

Property-damage crimes, shop or car thefts and stealing vehicles were also at a 12-year high last year, sparking calls for authorities to tackle rising anti-social behaviour.

Mr Stevens attempted to minimise the violence as equating to “three assaults on Friday and three assaults on a Saturday night … I’m not sure what people expect”, he told FIVEaa radio. “It’s not the job of the police to intervene and prevent that behaviour from occurring,” he said. “Ours is to respond when it does.”

However, under state law, the purpose of police is to “prevent crime” and “preserve the peace”. Mr Stevens told The Advertiser that police took an “intelligence-led approach” to policing.

“Rather than just randomly patrolling, we prefer to put out police officers where we believe they are going to have the greatest impact and be able to respond as quickly as possible to incidents of crime,” he said.

“It’s about assessing all of the information at our disposal and making sure we have the right numbers of police in the right locations, ready to respond to whatever occurs.”

Mr Stevens said depleted police numbers were not the reason for this approach.

“This is something that we adhere to as a common sense policing approach,” he said.

Mr Stevens said a “whole range of factors” affected incidents of crime, including alcohol, drugs and mental health.

Originally published as Police Commissioner Grant Stevens admits police won’t go to every crime call-out