Queensland Police Service heavily criticised for lax gun control
Queensland Police have been slammed for lax gun control and failing in a number of areas to fully protect the community.
The Queensland Police Service has been heavily criticised over gun control, including failing to inspect licence holders and granting licences to known offenders, in a report tabled in parliament.
The Queensland Auditor-General’s Regulating Firearms report was tabled on Friday, and there was no shortage of criticism of the police.
It stated police could regulate the acquisition, possession, use and disposal of registered firearms more effectively.
“Consequently, the community is not as well protected as it could be,” the report said.
“QPS is not consistent in how quickly it seizes firearms from unsuitable people.”
The report also took aim at the way in which firearm licences were granted.
“QPS does not have the right balance between affording procedural fairness for licence applicants and managing community safety,” it said.
“It sometimes grants firearm licences to people with a history of offending behaviour that may be a risk to public safety.
“QPS can strengthen its decision-making controls and guidance to ensure it prioritises public interest and safety.”
The report stated that by the end of 2019, there were 185,742 firearms licences and 829,743 registered firearms in Queensland.
Overall, the number of people holding firearms licences had increased by 12 per cent (2015-19) and the number of registered firearms had increased by 17 per cent.
The Auditor-General found there were 3205 firearms reported stolen over the past five years (2015-19) and 633 guns were reported lost, while police recovered 780 firearms.
The number of stolen firearms annually had increased by 7 per cent from 601 in 2015 to 643 in 2019.
“Inspections of firearm owners and their storage facilities are important in trying to prevent the theft and loss of firearms,” the report stated.
“More than 78 per cent of licences issued between 2015-19 have never been inspected,” the Auditor-General wrote.
The damning report made 13 recommendations to overhaul the state’s firearm system, including accurate recording and transfer of all firearms, ensuring firearm licence decisions are consistent, random firearm inspections with targeted risk-based inspections, and proactively inspect shooting ranges.
Deputy Commissioner Tracy Linford said police had worked closely with the Queensland Audit Office during the review and were not blindsided by the findings nor the recommendations.
“We are very comfortable with the 13 recommendations that have been made and we accept them,” Ms Linford said.
“We are committed to making sure we address all of those.
“The most important part for us is the community safety issue and making sure that any person that either applies to get a firearm and a licence … are the proper person to have one.”
She said Queensland Police received about 1800 licence applications each week, including 1000 permits to acquire one, and the system used to check licence applications was dated and needed updating.
Police have to draw information from multiple databases, including state and national, to crosscheck applications.
“We are absolutely committed to making sure we can speed things up,” she said
“We acknowledged that there were a lot of things that we could do to modernise ourselves and ensure that we do make sure that we are at the forefront of our minds.
“I have a team that's already looking at developing a system so that we can extract from the different databases at one time, so we can get a very quick picture of all of the data.”
Ms Linford said the QPS had established a Firearms Oversight Committee to implement all 13 recommendations.
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