Assistant Commissioner Brian Swan: QPS fixing 'stark misalignment' in Gold Coast police rosters
Queensland Police Service is confronting a delicate balancing act between rostering frontline staff to meet demand without working them to exhaustion.
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Top brass are planning further changes to Gold Coast police rosters in an ongoing bid to get more boots on the ground when they are most needed.
But senior police and the Queensland Police Union both agree there is a delicate balancing act between rostering for demand, without working officers to the point of exhaustion in a police force that is already under significant strain.
A number of reviews in recent years have identified deficiencies in the way in which Queensland Police Service rosters frontline staff.
A 2024 interim report focusing on the Gold Coast and North Brisbane districts found a “stark misalignment” between the number of officers on shift and actual operational demand.
It was reinforced by the findings of the Gold Coast District Policing Future Report, which identified “resource deployment, especially rostering, had not kept pace with changing community needs and urban growth”.
The reports’ findings were detailed in the recently released Commissioner’s 100-day Review of the Queensland Police Service.
The review found QPS had experienced “significant mission creep”, assisting with “non-core responsibilities” for other departments which had diluted the service’s ability to deliver core policing services.
Widespread fatigue, burnout, and psychological stress, exacerbated by poor rostering practices, limited wellbeing support, and a lack of integrated systems to manage workload and risk were other key findings of the 100-day review.
Assistant Commissioner Brian Swan, who led the review for the Commissioner, said the review had highlighted the Gold Coast as a police district “trying to achieve a better way of rostering”.
The review also noted the work the Gold Coast had done establishing its “Recharge” program, giving officers a break from frontline policing to try to safeguard them from the cumulative effect of trauma.
Patrol groups across the Gold Coast have been taking part in a rostering trial that started six months ago which involves a type of extended hour shift roster, as voted on by the workforce.
Extended hour shifts can be either nine or ten hour shifts.
Assistant Commissioner Swan said there were about to be some adjustments to the way the trial shift pattern works, with some areas preferring to return to eight hour shifts.
The reduction to eight hour shifts, depending on the shift pattern, would typically result in an extra two shifts per officer over a 28-day working roster.
If applied uniformly across a patrol group the size of Surfers Paradise, that would roughly equate to an extra 200 shifts per roster.
Assistant Commissioner Swan said the trial had been looking at a type of rostering called line rostering, a system used by the Queensland Ambulance Service where longer shifts are stacked over each other during the busier periods, and shorter shifts are used in the quieter periods.
“But it takes a lot of work to design that roster so that it works properly,” he said.
He said each patrol group was currently reviewing their rosters to ensure they meet the specific operation demands of their local areas, and that any future shift structure adjustments would be informed by an evaluation of the ongoing rostering trials.
“These trials are assessing a range of factors beyond just shift length, including resourcing, fatigue management, and service delivery outcomes,” he said.
“While consideration is being given to potential changes in shift patterns, no permanent changes have been implemented at this stage, and any changes will be subject to evaluation and consultation with officers and stakeholders.
“This includes consideration of shift length, such as a return to eight-hour shifts in some areas, which has not yet occurred.”
One of the recommendations of the 100-day review is to evaluate the rostering trials on the Gold Coast and in North Brisbane, with a due date yet to be set.
“The evaluation of the trial will need to determine what’s the best path forward, balancing those three pillars of trying our best to be meeting our operational demand, but still managing the fatigue of our members and being industrially compliant,” Assistant Commissioner Swan said.
The senior police officer said ultimately, what he hoped to see out of any rostering system was that police were rostered when they are needed, “and at the same time we’re not rostering to a point that we’re fatiguing our members”.
“And I would hope that whatever rostering systems that we do end up with, that they are fit for purpose and that it allows us to move our resources when we need so we’ve got agility to surge when we’re needed at any given time when we do need to surge.”
Queensland Police Union of Employees president Shane Prior said if he could click his fingers and remove all duties from police that belonged to other government agencies, “the demand would be significantly reduced, which would then give police the ability to go back to proactively patrolling the community”.
He also said the Gold Coast had “long-endured the consequences of rostering and resource failures”.
But like Assistant Commissioner Swan, Mr Prior noted that for every action there was a reaction.
By rostering more police on peak times, giving them more weekend and night work, it meant they wouldn’t be able to spend as much time with their families, he said.
“The consequence of that is there is they’re going to seek other employment,” Mr Prior said.
“(There) needs to be a recognition that the employee needs to be the centre focus of all this.
“If employees are unhappy with a workplace in 2025 they simply just leave.
“The days are gone where people are rusted-on police officers for their entire careers.”
Alongside handing back other departments’ work to them, Mr Prior said the union believed rostering needed to be front and centre of addressing policing issues into the future.
He said he supported data-led deployment, local input, and frontline consultation on rosters.
Assistant Commissioner Swan said when work started on implementing the recommendations of the review, it would start bringing decision-making back to regions and districts.
Employees who support frontline officers – whether that be HR, finance, allied health professions or others – would also eventually be based locally, Assistant Commissioner Swan said.
The changes will mark a full-circle moment for the Queensland Police Service, which underwent a significant restructure in 2013, centralising support and business functions in Brisbane.
“The review is recommending we go back and look at a – it’s close to the pre-2013 model – with some more nuanced approaches to some of the local issues.”
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