Top SA cop rejects repeat violent offender exile

South Australian Police Commissioner Grant Stevens has rejected coronial recommendations that violent and repeat offenders be banned from living in the state’s sprawling APT lands.

South Australian Police Commissioner Grant Stevens. Picture: Getty Images

South Australian Police Commissioner Grant Stevens has rejected coronial recommendations that violent and repeat offenders be banned from living in the state’s sprawling Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands but concedes the presence of law enforcement in the area must improve.

In his first significant comments since the highly critical findings into the 2016 death of outback nurse Gayle Woodford on APY Lands, Mr Stevens said police were in discussions with the government about upgrading poorly resourced stations in Fregon, a main community.

“These are very different communities,” Mr Stevens said.

SA Deputy Coroner Anthony Schapel, in findings handed down last month, said it was “perverse” that Fregon had no permanent police — a tin shed is the local station — and recommended serious offenders be prevented from residing on Indigenous lands.

Due to the remoteness of the APY Lands and their sparse population — just 2276 at the 2016 census — the entire region is policed by an average of 10 officers each day from a pool of about 30.

SAPOL is working on plans to establish a permanent presence in Fregon and other towns and reconsidering rostering, allowing police to stay in towns overnight.

“The building itself is not really fit for purpose so the officers who are there spend time in their vehicles rather than sitting in a shed,” Mr Stevens said.

“We have been talking to both levels of government about enhancing facilities in three of the more remote communities including Fregon so police are able to spend more time in those communities … rather than respond to taskings and spend a little time in communities before returning to their substantive posting, which might be 70km away.”

The model under discussion is not without its critics, including Labor’s Indigenous affairs spokesman Kyam Maher, who has spent extended periods living on APY Lands.

SAPOL, which deploys police on a two weeks on/one week off model, is considering deploying staff one week on/two weeks off but with more police to ensure no positions are unstaffed and officers are seconded to particular towns so they can build and maintain relationships.

Mr Maher said APY Lands elders he had spoken to had concerns about any reduction in the amount of time individual police would spend in the region.

He said these communities needed a more regular police presence like the rest of the state, and he urged the government and SAPOL to reconsider the change, saying it was a downgrading of the previous system and that locals wanted a permanent presence.

Mr Stevens said the new model would provide greater continuity because the officers would be based in the same towns.

“This is all about increasing the number of people who are deployed to the lands and rotating them through a little bit more frequently so we can maintain their skills back in the metropolitan area, provide them the training they need and ensure they are ­allocated to a particularly community in the APY.”

He baulked at the suggestion in the coroner’s report that violent offenders could somehow be prevented from returning to live in the APY Lands.

Woodford’s killer, Dudley Davey, had raped a nurse in Fregon prior to attacking her and returned to live there after completing his jail time for another sexually violent crime.

Mr Stevens said the reality was that in the APY Lands, many people would be affected if those with convictions for crimes of violence were precluded from living there.

Such a law would also catch those who had turned their lives around. “That would come with some challenges because there are people … in those communities who have previous convictions for offences of violence,” he said. “I’m not sure how that would work in terms of the importance of family and community to these people. I don’t see how you could prevent them from returning to their communities.

“There would also be (those) affected by that who have been rehabilitated and no longer pose a threat to the community. They have every right to go there.”