Police DV failure an utter disgrace
KYLIE LANG
IT BEGGARS belief that there are still police officers who consider domestic violence matters “unimportant”.
Have they been living under a rock? How can their training be so poor? And how can Queensland Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll refuse to call a review into cultural issues within her force?
With domestic violence claiming the life of at least one Australian woman every week, it is painfully clear the system is broken.
Doreen Langham begged 16 different police officers for help in the days before she was murdered by her abusive ex-partner Gary Hely, and “basically told to go away and don’t come back”, an inquest heard this week.
Criminologist Kerry Carrington told Southport Coroner’s Court that “none took her seriously”.
How utterly devastating that must have been for the terrified Ms Langham.
In her report for state coroner Jane Bentley, Professor Carrington said the officers who did respond “seriously did not have the will, skill or knowledge or expertise to respond in the right way … it culminated in a catastrophic failure”.
In what would be her final plea, Ms Langham called police to her Logan home, only for officers to do a cursory inspection.
The court heard a rookie officer did not research the criminal history of Hely, and he and his fellow officer didn’t inspect rear doors or windows to see if anyone had broken in.
They didn’t check the yard either, and when Ms Langham didn’t answer the door, they left.
When asked in court if they had treated the call-out as “an unimportant and minor job”, the rookie said yes.
He also said his DV training had been “fast-tracked” and “more time was spent on reading legislation than practising scenarios”.
None of which helped Ms Langham.
Hely set her home alight on February 22 last year, killing them both.
On Wednesday, following my Brisbane radio talkback segment with 4BC’s Sofie Formica in which we discussed the unacceptable tragedy of Ms Langham, an aggrieved father contacted me to relay his daughter’s “disgusting” experience.
He said one police officer gave her incorrect information about how to proceed with her DV complaint while another told her he had better things to do.
“I was with my daughter when the attending officer said, ‘I hope you realise this (the paper work) is keeping me from a good traffic shift’. I wanted to throttle him,” the father said.
On her third complaint to police, the 21-year-old mum lucked on an empathetic ear from a female officer, and four years and expensive legal battles later, she is safely out of her former, abusive relationship.
“It shouldn’t be a lottery to find an officer who knows how to act,” the father said. “Domestic violence is getting worse, yet victims are made to feel like they’re the problem, and not the perpetrator.”
In December, a damning Women’s Safety and Justice Taskforce report recommended an independent commission of inquiry into cultural issues within the QPS.
The taskforce, led by former Court of Appeal president Margaret McMurdo, received 500 submissions from victims and identified many cases in which police had failed to properly investigate DV complaints.
The report found many women “won’t even pick up their phone to call the police because they have no confidence in their ability to help”.
Yet Queensland Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll has rejected demands for an inquiry, insisting there are no “widespread cultural problems”, only “some individuals” who “don’t always do the right thing”.
Tell that to Ms Langham’s family, and the many other families left shattered by domestic violence.
In the past financial year alone, Ms Carroll says Queensland officers have attended to more than 120,000 DV cases – a 13 per cent spike on the previous year.
With domestic violence now taking up 40 per cent of police time, it has never been more important to get the responses right, 100 per cent of the time.