A New Top Cop !

Premier Gladys  Berejiklian and her cabinet made a wise decisions when they filled the post of Police Commissioner from within and avoided making the selection from the ranks of the Deputy Commissioners who had been jostling for the job.    The man chosen - Mick Fuller - has served one rank level below that elevated hierarchy but as an Assistant Commissioner he would be fully aware of the tensions within the force and he would know what needs to be done.

The job he has chosen to accept puts him on a level with just a handful of other senior people in this country when it comes to the sheer size of the organization under his command.    The New South Wales police force is the biggest in Australia with a serving strength of  sixteen thousand five hundred serving officers and with a budget in excess of 3.5 billion dollars.  It serves the important function of dispensing law and order and protecting the citizens of this state from the ravages of crime.

Mick Fuller has made it clear that he intends to use his position to make policing more " visible " to the people of this state.   He believes that more police to be seen patrolling the streets deters crime and that the sight of marked police cars on the road system has a bigger safety deterrent to other drivers than an anonymous speeding fine arriving in the mail.

The nature of crime is ever changing.   The mix of the community has changed over the past twenty years.   The nature of crime has vastly changed with a declared war in progress against our standard of living by terrorists who aim to deliver mass murder in support of their strange ideology.   We are waging - and losing - an ongoing war on drugs.

There is a growing problem with the police image.   Police are accused of becoming authoritarian and running roughshod over the rights of ordinary citizens.   Policer firepower has increased and in some jurisdictions it has reached military levels.  Here in New South Wales the police attend serious incidents in a Bearcat armoured vehicle, with a machine gun turret on top.    The standard police Glock pistol is to be supplemented by the inclusion of a military assault rifle in every police car.  The police now wear body armour when dealing with the public.   Putting on a police uniform delivers an element of danger to those who represent the law in the public domain.

There is a vast difference between policing in a major city such as Sydney and the thinly resorced facilities in rural Australia.    Often an officer of relatively junior ranking is responsible for a vast district and a wide mix of people.   It is a matter of training if such a situation delivers a fair and even handed application of the law across different cultural groups.   This is usually dictated by the attitude of those tasked with overall supervision of wide areas of control..

Mick Fuller has the task before him.   He will need to pick his crew to disseminate his view of how this state will be policed and he will have to overcome the usual inertia from those who have a comfy job and no wish to make any sort of change.   He will have to weed out elements who seek to use police powers for their own gains and he will have to endure the politicks that go with serving a parliament composed of very differing ideologies.