During Estimates hearings on Friday 26 July 2024, I asked the Police Commissioner about whether watch house officers are adequately trained to provide services to children.
You can read my question and his full response below, or in the official Parliamentary record of proceedings (Hansard) here.
Mr BERKMAN: I appreciate the opportunity. I will start with a question to the commissioner, if I may. Commissioner, are you of the view that watch house officers are adequately trained and equipped to provide health and welfare services to children, including children who may be severely disabled or cognitively impaired?
Commissioner Gollschewski: I thank the member for the question and I will answer it by focusing on that in a bit. Can I say that, since becoming commissioner, watch houses have become an area of some concern to me. In fact, I have had recent conversations with both the Human Rights Commissioner and the chair of the CCC about the concerns that I have, and it is not just around the treatment of children in our watch houses. Watch houses are very difficult environments, not just for the people we have to put in them but also for my workforce, the people who have to work in them.
We have 64 watch houses across Queensland, some which you could say are up to speed in terms of what we would look for currently and some which, sadly, might have been state of the art in their day but that was 50 years ago. It is an area of great concern. I raised very early with both the minister and the Human Rights Commissioner that I intended to focus on that area. Since that discussion, we have instigated a dedicated program which I will go into later, should I get the time, but I want to come back to your question.
Yes, there are the places, so the facilities themselves—how they are constructed, what we put in them, how we staff with them and not just with police. For instance, in the Caboolture hub, where we keep children, there are embedded youth justice workers, health workers and regular availability of other specialists to come in and support children when they are in that facility.
Our preference is not to have children in watch houses and to process them as quickly as possible. The children that are put in our watch houses are those that we cannot deal with otherwise— where the risk to community safety is such that they cannot be bailed and they cannot go elsewhere. The only way we can reduce that risk to community safety is by putting them in custody, and that is the appropriate thing to do. Of course we are increasing our operational and investigative targeting in that area to make sure we are bringing people to account who are posing that sort of risk to the community. My answer is that is an ongoing piece of work. I am not satisfied that we have the capabilities we need to appropriately deal with this. I have appointed Deputy Commissioner Cameron Harsley to lead a piece of work that will look at our places, our people, the culture that we have in our watch houses, how we act. I have concerns about the level of complaints we are seeing coming out of our watch houses as well.
As I said, this is a piece of work that we will do collaboratively with the Human Rights Commission, the CCC and Queensland Corrective Services. I have spoken to the commissioner there. I am yet to engage with the Queensland Family and Child Commission, but we will. I acknowledge that the government has given us $5.5 million in this budget towards watch house modernisation. That is a start, but I can guarantee that I will be coming back after we do this work to see how we can significantly enhance how we manage our watch houses, including how we treat people within them.