12:00a.m. 7th September 2008

| By Rae Wilson

10/07/08 176953 Photo: Cade Mooney/Sunshine Coast Daily

A Sunshine Coast police officer has revealed a crisis in the local service as morale slips lower than it was after the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption in the 1980s.

The long-serving officer has revealed a litany of problems including sick officers not being replaced on shifts; police cars being taken off the roads to save money, and officers battling just to get batteries for their equipment, including breath-testing alco-meters.

“It’s only been a matter of luck that an innocent member of public hasn’t died because of a lack of resources. It’s not good management, it’s pure luck,” he said.

The officer, who wanted to remain anonymous, said there were shifts at the Maroochydore station “every week” with no police vehicle on the road because sick staff were not replaced.

The same problem rotated across all Coast stations each week, resulting in a failure to put cars on the road.

He claims police officers straight out of the academy are being paired with constables with just 12 months’ experience.

“To save money, from Noosa to Caloundra, they won’t call anyone in if someone is sick,” he said.

“If someone is sick in the regional office, they will call someone from a station to relieve them, but they won’t replace the person at the station.

“There’s a number of occasions where Maroochydore will say they need an urgent request and, rather than try to address the issue, they’ll try to get a car from Noosa.

“Recently there was a violent domestic at Maroochydore and it was 30 minutes before a car got there from Noosa. It’s embarrassing for all of us but we can’t tell the truth to the public, we have to toe the party line.

“Everything about this job is perception, that’s drummed into us on a monthly basis.”

The officer said even collecting batteries from the “penny-pinching” district office had become arduous.

“They only care about dollars and cents, they don’t care about the public at all,” he said. “It’s gotten to the point they question the amount of batteries we use.

“Alco-meters chew batteries at an alarming rate, so we might have to go back several times in a week.

“Across the entire Sunshine Coast, they changed to alco-meters that include GPS, which had to be calibrated.

“There’s usually four to six at each station but, for about six weeks, we had one at Maroochydore, one at Noosa and none at Kawana or Caloundra.

“If we stopped a (possible) drink-driver, we had to get a car from Maroochydore to do the test or we had to let them go.

“This current management we have in the Sunshine Coast district is slowly driving the service down the tube.

“We’re losing people we shouldn’t be losing, who have contributed a lot to this job, because they just don’t care anymore. Morale is at an all-time low.”

The officer said he was speaking out because he was “tired of hitting the wall”.

“The reason I got into the force, like many of us, was to make a difference,” he said.

“We just want to be able to do our job. And we want to be able to turn up at a house and not cop abuse because we’re so late.

“It’s not our fault we don’t have the resources to do good for our community.”

A police union spokesman said the union had raised the issues with the police service numerous times.

“In terms of the specific issues about relief being provided to the regional office but not operational police, we would say that is typical of the administration focus of the police service,” he said. “It’s a sad fact that the police service has become too administratively bound and focused on paperwork rather than solving or preventing crime.”