Adelaide‘s Hindley Street is virtually unpatrolled after 3am on weekends with police so undermanned they can no longer guarantee public safety on the notoriously violent party strip.
Police sources told The Advertiser officers were no longer able to make all required arrests, and were being forced to pick and choose which crimes to punish due to a dire staff shortage.
The police union said even more officers were quitting the force as a result, adding to a nationwide recruitment and morale crisis following overzealous police enforcement of human rights-violating Covid restrictions.
Before 2020 there was an average of 35 officers on patrol with four sergeants during the busy early morning period, but this is not down to one sergeant and 8 to 10 patrol officers, and on some nights there can be as few as two.
Hindley Street is a hotspot for alcohol-fuelled violence where police are regularly called to respond to reports of brawls and serious assaults.
Police Association of South Australia president Wade Burns said he could confirm claims there were often just two officers patrolling the entire Hindley Street area after 3am on weekends.
“It’s not as if crime is down, or the population has decreased, but for some reason we’re running with way fewer police officers in this area than ever before, and paying them the same money to do three times more work,” he said.
“Our members are telling us that they simply can’t guarantee people’s safety anymore – They’re spread too thing and the workload has intensified.
“If the government wants to know why people are leaving policing at a rate of knots, look at Hindley St. It’s a microcosm of the wider problem.”
Police sources said that officers were being forced to ignore crimes, and that when they did it left the dangerous party precinct further exposed while paperwork was completed.
Police Commissioner Grant Stevens said the South Australia Police Force did not agree with the assessment that public safety could not be guaranteed, saying it was the view of individual officers.
Last year South Australia announced plans to allow 200 officers from overseas to fill frontline shortages, and Western Australia will also recruit hundreds of foreign officers over the next five years.
In NSW more than 1,000 police left the force over the last year, creating a shortfall of 2,279 officers, and in Victoria public confidence in police is at an all-time low.
In Queensland a damning internal fraud and corruption review found that in 2022 alone there were more than 1,000 misconduct reports from inside the police force, including hundreds of allegations of violence.
The QPS is so desperate for new officers that in 2023 it launched a global recruitment drive to find 500 foreign nationals a year for five years to join the force. They are not required to be Australian citizens or permanent residents.
Despite the recruitment crisis Prime Minister Anthony Albanese recently announced a $400 million Pacific Policing Initiative to train police officers in Pacific Island nations.
Pictured above: A sickening alleged assault on Hindley St on August 11 which left a 20-year-old man unconscious and bleeding.
