By Carey Joy

OPINION: An incredibly devastating and major blow has been dealt to the entire NT Police force this week due to the reprehensible actions and behaviour of the NT Police Command and Commissioner of Police, and another from which the already fragile force surely will not recover.

We have now seen the Commissioner and NT Police management destroy what is left of the ability of police officers to lean on each other and seek support when they need it.

This has been evidenced most lately by the illegally obtained material released through the current coronial inquest, but also includes the manner in which Alice Springs staff have been stood down recently and charged with breaches of police policy and alleged poor conduct for speaking to their mates.

At the same time we are being presented with the R U OK? campaign, which encourages everyone to speak to their mate about their mental health, we have seen NT Police management remove current and ex-NT Police members comments about how poorly they had been treated and the simple fact that ‘no’, they were not ‘OK’, from an NTPFES social media post image of two commissioned officers holding an R U OK? sign.

As a 15-year police veteran, I am incredibly saddened and concerned by what has happened to our NT Police force and my ex-colleagues.

One would have imagined that the week prior to the biggest coronial trial that we have seen in our policing history, a concerned leader would attend Alice Springs, address his staff in person and put extra services in place to assist staff through this event.

One would have expected the leader, given the NTPOL is currently faced with record suicide levels, would ensure an NTPA rep, counsellor and welfare officer were posted in Alice as extra support for his staff going through such a difficult time in their careers. Instead, we have seen two superintendents and Deputy Commissioner Murray Smalpage sent to Alice to act as “liaisons” between NTPOL legal teams and the Commissioner to ensure their message is on course at the coronial.

So again, staff are second and the command structure protecting their own interests made the top priority.

The most astounding event so far, however, concerns the leaked messages and personal attack on Constable Zach Rolfe and other officers by means of disclosing what has been proven to be unlawfully obtained text messages.

The comments from the Coroner, in her ruling to permit illegally obtained private text messages, stated that, “Nothing in the Coroners Act expressly prohibits me from receiving, and considering, evidence that has been unlawfully obtained by another person”.

What this shows is that the Commissioner of Police has allowed investigators to illegally interrogate Constable Rolfe’s private phone and withdraw private conversation records involving different officers, retain these conversation records for over three years, then present them in a coronial inquest to publicly attack his own staff members.

Firstly, how is the Commissioner, who is meant to be the most ethical and trusted NT Police Officer we have, permitted to illegally obtain information and then use that information against his own staff members publicly when it suits him?

How has the Police Minister and the Chief Minister ignored these facts, and many more breaches of duty, but continue to leave him sitting in the chair as the Commissioner of Police? How is this not behaviour which directly ‘undermines the integrity of the Northern Territory Police and the community of the Northern Territory’, as has been levelled against another officer?

Why has no action been taken to ensure this can’t happen again? If the Commissioner can illegally obtain information from one of his staff members, what stops him from doing the same to any other Territorian, even with the checks and balances that are supposed to be in place? If he can illegally obtain it, he has shown that he will.

What’s clear to myself and other current and former officers is that this deliberate action was taken so the media could obtain this information and publish it, with the Commissioner believing people would then forgive him for his disastrous $4 million murder trial and agree, ‘yes Constable Rolfe and the IRT staff are naughty racist men, this is all their fault, not the NTPOL management team’.

However, the facts we have all seen on the body worn footage, show the behaviour of Rolfe and his partner prior to entering that house in Yuendumu and while in the dwelling were anything but racist. Constable Rolfe was respectful to those he approached. But then he was stabbed.

He was ultimately acquitted by a Supreme Court jury of murder and related charges.

NT cops live with and protect Aboriginal people every day; sometimes it takes a toll

Our Police force and anyone who has ever lived in the NT, understands there is no way a genuinely racist person harbouring racist views towards Indigenous people would ever choose to work in such a location, where 90 per cent of your job as an NT Police officer is living amongst, working with, and protecting Indigenous persons. So, to suggest a racist would choose to work here is simply ludicrous.

But that’s what Chalker wanted the public to believe and to use the texts to distract from other problems and failures in the force.

What the leaking of the illegally obtained text messages actually did, was destroy the last element of the fabric of the NT Police force’s sense of comradery and security.

We were always told as new recruits that at times you will need to vent, swear or discuss things that the average person not in the police force would find very confronting and offensive. So, if ever you needed to vent, yell, cry or say things that are not for public consumption, you were to discuss them with your colleagues in private or inside the stations, as we were not to lose our composure in the public eye. The station and the officers next to us were our last line of defence and the only people who understood.

This, thanks to the behaviour of our Commissioner and the management team, has been completely destroyed.

Officers now know that private messages taken completely out of context can be illegally obtained, used against you and given to the national media for distribution.

Also, it requires raising, that under our latest executive, your police stations now feature secret audio and video devices which have been used recently to order other officers in Alice Springs stood down for airing their personal grievances to their peers about management.

Is this how the NT Police encourages its members to speak to their colleagues?

When I say the texts were ‘out of context’, I can offer this as an example: in one 24-hour period as an NT Police officer I attended a remote location where a 7-month-old baby had been raped by an adult male relative; I then attended a job in Larapinta where a male had used a saw to cut his grandfather’s head off save for approximately one-inch of skin, killing him.

I was a first responder to these jobs, and if it had not been for the ability to vent and message a colleague at 3am, god knows where I would have ended up.

The general public have no understanding at all of what horrors a police officer deals with and sadly in the NT, a lot of these incidents occur in Indigenous communities. The workload is simply beyond belief and we have the highest percentage of violent crimes per capita than anywhere in Australia.

Is it any wonder our officers are now faced with the worst retention rate in our history, the lowest recruitment rates in our history, the highest resignation rates in our history, critical staff shortages, and now tragically, the highest suicide rates in our history?

During the week of the R U OK campaign, we have seen the Commissioner show he is happy to have illegally obtained private messages disclosed against an officer without any regard for his mental well-being, and at the same time, happy to delete comments made on a post about mental well-being by other officers still trying to come to terms with the trauma they have suffered through the job.

Any ability to vent to a colleague or vent inside the station, which were these officers’ only places of safety, have been destroyed forever.

It is absolutely disgusting that this has occurred to the NT Police force and its staff; these officers now have all of their friendships compromised, comradery and security is gone and won’t be restored.

We have also seen just last week another eight NT Police officers resign. To put this into perspective, that is enough staff for an entire 10-hour shift in Alice Springs, who have now also left the force in one week.

If the NTPA survey was to be done now, after this last week, the number of officers with no confidence in the Commissioner would be in excess of 99 per cent.

Carey Joy is a former NT Police officer who worked in the Territory Response Group (TRG), led the Immediate Response Team’s (IRT) initial task force, and was also a federal agent in the Tactical Response Team (TRT), a national and international police tactical group working on deployments around Australia and overseas. His last five years in law enforcement were in Alice Springs with the NT Police as a general duties shift sergeant and bomb technician for the Central Region. He resigned in 2016 to start his own company.