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More Indians, Sikhs in Victoria Police
Melbourne, 22 July: India has been the centre of world attention particularly in the last two months when attacks on Indian international students caught the eye of world media particularly with the attack on Shravan Kumar Teerthala who ended up in ICU of Royal Melbourne Hospital.
The Indian students have always been hesitant in reporting any matters to police, firstly because of their own misapprehension of being disadvantaged from getting their permanent residency should they ever get involved in police matters and secondly their regular complaint is that even if they summoned enough courage to walk into a police station to report a matter – the police would simply not treat them fairly. They claim generally they are simply shoveled back home by police officers attending on them, without even writing any report and in extreme cases the allegations entail stories of abusive and racist behavior on police’s part.
That has led many in the student community, but notably not so in the established Australian Indian community, to call for a ‘multicultural police’ for a multicultural society.
In an exclusive interview with the Chief Commissioner Simon Overland, Bharat Times put this and many related questions seeking answers.
There have been reports of some police officers showing 'some attitude' when international students went to report matters to police, your response.
‘I am confident we provide a high quality service; I can’t pretend though that we always get it right – there might be instances where the response isn’t as it should be.But if that is the case then one of the things that we say to Indian students is that ‘let us know’. We have complaints regime in this state. They can complain to independent body Office of Police Integrity (OPI) – or even let me know’ – said the Chief Commissioner.
And the commissioner assured BT that the complainant would be regularly – fortnightly kept informed of the progress of investigation of his/her complaint.
Is the police force under-resourced?
‘As CEO of the force, I would always like more but we had around 10,230 police force in 2002 and grew to 11,100 in 2009 and by June 2010 I will have another 150 police force added to that number,’ the Chief Commissioner told BT.
The police force grew by 870 officers between 2002 and mid 2009 while the number of Indian international students alone grew from 5000 (2002) to 47000 (2009), more than doubled since 2006. And by a multiple of approx. 50,000 per year if international students from across the world were added. For the record, the Chief Commissioner thinks the increases (in police numbers over time) have been significant.
There have been calls for a 'multicultural police force' in place of a 'monocultural police' Your view of multicultural police for Victoria?
‘Multicultural police? Absolutely, absolutely’ says the Chief Commissioner,
What steps can be taken then?
‘We are in the process of looking at our recruitment practices – we are – I mean we have changed – we do have multicultural officers working with us now … we’ve just launched a new programme where we recruited people to deal with new and emerging communities because we realize there are special challenges for those – people arriving in Australia… we have more people from diverse backgrounds joining as police officers and that’s fantastic – but we need to do more of that. We really need to have a a workforce that broadly represents the community that we police. I would love to see more Indian people join the police, I would love to see Sikhs come and join the police, we need more Muslim people to come and join the police, we need more Sudanese people to join the police – that’s the direction we would be going’, the Chief Commissioner told BT.
The official crime figures show a significant presence of Indian victims in both Robbery (319, 512) and Assault (700, 894) cases for the years 2006-07 and 2007-08. Interestingly, when there was a significant jump in the case of Indian victims of assault - 194, there was a decline in the case of Caucasian victims for the same period - 19454 to 19188. In the case of Robberies also, the significant leap in case of Indian victims - 193 is not reflected in Caucasian victims which went up from 1492 to 1535.
While the new multicultural recruitment programmes are being implemented, Chief Commissioner’s message to the students:
“the attacks are wrong, if they are racist that’s also wrong. We are not a racist country and we understand it’s important that anyone who comes here – be they Indian students or international students has a right to be safe... they just need to trust us, they need to work with us because I think there is a lot that we can do together to keep them safe and they need to understand that we would do everything we can to keep them safe.â€
- DM
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