The former officer in charge of the Queensland police domestic violence unit says decades of “Band-Aid” and “patchwork” reforms have clearly failed to protect vulnerable women, amid growing calls for a royal commission to examine repeated police failures.
Last week, an inquest heard how a desperate Logan woman, Doreen Langham, contacted police 20 separate times and was “basically told to go away and don’t come back” in the days before she was killed by her former partner.
Retired Insp Regan Carr, the former Queensland police state domestic and family violence coordinator, said she “felt sick” reading about Langham’s situation.
“It’s the same story, it’s like a broken record to a certain degree,” Carr said.
“It’s 2022 and women are still dying horrifically. We have so much research, so much evidence, we have the best of the best equipment, and we’re still not getting it right.
“Part of it is asking, ‘What is it that has to change?’”
Carr, a 34-year veteran of the QPS, said her comments should not be read as a criticism of individual police officers, who in many cases were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of domestic violence incidents.
“I cannot imagine how let down some of these frontline officers must feel. They must feel extremely disheartened, because I know they don’t go to work with the intent of harming people,” Carr said.
“At the end of the day the people we have to listen to in all of this is the victims.
“I’ve spent most of my career working with vulnerable people and vulnerable victims. I’ve always believed that we have to be their voice, we have to be there for them. Whatever we do we have to take the burden off them.”
Carr said the state’s response to escalating domestic violence had been like a “patchwork quilt” and that constant amendments to legislation, recommendations or tweaks to policy were not having enough impact.
“It’s not a big enough Band-Aid; you can’t keep doing it,” Carr said.
“You can’t keep saying, ‘We’re doing this, we’re doing that’ when there’s clearly something that’s not quite right.
“Sometimes you’ve got to be brave, really brave, as a government, as a community … to ask why are we not collectively getting this right.”
‘She was desperate, absolutely desperate’
At an inquest last week, the Queensland deputy state coroner, Jayne Bentley, was told that two weeks before Doreen Langham was killed her former partner, Gary Hely, threatened her life.
Langham called police to report the threat. Each time Hely breached a domestic violence protection order, Langham contacted police. She called and went to two separate police stations.
On 22 February last year – 15 days after Langham first called police – Hely bought 10 litres of petrol, entered her townhouse at Browns Plains in the Logan area, and set the place alight.
By then Langham had made more than 20 calls and spoken to at least 16 separate officers.
Criminologist Kerry Carrington, from the Queensland University of Technology, was given access to the coronial file, including transcripts of those conversations.
“She reported breaches to the police five times in the week before she was murdered and all but one officer told her to basically go away and don’t come back and just come into the station once a week because you’re coming in too often to report breaches,” Carrington told the inquest.
“She was desperate, absolutely desperate.
“None of that seemed to get through to the police who picked up the phone.”
Carrington, an advocate of the South American model of specialist police stations for women and families, said that had such a station existed, Langham would have been met by a trauma-informed councillor, taken seriously, and listened to without judgement.
“Then she would have been interviewed by a police officer who works from a gender perspective and understands domestic and family violence is a cycle of coercive control.”
Over the past week, as the Langham inquest repeatedly made front page news in Queensland, the police commissioner, Katarina Carroll, sent a communique to all officers that said while most police work is excellent there had been “instances where we have failed victims”.
Under Carroll – especially since the deaths of Langham and Gold Coast woman Kelly Wilkinson – reforms have been made. In her statement to officers, Carroll pointed to a trial allowing police to use body-worn cameras to record victim statements; a dashboard tool to target high-risk perpetrators; district based victims’ units; the establishment of a police advisory group; and a police-wide domestic and family violence audit.
Where police remain at odds with others – including researchers, women’s groups and the state women’s safety taskforce, chaired by former court of appeal president Margaret McMurdo – is in the extent to which police culture contributes to repeated police failures.
Carroll and the police union are opposed to a recommendation of the McMurdo taskforce for a royal commission into “widespread cultural issues”, having taken submissions from women about their experiences reporting domestic violence.
“A Queensland woman seeking police help to stay safe from a perpetrator enters a raffle – she may get excellent assistance, or she may be turned away,” the taskforce report says.
“Unfortunately, the taskforce has … heard that many police officers right across the state are not responding to women’s complaints of domestic violence and this is putting women’s safety at risk.”
Learning lessons from the past
On Tuesday, the deputy police commissioner, Tracy Lindford, gave a press conference after a domestic and family violence death in the Logan area. She spoke about the sheer volume of the problem.
“Once again we see the complexities of domestic and family violence,” Lindford said.
“In the last financial year, we dealt with 120,000 domestic violence occurrences. Our people right now in the QPS spend 40% of their time, police time, investigating domestic and family violence. So that is the scale of the issue that is out there.
“While the vast majority of the time our people get it right, there are occasions where we don’t.
“I don’t think there’s a cultural issue. [Police] are taking a lot of action and they’re doing it every day.
“Since Ms Langham’s death there’s been a lot that has taken place to make sure we do better.”
The deputy state coroner is examining whether those changes are sufficient; Carrington and others say past inquests show that police have previously promised reforms, and that these have not been effective.
More than a decade ago, Noelene Beutel was beaten within an inch of her life. According to the coroner, two police officers who spoke to her in hospital “responded poorly … and wrote off the job”. She was murdered – by the same man who put her in hospital – six months later.
The inquest into the 2011 killings of Antony Way, Tania Simpson and her daughter Kyla detailed how a police officer did not consider the killer’s prior controlling behaviour to be domestic violence.
The report on the death of Indigenous woman Elsie Robertson in 2013 outlined what police themselves concluded was “an unreasonable delay” of more than an hour between a call for assistance and officers attending the address in Cairns.
The inquest into the 2015 death of Mr M – killed by his partner’s ex – described the police response as “inadequate” and beset by “inaction and tardiness”.
In each of these cases, the inquest findings detail how police have committed to reforms, including better education for officers, reviews of policies and procedures.
Carrington says more now needs to be done.
“This is a systemic, institutional issue and it goes to the core of police culture,” she said.
The Queensland government will ultimately decide whether to adopt the full recommendations of the McMurdo taskforce and hold a commission of inquiry – a final call will likely be made by state cabinet.
Such a move might be politically difficult; the influential union that represents rank and file officers has called the taskforce report “woke”.
Queensland’s attorney general, Shannon Fentiman, told Guardian Australia the government was “prepared to take action” on issues raised by the taskforce, including how to improve frontline responses.
“The [taskforce] recommendations are based on the submissions of over 700 brave women who came forward to share their experiences with the system and how it failed them,” Fentiman said.
“We know there is more to do and government is carefully considering all of these recommendations and will be providing a response soon.”
