Reference no: EM133013804

Oakhurst police station is where you definitely do not want to be sent when you graduate from police academy. Some new police officers even refuse the posting when they know it will mean unemployment if they refuse. Oakhurst police station has 60 police officers to serve a community of just 8,000 people - and every one of them is constantly busy.

The small, dusty and forbidding town of Oakhurst (population 2, 270) is more than 4 hours drive on a desolate road to the nearest proper town. Oakhurst offers almost nothing for its residents to see or do. It has the barest essential facilities. Most retail shops are boarded up and covered in obscene graffiti - the owners ran away years ago. The town sits on the edge of the endless Great Tasman Desert; it almost never rains and the long, hot summer days average 40°C for months. Around Oakhurst there are even smaller townships of a few hundred people each and the police station is responsible for a district covering thousands of dry, barren kilometers full of deadly snakes and spiders.

Oakhurst and the surrounding townships are 80% Aboriginal (native, indigenous peoples). Very few have jobs and alcoholism and drug abuse are endemic. Crime is very high. From petty crime like theft, burglary, car crimes through to serious assault, domestic violence, sexual assault, rape and the occasional murder. Police experience physical and verbal attacks, threats against their families, drunkenness, spitting and damage to their personal property (car, home) frequently. The Aboriginal people are taught by their parents to hate the police from a young age. There is zero trust and zero cooperation - it is almost like a war zone. But Aboriginal relations are a very sensitive political issue. Hundreds of years of discrimination means that governments take a very soft approach towards intruding on Aboriginal affairs.

Not surprisingly, police morale is very low at Oakhurst police station: turnover is 70% per year. Police sent to Oakhurst last 15 months on average and then resign and leave the police. There are hundreds of police stations in very nice cities and towns around the state, but jobs rarely come up. In those places, a police officer will stay for 20 years. You have to join a list for a nice transfer - each year you serve, you go higher up the waiting list for a transfer. So, transfers come with long service but nobody can stay at Oakhurst long enough to get a transfer. Transfers and postings are managed by the Department of Policing. These are bureaucrats in the big city who make the rules. They know nothing of the misery of being a police officer in places like Oakhurst. The high turnover further damages police-community relations in Oakhurst because the public never get used to seeing the same police officers. It is impossible to try and build trusting relationships with the Aboriginal people when they know that the police do not even want to be in their town.

Police performance is also very low. The Department of Policing uses a 'relative measures' approach along with a 'forced distribution' model to rank police stations and police officers. Relative measures evaluations result in Oakhurst station always being ranked last in the State because it is compared with all other police stations on set criteria. Oakhurst has: the most crimes per 1,000 of population; most arrests; most complaints from the community; highest turnover of staff etc. The forced distribution model to assess the performance of police officers is also a problem. The Regional Director of Police assesses almost all Oakhurst police officers in the lowest 10% in the state every year. This is because Oakhurst police make more mistakes and fall behind with paperwork and this is because the station is always staffed by inexperienced officers because of the turnover problem. Morale is so low and the job so much harder than in a rich neighborhood in the suburbs. Oakhurst police feel that 'forced distribution' is unfair to them because other police elsewhere have a much easier job and can perform much better and so get better results. This whole situation causes a further decline in morale and engagement with the job and the police service. Poor performance evaluations cause more pressure and, so, more mistakes. It is like a hopeless downwards cycle that has no end and no beginning - just repeating year after year.

Question:

Retention of police is poor for some obvious reasons. What planning approach would you take to improve retention at Oakhurst police station and what initiatives could realistically be introduced to encourage police to stay at Oakhurst longer?