The Problem Isn’t Police Numbers. It’s Policing.

Every few years, policing attempts to rebrand itself.

This time in South Australia, it’s “cutting red tape”, “reducing fatigue”, “getting cops back on the road”, and yet another sweeping restructure of a system that insists the problem is how policing is organised, not what policing is.

While reports of police harm are repeated year after year, responsibility is endlessly displaced and reallocated. For example, in 2023, a whistleblower claimed police was “failing victims of crime and forcing burnt-out officers to the brink,’ and that detectives are “bogged down in needless red-tape and paperwork.” The Police Commissioner rejected these claims, suggesting the “information is inaccurate and potentially defamatory.” 

Now, around three years later, the same issues are confirmed by an independent review and the South Australian Police Commissioner admits the “district policing model was no longer fit for purpose,’ and there are “longer term things which require substantial changes to our structure.” 

The Police Commissioner assures us that officers are overworked, bogged down by Coroner’s recommendations, hampered by reporting obligations, and suffocating under administrative burden. We’re told crime is only up six per cent, but police workload is up thirty. We’re invited to sympathise with the strain. To believe that if only the model were tweaked, blended frontline and investigative units, mobile phones rolled out faster, calls graded differently, policing could finally become “fit for purpose”.

But here is the truth that never makes it into these reviews: the problem is not the number of police, the distribution of police, or the amount of red tape police must wade through.

The problem is the institution of policing itself.

Policing Was Never Meant to Keep Us Safe

Policing, as it exists in this country, was not designed to produce safety. It was designed to protect property, enforce racial hierarchy, and uphold the interests of the state and the elite. That function has not changed; it has simply been dressed up in new language.

No amount of restructuring will transform an institution built to manage inequality into one that resolves it. 

In fact, a 2018 psychology study by David Levari and colleagues found that when the prevalence of a problem decreases, people shift the boundaries of what counts as a problem. In policing, this means that even when crime declines, definitions of “serious” crime expand, drawing more behaviours into the net rather than shrinking it.

Levari illustrates this phenomenon by pointing to changes in dictionary definitions over time. For example, while a 1960 edition of Webster’s Dictionary defined “aggression” as “an unprovoked attack or invasion,” more recent definitions have expanded to include behaviours such as “making insufficient eye contact.”

Applied to policing, this dynamic helps explain why reductions in crime do not lead to reduced police presence: instead, the boundaries of what counts as serious or concerning behaviour expand, sustaining the perceived need for policing.

In other words, reductions in crime do not automatically lead to reduced policing; instead, the boundaries of what is defined as criminal behaviour tend to expand, sustaining the perceived need for police intervention.

Coroner’s Recommendations Exist Because Police Kill People

We are told officers are “bogged down” by Coroner’s recommendations. Let’s sit with that for a moment. Coroner’s recommendations are not bureaucratic niceties; they exist because police keep killing people. Because people keep dying in custody. Because violence keeps occurring at the hands of the state. If police are frustrated by the obligations that follow death, perhaps the problem is not that they are bogged down by accountability, but that they are not bogged down enough.

What kind of institution complains about the paperwork that follows preventable deaths while continuing to produce them?

The Commissioner laments fatigue, yet the institution refuses to confront the harm it inflicts daily on communities who experience policing not as protection, but as threat. Aboriginal people. People with disabilities. People in mental distress. Poor people. Women experiencing violence who are met with suspicion or punishment instead of care. Children criminalised early and often.

Managing Harm Instead of Ending It

We are told police are being diverted into work “better handled by other services”. Mental health call-outs. Welfare checks. Domestic and family violence responses. This admission should be a breaking point, because it confirms what communities have been saying for decades: police are not equipped to do this work, and their presence often escalates harm.

And yet the solution offered is not divestment. It is not removing police from roles they should never have occupied. It is not transferring power and resources to community-led, non-carceral responses. Instead, it is better call-grading. Fewer welfare checks attended. Less involvement, but only because police are overstretched, not because their involvement is dangerous.

That distinction matters.

The report tells us that up to 40 per cent of metropolitan police are unavailable for frontline response. That investigations are overdue. That technology has increased administrative burden. That the system is “no longer sustainable in its current form”.

Here’s the thing: it has never been sustainable. It has only been survivable for some, while extracting an enormous cost from others.

The damage caused by policing cannot be explained away by under-resourcing. It reflects the role policing was designed to play – enforcing order through control and punishment rather than addressing harm at its roots. Cycles of review and reinvestment do not represent reform; they reveal an institution more committed to its own survival than to public safety.

Each review promises trust, adaptability, safer communities. Each one insists that with just a little more time, a little more technology, a little more money, policing will finally work. Meanwhile, the death toll continues. Communities remain over-policed and under-supported. And police unions demand more resources while resisting meaningful accountability.

The hypocrisy is staggering.

We are asked to accept that police are too busy to do their jobs properly yet never asked whether their jobs are the right ones to be doing at all. We are told demand is increasing, yet no one asks why social harm is being funnelled into a law-enforcement response instead of addressed at its root. We are barely invited to debate models, structures, and staffing levels, let alone the legitimacy of policing as the default response to social problems.

Divestment Is the Only Honest Response

We do not need another restructure, more resourcing or endless handwringing about the “complex role” of police.

We need divestment.

Divestment from an institution that has proven, over and over, that it cannot deliver safety without violence. Divestment from a system that absorbs enormous public funds while producing harm that other services are then expected to clean up. Divestment from policing as the primary answer to poverty, mental distress, family violence, and social inequality.

Those resources should be redirected into housing, healthcare, disability support, community-controlled crisis response, prevention, and care, the things that actually reduce harm before police ever show up.

This is not radical. It is logical, and honest.

The question is not how to make policing more efficient. The question is why we continue to pour money into an institution whose core function is incompatible with justice, safety, and dignity.

South Australia does not need a better policing model.
It needs less policing, and more courage to imagine life beyond it.