Warning: This article contains the names of deceased persons
There is a particular kind of danger that comes with a police officer who is never off the clock. Not because they are protecting the public, but because they carry with them the authority, entitlement, and impunity of the state into every space they enter. The mythology says “off duty” means they are just another member of the public. The reality is something else entirely. They are armed with power even when they are not in uniform, and increasingly, they are using it.
The footage of a 13-year-old Aboriginal girl being thrown across a train seat by an off-duty WA police officer this past week is not an anomaly. It is a window: a glimpse into what happens when policing is not contained by time, place, or accountability. A child is pinned to the floor, her body lifted and thrown, her head hitting glass. And then, almost predictably, the machinery turns not toward the officer, but toward the child: charged, cautioned, processed. This is how it works. Harm flows downward, and accountability flows nowhere.
The Fiction of “Off Duty”
In most Australian jurisdictions, police policies make clear that officers may intervene when they witness what they believe to be an offence, even when off duty. They are often expected to identify themselves, assess risk, and call for backup. Use of force is supposed to be limited, proportionate, and justified. That is the theory.
What these policies actually produce, however, is a roaming jurisdiction, a form of policing that is effectively unbounded. An officer in a supermarket, on a train, in a car park, in a pub, deciding in a split second that they are the law in that moment, and acting accordingly. There is no partner, no body camera, no supervisor, no operational oversight. Just instinct, bias, and force. And we are meant to trust that this is safe.
When Intervention Becomes Violence
The death of Kumanjayi White should have shattered that trust completely. A young Warlpiri man with disabilities, restrained by off-duty police officers in a supermarket; not a police station, not an emergency scene, but a supermarket, the kind of place we are told is safe, ordinary, everyday. He died anyway.
This is what “intervention” looks like in practice. It is not neutral, careful, or protective. It is violent, it is racialised, and it is lethal. And it is not new. The killing of John Peter Pat in 1983 remains one of the clearest historical examples of off-duty policing turning lethal: a 16-year-old Aboriginal boy beaten by off-duty officers, dragged into a cell while unconscious, and left to die. No meaningful accountability followed. The system closed ranks, as it so often does. Different decade, same logic.
What sits alongside these deaths are the incidents that do not end in fatality, but still carry the same logic of escalation, entitlement, and harm. In 2023, in Dalby, Queensland, an off-duty police officer was stood down after headbutting a 14-year-old Aboriginal boy. The footage shows a confrontation, words exchanged, the teenager with his hands in the air, and then the officer driving his head forward into the child’s face. The boy later said he believed he was targeted because of the colour of his skin. Even in the official response, where the conduct was labelled “completely inappropriate,” the structure remains intact: an officer, off duty, asserting control through violence against a child in a public space.
In another 2023 case, a man claiming to be an off-duty police officer allegedly chased an eight-year-old Aboriginal boy, Elijah Stevens, with a ute and struck him as the child tried to ride away. The justification, reportedly offered by the man himself, was that he wanted to “teach” the boy a lesson after a minor altercation at a skate park. The boy is not just any child, he is the grandson of Aunty Tanya Day, who died after being taken into police custody in Victoria. The trauma here is not incidental; it is cumulative. It layers across generations, across encounters, across every moment where police insert themselves as disciplinarians, enforcers, and, ultimately, sources of harm.
The Problem Is Not “Bad Apples”
We are told, again and again, that these incidents are exceptions, that they are the result of individual misconduct, a rogue officer, a mistake, a failure to follow procedure. But how many times does it have to happen before we recognise the pattern? A child thrown on public transport, a man killed in a supermarket, a boy dead in a cell, a teenager headbutted in the street, a child chased and struck with a vehicle. This is not deviation. This is design.
Policing, by its nature, authorises the use of force. It trains people to see threat, to assert control, to dominate situations quickly. It embeds suspicion, particularly toward Aboriginal people, toward disabled people, toward anyone already marked by the system as risky or disposable. When you take that training, remove even the minimal constraints of formal duty, and place it into everyday public life, this is what you get: unregulated power, exercised impulsively, and backed by the institution.
Charged for Being Harmed
What makes these incidents even more obscene is the familiar aftermath. The girl on the train, injured and shaken, is the one charged. The narrative shifts immediately: what did she do, what justified the force, how do we reframe the violence so that it becomes legitimate? This is how policing sustains itself, not just through force, but through narrative.
It is a system that constantly repositions harm so that those subjected to it become the problem. A system that can throw a child into a window and then criminalise her for the impact. A system that can headbutt a teenager and still centre the conduct of the child. A system that can run down a boy with a vehicle and call it discipline.
Defunding the Conditions That Make This Possible
If police power does not end when the shift does, then the problem is not simply operational, it is structural. It is about what we have authorised police to be in our society: not responders, not protectors, but ever-present enforcers. Defunding the police is not a slogan. It is a necessary intervention into this reality.
It means shrinking the scope of what police are allowed to do, and where. It means removing them from spaces where their presence escalates rather than resolves harm: public transport, mental health crises, community disputes. It means investing in responses that are not built on force: community-led safety, crisis support, disability-informed care, culturally grounded interventions. Because the truth is this: an off-duty officer cannot kill someone in a supermarket if policing is not the default response to everyday life. A child cannot be thrown across a train carriage by police if police are not positioned as the arbiters of public space.
This Is What They Do
We are past the point of pretending these are isolated incidents. The through-line is clear. From John Peter Pat to Kumanjayi White, to children across this country being assaulted, chased, and criminalised by off-duty officers, the story does not change. Police intervene, people are harmed, and the system protects itself.
We are told to accept it. We shouldn’t. There is nothing accidental about a system that carries its violence everywhere it goes, even when it claims to be off duty.
