The Malinauskas Government wants South Australians to understand its latest deal with police as an expression of gratitude.
Under an enterprise agreement reached in principle with the Police Association of South Australia, police officers have been offered four annual pay increases of 4 per cent between 2027 and 2030. The package also includes improved overtime and specialist allowances, regional incentives and additional benefits for experienced frontline officers. The Police Association has described it as the largest police salary package in South Australia since 1995. Depending on rank and other changes, base salaries could ultimately rise by substantially more than the headline 16 per cent. Police Association members are yet to vote on the agreement.
Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis called it a “fantastic outcome”. Police Minister Michael Brown said police deserve to feel “valued, respected and supported”. The Government also boasted that more than 800 officers have been sworn in since 2023 and that South Australia has reached its full complement of police.
It is another milestone in the state’s ever-expanding investment in policing: more officers, higher salaries, improved allowances, new technology and a political commitment to keeping police numbers at historically high levels.
However, the question governments refuse to ask is whether an expanding police force is making people safer, or simply expanding the number of situations in which armed officers are sent to manage mental distress, disability, homelessness, poverty, drug use and other human crises.
Because while the Government talks about valuing police, people are dying during encounters with them.
The deaths behind the announcements
In January 2025, police were called to a home in Craigburn Farm after receiving reports that a 40-year-old man was threatening to harm himself.
He was alone in the house. He needed care.
Four police officers attended alongside ambulance officers. SAPOL said the man confronted police with a knife and that a Taser was deployed unsuccessfully. More than one officer then fired their gun. The man died in hospital.
Before any independent investigation had been completed, Police Commissioner Grant Stevens publicly said that, after viewing body-worn camera footage, the officers appeared to have acted in accordance with their training.
That statement should trouble us.
If police can act in accordance with their training and a person experiencing a mental health crisis still ends up shot dead, then the training cannot be the end of the conversation. It may be part of the problem. A system cannot justify a killing simply by saying its officers followed the rules of a system designed to authorise force.
In May 2025, 42-year-old Gaurav Kundi became unresponsive while South Australian police were arresting him at Royston Park. He died in hospital two weeks later. His death was treated as a death in police custody and referred for coronial investigation, with police use of restraints among the issues under scrutiny.
Then, in August 2026, a 23-year-old Aboriginal man from the APY Lands died during an arrest on West Terrace in Adelaide. Police said four officers were involved in restraining and handcuffing him before he became unresponsive. His death is now the subject of coronial, commissioner’s and internal police investigations.
These deaths are not interchangeable, and the precise circumstances of the more recent cases remain under investigation, but taken together, they reveal the consequences of making police the default responders to human distress. People experiencing mental illness, psychosocial disability, drug-related distress or extreme agitation are treated first as risks to be controlled. Police arrive with weapons, restraints and the institutional authority to use force. The situation escalates, somebody dies, and the same institution involved in the death is entrusted with investigating what happened.
The public is then asked to wait for years for a coronial finding while official statements establish the police narrative within hours.
Police are not a mental health service
Governments repeatedly describe mental health call-outs as exceptionally difficult work for police. That much is true. What they will not acknowledge is the obvious conclusion: police should not be the primary service sent to many of them.
The World Health Organisation says mental health care is best delivered through coordinated, community-based services, including accessible health care, peer support, psychosocial rehabilitation and supported living. It also identifies poverty, violence, inequality and environmental deprivation as important determinants of mental distress.
Police address none of those conditions.
They cannot provide stable housing. They cannot replace an overstretched mental health system. They cannot create culturally safe healing services. They cannot undo poverty, isolation or dispossession. They are equipped to command compliance, contain people and use force.
Yet whenever the social consequences of government policy become visible, police are sent to manage them.
When somebody is homeless, police move them on. When somebody is in distress, police restrain them. When a young person is struggling, police criminalise them. When Aboriginal communities demand resources, governments offer more surveillance. When people ask why services were not available before a crisis, politicians announce another police initiative.
This is not accidental. Police expansion allows governments to avoid addressing the conditions producing harm while appearing to act decisively against their consequences.
“Record investment” is a political choice
Governments often speak about police spending as though it is unavoidable. It is not. Every police officer recruited, every specialist allowance increased and every new surveillance technology purchased represents a political decision about where public money should go.
The Government has even backed a $35 million artificial-intelligence trial across the South Australian public sector, including tools intended to reduce SAPOL interview-transcription work so officers can spend more time on operational duties.
The state is not merely maintaining a police service. It is steadily increasing its personnel, reach, technological capacity and political power.
This does not mean individual workers should not receive fair pay. The question is why governments can always find political enthusiasm and public money for police while community-controlled services, Aboriginal organisations, housing providers, mental health workers and peer-led crisis responses are forced to compete for short-term grants and prove their value over and over again.
Police budgets are treated as investments. Community services are treated as costs.
Police receive multi-year certainty. Community organisations receive pilots.
Police are trusted to define what they need. People who have survived police violence are asked to make submissions.
An institution investigating itself
There is also a profound accountability problem.
When a death occurs during a police operation, SAPOL may initiate an internal investigation or commissioner’s inquiry, with oversight bodies involved to varying degrees. But oversight is not the same as independence. Police still collect crucial evidence, interview officers, control information and shape the earliest public account of what happened.
This matters because the first official narrative is powerful. Media reporting frequently reproduces police descriptions of a person as “armed”, “aggressive”, “non-compliant” or “known to police”. Those words can function as advance justification for whatever force was used.
The person who died cannot provide their account.
Their final moments become a story told by the institution whose conduct is under investigation.
A genuinely accountable system would ensure that deaths and serious injuries involving police are investigated by a body institutionally independent of police, with the authority and resources to gather its own evidence. Families should have immediate access to independent legal and cultural support. Body-worn camera footage and other evidence should be preserved and disclosed without families being forced into years of litigation and advocacy.
Police commissioners should not publicly clear officers, even provisionally, before an independent investigation has reached its conclusions.
Safety cannot be measured in police numbers
The proposed pay deal is being presented as proof that the Government values safety, but safety cannot be measured by the number of officers sworn in, the size of a police pay package or the speed with which an armed response arrives.
Safety is having somewhere secure to live. It is being able to call for help during a mental health crisis without risking being shot, restrained or criminalised. It is access to health care, income, community, culture and support before distress becomes an emergency. It is knowing that the state institution empowered to use violence will not be allowed to investigate itself when somebody dies.
South Australia does not need another self-congratulatory announcement about record police investment. It needs an honest reckoning with what that investment produces, who it targets and why police remain the state’s preferred answer to problems that cannot be solved with guns, tasers, handcuffs or more uniforms.
The Government has shown that when it wants to guarantee four years of investment, it can.
The question is why that certainty is reserved for policing, and why the people and services capable of keeping communities safe without killing, restraining and criminalising them are still expected to survive on what is left.
