Queensland is inviting retired and former police officers back to the front lines as the service faces the departure of hundreds of staff in the next few years.
Proposed changes will allow for a new category of “special constable” to help ease staffing pressure on the state’s police service, with officers over the mandatory retirement age of 60 allowed to return and undertake frontline duties.
At present, police officers can only be employed full time or part time and they cannot be employed past 60.
With 176 Queensland police officers expected to depart the force in the next 12 months and more than 850 by 2026, Commissioner Katarina Carroll said the special constables would strengthen frontline numbers, particularly on busier shifts such as weekends and public holidays.
“Another example is if people take long-term leave over those holidays, we’ll get these special constables in, but also frontline duties for natural disasters and those big events that we’ve got coming like the Olympic Games,” she said on Thursday.
Ms Carroll said police hotlines were already buzzing with interest and several soon-to-be mandatorily retired officers had expressed their desire to stay on within these roles.
She said the ideal roles to fill were general duty frontline staff, and police would target both retiring workers and those who had departed the force in recent years.
Officers will have to undergo testing and will be fully sworn in and have the standard powers of an operating police officer.
“This is transition into retirement but I think more than that, what it allows us to do is have a pool of relief officers that we can deploy very, very quickly which at the moment is a rigid system of doing that,” she said.
Ms Carroll said police had faced recruitment challenges recently but this program was not in response to propping up their pipeline of new recruits.
© AAP 2023
