Response from State Coordinator and Commissioner of Police Grant Stevens
‘As I have said repeatedly over the past 14 months, the role SAPOL has played in responding to the COVID19 pandemic has been extraordinary. Sworn police officers have had to undertake non-traditional policing roles. It is a fact that SAPOL resources have been and continue to be stretched.
No one could have predicted that police officers would be deployed to airports, border check points, medi-hotels or check business and quarantine compliance. This has all been necessary to ensure the overall safety of the South Australian community.
SAPOL has a primary role to respond to all emergencies including pandemics. SA Health is the lead responding to health issues, but SAPOL must ensure the overall safety of everyone in our community. This has meant undertaking those very different tasks.
I can assure you the roles performed by SAPOL members have been a major contributing factor in how well this state has responded during the pandemic.
Notwithstanding our COVID-19 response, SAPOL has maintained the more traditional policing roles, which keep our community safe. This has required some prioritisation, as well as the suspension of non-critical activities. This has only ever been a temporary approach.
South Australia’s pandemic response is going to continue for some considerable time. I have been actively working with government, SA Health and other sectors to extract the police from compliance checking and medi-hotel duties and return them to core policing duties. This will not happen overnight as we are still obliged to ensure the community is safe from COVID-19.
Operation Trace was a 1 week operation which concluded yesterday. It saw a dedicated group of police officers who were already engaged in COVID-19 compliance checking – reminding people and businesses of their responsibilities with the QR check-in system.
This is a lawful requirement; and police officers as authorised officers under the Emergency Management Act, were appropriately deployed for 1 week to re-enforce the critical importance of QR code compliance for our contact tracing capability in South Australia.
This operation did not take police away from general patrol duties or crime investigation. The impact of the operation was significant with almost a million more check-ins per day. These are compliance levels which had not been reached prior to the operation.
Other than the Northern Territory – South Australia has the lowest restrictions of any community. All members of SAPOL across the board; no matter what role they have played, have all contributed in some way to our successful pandemic response.
Having said that we cannot become complacent in our endeavours to sustain the low level restrictions we have at this time and to keeping COVID19 out of our community.’
If you require further information you can call the SA COVID-19 Information Line on 1800 253 787 between the hours of 9am to 5pm 7 days per week or go to the SA Health website at www.sahealth.sa.gov.au/ or www.sa.gov.au/covid-19
