Australian police and the housing crisis: A scoping review
A recent report by Gilbert et al. (2021), identified housing-related challenges faced by ‘key workers’, i.e., those employees essential to the functioning of society, which include police (Gilbert et al., 2021). Rising costs of living and limited access to affordable accommodation have meant that many key workers, police included, cannot live close to their sites of employment, creating numerous risks for themselves, their employers, and those they serve. For individual officers, these risks may include fatigue, financial stress and vulnerability to misconduct – each of which can result in poor police practice, thereby creating risks to the safety and security of the communities they serve. For policing organisations, challenges include ensuring the minimum staffing at operational sites and timely availability of personnel for rapid response deployments. This is a scoping review to determine more precisely the ways Australian police and their employing organisations are affected by the housing crisis. The review will include: a comparative analysis of both police wages and housing availability in each Australian jurisdiction; identifying the availability, if any, of subsidised housing for police officers in each jurisdiction; and clarifying the nature of the risks associated with insecurely housed police officers. The results will be analysed to identify remaining knowledge gaps on the key issues and to begin developing potential strategies for the secure housing of police officers. The analysis will also allow critique of the long-standing belief that police must be both present in a community and representative of a community to effectively undertake their work.