Kerre McIvor: Police and guns - will planned changes make any difference?

An Armed Offenders Squad callout to an incident where a man was seen threatening people with a knife. Photo / Hayden Woodward

OPINION:

The Police Commissioner and the Police Minister unveiled a $45 million initiative this week designed to, in the words of the minister, "get every single police officer home to their family at the end of each day".

The commissioner said the death of Constable Matthew Hunt was the driving force behind the complete rethink of frontline officers' safety. But it's hard to see how the initiative would have made a blind bit of difference to getting Matthew Hunt home.

From the evidence I heard in the trial of Eli Epiha, the man who admitted to murdering Constable Hunt and who was being tried for the attempted murder of Constable Hunt's partner, David Goldfinch, they were shot in cold blood.

Epiha decided, for whatever reason, that he would shoot at two unarmed officers, and he would shoot to kill them.

A witness described seeing a man jump out of a black car, holding a gun like an AK47, when the police car pulled up. "His hand was on the trigger in the shooting position, ready to shoot," the witness recounted and within seconds, the witness heard shots.

These were two young officers, approaching a smashed-up car, ready to assist what they thought must be an injured driver. Instead, they were shot in the street.

Constable Goldfinch had just enough time to raise his hands to show he was unarmed and to plead with Epiha to stop before Epiha pulled the trigger.

So in this particular instance, it's hard to know how the measures announced this week would have prevented Constable Goldfinch's injuries and Constable Hunt's murder.

Still, having more training and more police has to be a good thing for the police and the community.

The proposed model means more than 200 additional police officers will be qualified at the armed offender squad standard.

Currently there are 300 members of the Armed Offenders Squad. Tactical training to frontline staff will also be doubled from 3.5 to 7.5 days per year.

Dog handler teams will be double-crewed and there will also be training on how to de-escalate situations. That will undoubtedly be helpful.

Every highly regarded martial arts or self-defence expert says the best way to resolve a conflict is to prevent it taking place but again, given the trigger-happy nature of the people our police are having to deal with, I wonder how many times they'll be given the opportunity to test-drive their freshly minted negotiation skills.

Most of the people who identified themselves as serving officers who contacted me on my radio show didn't believe the new measures would make a blind bit of difference.

And it was chilling hearing the young wife of a police officer telling me that the public didn't know the half of what the police deal with on a daily basis. She worried every single day whether her husband would make it home to her and their 5-month-old baby. She spoke for a lot of officers' partners.

The Police Association is cautiously optimistic, however.

President Chris Cahill says the initiative is an acknowledgment that the increasing use of illegal firearms has changed the policing environment and that police, and the public, need better protection.

It is, he says, a viable alternative between the status quo and general arming of police. I hope so. I really do. And I'm sure the Police Commissioner does too.

I had him in the studio for an hour recently talking all manner of policing and he's a very pleasant man. Media-trained to within an inch of his life, and so well-versed in Politspeak as to be almost unintelligible, but I have no doubt he wants the best for his officers. His own son, he says, wants to join up.

So the impetus is there, as if any more were needed, to create a safer working environment for all his men and women.

Let's see if he can deliver.