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In the early decades of the Queensland Police Force’s existence, a Brisbane city policeman was truly a jack-of-all-trades. Apart from the extensive policing duties (peace preservation, crime prevention, prosecution, beats) he was expected to fill the gaps in the civil service system. These were far from traditional police duties and they occupied a considerable portion of a policeman’s time. Even well into the twentieth century, the extraneous duties list contained on average fifty to seventy tasks.
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Cartoon re extraneous duties of country police officers. Printed in Queensland Police Union Journal 1924.
Image No. PM1411 courtesy of the Queensland Police Museum
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In his first report to the Parliament, Commissioner David Seymour alluded to these duties, namely ‘summons-serving, acting as Clerks of Petty Sessions, rangers of Crown lands, inspectors of Slaughter-houses, district registrars of births, deaths, and marriages, and bailiffs of Courts of Requests — none of which duties are legitimately those of constables.’
In the two decades between 1904 and 1924 the list more than doubled. In 1904, police held thirty subsidiary appointments that included such diverse tasks as ‘customs officer’ and ‘secretary to marsupial board.’ By 1924 the list grew to seventy items, which ranged from more or less police related work as a ‘superintendent of prison or police gaol’ to a ‘ranger of reserves for the protection and preservation of native birds’ and an ‘observer at stream-gauging station for hydraulic engineer’.
Consecutive commissioners voiced their dissatisfaction with the numbers of subsidiary duties and their impact on ‘legitimate police functions’. In many places, actual policing activity was superseded by the performance of these extraneous activities, the Police, as such, existed only in name.
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Cartoon showing the burden of extraneous duties – printed in Queensland Police Union Journal 1932.
Image No. PM1367 Courtesy of the Queensland Police Museum
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Towards the final decades of the century the range of these extraneous duties decreased. However about one-third of man-hours were still taken up by work for the civic agencies.
The list of additional duties has further shrunk in the twenty-first century. Contemporary regulations at large reduced police responsibilities to only those duties that half a century before would undoubtedly be deemed ‘legitimate police duties’: obtaining warrants, gathering evidence, making arrests and enforcing laws – or in a nutshell crime detection and prevention.
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