BILL Tilley has hit out at a plan by Victoria’s top cop to replace police on the beat with back-room crime fighting specialists, saying it could undermine the Coalition’s tough-on-crime credentials.
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The member for Benambra — a former police officer who resigned as parliamentary secretary for police in 2011 after being implicated in a plot to overthrow former police commissioner Simon Overland — ridiculed the idea as “drivel”, telling colleagues it sounds like “deranged ramblings of some aloof, out-of-touch committee comprised of people who have never walked the beat”.
In a document provided in essay format to Liberal MPs after a party room meeting yesterday, Mr Tilley said Mr Lay should think about redeploying some of the people that permanently inhabit police headquarters who are “constantly getting promoted without any idea about what is going on out there on the street”.
“Then they get to a point where they are tasked with coming up with drivel policies such as this,” Mr Tilley writes.
“By the time the cracks in their policies appear they have been promoted again, moved on and take no responsibility for the failing that eventually emerge.”
