The Queensland Police Service has been accused of attempting to influence politics by releasing misleading crime statistics during a by-election campaign. The Police Commissioner claimed crime had fallen by 10% in the past year, but criminologist Professor Kerry Carrington claimed this was based on “cherry-picking”: “When you look at the whole database there’s only been a very minor drop of around 2 per cent.” Terry O’Gorman, chair of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties, said it was reminiscent of the corrupt Bjelke-Petersen Government: “During the ’70s and ’80s police used to regularly release crime statistics that were wrong in order to support the government of the day.” In Victoria, a similar scandal around the 2010 election led to the establishment of an independent Crime Statistics Agency, which will begin on 1 January 2015.
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