Police Are Drowning in Demand — Why Are We Still Chasing Cannabis Users?
The independent ANZPAA report released yesterday on the role of police in Tasmania confirms what we already suspected: cuts to other government services are pushing more demand onto police. It's the same picture playing out in our emergency departments and hospitals. The independent ANZPAA review shows that operational dispatches have surged by 40,000 incidents over the last decade, with family violence calls alone skyrocketing by 250% – often taking up to eight hours of an officer's time per incident.
While the report looks at ways to do more with less, it doesn't consider whether police should be spending their time on low-level offences.
The report identified that mental health, family violence and stealing/theft incidents are taking up a lot of police time. What it doesn’t mention is that Tasmania Police proceeded against 1,300 people in 2024–25 for minor cannabis offences. That means low-level cannabis users made up around 16% of all offenders caught by police in Tasmania that year.
While Tasmania Police doesn’t report the exact hours spent on these arrests and prosecutions, modelling from the Victorian Parliamentary Budget Office shows that Victorian police spend roughly 56,800 hours a year enforcing cannabis laws. There is no reason to think it is any less significant here.
If we're serious about freeing up police to focus on the high-harm issues our community actually worries about, decriminalising minor cannabis possession is an obvious place to start.
It's time we had that conversation.