Issues with staffing levels and heavy demand on police during this year's three-month bushfire crisis means there's less time for proactive policing, the police association says.
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Tasmania Police's 2018-19 Corporate Performance Report revealed an almost 27 per cent increase in offences in the Launceston district.
Police Association of Tasmania president Colin Riley said Launceston station needs more staff.
"They are flat chat," Inspector Riley said.
"Police aren't responsible for people's behaviour. All we can do is influence their behaviour, but effectively we need time to do it."
COURT AND CRIME
The police capability review is looking at allocation of staff across the force, as well as the changing nature and growing sophistication of crime.
Acting Northern Commander Stuart Wilkinson said they were listening to their people in relation to the number of officers available to respond to jobs.
"There is a review of our numbers going on at the moment, however we feel we have adequate numbers to resource the area," he said.
Launceston is the Northern district's only 24-hour police station, compared to four stations in the south.
Serious crime has been a challenge for the Northern district with some of the state's most high-profile murders happening in the region in the past three years.
But there was a 73.9 per cent clearance rate of serious crime last financial year, which was more than 30 per cent higher than the clearance rate for total offences in the same period.
Inspector Riley said there was a high expectation police would resolve serious crime.
"You can have simple serious-crime where someone kills someone and they own up to it, or you can have difficult serious-crime where people conceal what they've done," he said.
"They've [the North] had a really hard time with difficult serious-crime."
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Inspector Riley said there were four areas that needed consideration, improvement or implementation to fix the growing crime rate.
"The first thing is there needs to be safe numbers and therefore you need methodology that tells you that," he said.
"Secondly, you need a mechanism to understand if members are being subject to reasonable workloads.
Inspector Riley said they asked the agency for a police officer allocation model at the start of this year to determine correct numbers, but they were still waiting for that information.
The police association also wants to see a mechanism that monitors the mental health of officers to determine the difference between allocated and effective strength.
"Fourth: encouraging a culture where members speak up, because they generally just want to do whatever is asked of them, so both the members and agency need to speak up when they're doing stuff that isn't core business," Inspector Riley said.
"An example is helping other government agencies because they have capacity issues, therefore we aren't doing proactive crime reduction."