Cross Border Policing
The Tweed/Coolangatta border is the busiest border in Australia with thousands of tourists and local party goers flocking there every year.
Yet the Coolangatta police station is only manned during the day. Tweed police station is just one short kilometre away, but officers can only cross the border to apprehend an assailant if they are trained as Special Constables, and if they are willing to undertake the hours of paperwork that follows a cross-border arrest.
As Andrew Eppelstun of the NSW Police Association recently stated on ABC program Hungry Beast, “..it is a great frustration for police. If I arrest someone in Queensland I can’t bring them back across the border.”
(15 April 2010 Hungry Beast ABC – can be viewed here )
