WEST Australian police have changed their reporting procedures on domestic assaults to be more stringent.
The crime statistics from the 2014/15 year reflects an increase in the number of assaults, but Bunbury Police officer in Charge Senior Sergeant Malcolm Jones said it may be a false reading.
He said because the police policy had changed in relation to how the attending officers record assaults, they were seeing more offences linked to domestic violence.
“Although there may be an increase in actual assaults, a lot of that may be in relation to how we are recording and attending to them,” Mr Jones said.
“The police have always recorded a report for the incident but whether we link an offence to that has changed.
“And we are much more cautious now in making sure that if there is any indication of an assault we link it to an offence, but there may not be a resolution to it.”
He said when the victim didn’t want to progress and there was no other supporting evidence they wrote it off as insufficient evidence.
The crime report showed homicides had tripled and he said they were very hard to police – you can go years without one and then have a spate of them.
Mr Jones said they are very rarely linked and are for different reasons, be it domestic violence or other circumstances.
He said drugs were a huge influence on all incidents, including property offences and offences against the person.
“There are agency wide initiatives in place in relation to drugs and the commissioner has been very clear that it is a community wide issue,” Mr Jones said.
“Investigation of offences where drugs could be linked, domestic offences in particular, there is a strong follow up with agencies for support.”
He said the increase of 373 offences against property in the last financial year could be attributed to drugs, which drives crime.
The good news is for total offences, compared with this time last year, Bunbury are 2.4 per cent down.
“That equates to 27 less reported offences than this time last year,” Mr Jones said.
He said this was because of specific targeting of defences and getting prolific offenders off the street.
