Threats to kill are regularly being analysed by Victoria’s forensic psychologists and psychiatrists only after a person has been convicted, wasting opportunities to identify dangerous individuals before they turn to violence, experts warn.
Victorian threat experts have helped design proactive joint police and mental health threat response teams for the United Kingdom and Queensland but moves to develop the same model in Victoria have failed to gain traction.
Professor James Ogloff from the state’s forensic mental health institute, Forensicare, said there should be a joint program to manage threats at home. “It’s a viable model that has been a great success elsewhere in Australia and overseas,” he said.
Forensicare runs a Problem Behaviour Program that assesses and treats people who threaten to kill, but this operates independent of police investigations and is most often only called in after a person has been convicted of making threats, he said.
In a heightened terror landscape and an increasingly digital world, where we are easier to find and threats of violence are made with the click of a button, police and those tasked with assessing threats are under more pressure than ever, he said.
“People don’t change but the mechanisms they use to make threats does,” Professor Ogloff said.
While terrorist threats are referred to ASIO, people not associated with terrorist groups but who threaten violence under a terrorist banner end up in his office.
“We see people who do have extreme views, who are terrorists, and there’s other people who potentially aren’t terrorists but they have mental illness and sometimes the consequences can be the same,” he said.
Victoria Police declined to say whether it had been approached about the joint model, instead saying: “Due to security and operational reasons, Victoria Police will not comment on methodology.”
A spokeswoman for Police Minister Wade Noonan said: “An initiative such as this may have merit, but it needs to be understood that decisions regarding organisational structure and the specific deployment of resources fall to the Chief Commissioner of Police.”
When threats against the British royals were seeing millions of dollars poured into extra security each year, Victorian forensic psychiatrists, professor Paul Mullen and Dr Michele Pathe, were in the expert team called in to find a solution.
Their research on isolating credible threats within a sea of disturbed communications paved the way for the first police mental health taskforce in the world. The UK’s Fixed Threat Assessment Centre opened in 2006 with teams of police and mental health clinicians investigating threats made by lone individuals.
Dr Pathe established a similar unit in Queensland in 2013, which manages threats cases for politicians, police and other agencies.
Professor Mullen is the former head of Forensicare and has assessed some of Australia’s most notorious killers. He said a proactive joint taskforce could potentially prevent serious violence in Victoria.
It would also help thousands of ordinary Victorians who live in fear, and lead to treatment for mentally ill individuals who have slipped through the system, he said. “We’re missing the opportunity to recognise and help some very seriously mentally ill people,” he said.
Police recently raided the Victorian home of a mentally ill man after he sent a threatening letter to a prominent politician,” Professor Mullen said.
“He wasn’t much of a threat, if any, to begin with but the raid would have increased his agitation, increased his anger and made him potentially more dangerous,” he said, adding that their approach should have considered the man’s clinical history.
Asked why Victoria doesn’t have a joint taskforce, Professor Mullen said: “I’m still hopeful that we will.”