Queensland Police Service Are Now Recruiting Teenagers

The Queensland Police Service (QPS) has lowered its minimum age requirements in a bid to draw 17-year-olds into the force.

QPS is speeding up enrolments by allowing teenagers to apply one year earlier, so they can enter the academy as soon as they’re of age.

The recruitment pathway is meant to help bolster their goal of 1000 new recruits each year for the next three years according to 7News Cairns, and came into effect immediately, targeting Grade 12 school leavers as an alternative to tertiary education or vocational institutions.

“We want them here at 18, they will be out on the road at 18-and-a-half,” said Queensland Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll on Thursday. “What I want to do today is to encourage every 17-year-old in Queensland to apply for the Queensland Police Service.

“You can be one day in the sky in a helicopter, one day out on a boat with the water police, on a push bike, on a motorbike,” tempted Minister for Police Mark Ryan in a bid to appeal to the youth by selling the same breadth of activity as an Action Man doll.

It comes as QPS inducted nearly 130 new recruits into the force — noted as the largest number of graduates sworn in in a decade — and a fortnight after the Palaszczuk Government dropped $3 billion into the police budget.

Meanwhile, in interesting timing, QPS is also hurriedly attempting to save face after their union called for better domestic violence awareness and training in the force on Thursday, after the deaths of Hannah Clarke and her three daughters in 2020.

Last year, the internal Working for Queensland survey identified a level of disconnect within QPS ranks, with people reporting a lack of trust in the organisation’s leadership, according to the ABC.