$608 million, and rising.

Every Northern Territory budget for the last decade has had a line item described, in some form, as a record investment in police. Each successive line item has been larger than the one before it. The 2025–26 figure — $608 million for police services, including a $95 million continuation of the existing police funding package and $10.2 million for the Remote Policing Implementation Plan — is the latest, but not the largest in real terms it will remain.[1]

The arithmetic is upward and structural. Budget 2024 lifted annual police investment to a then-record $561 million; the government's published forward estimates extend to a $570 million additional commitment over five years.[2] The NT spends more per capita on policing than any other Australian jurisdiction.

This piece is not an argument that the NT police force should be abolished, defunded, or run on goodwill. It is an analysis of three questions that successive budget speeches have not engaged with seriously, and that a publication called Accountability for Alice exists in part to ask:

Question one: where the money goes

The published budget papers disclose top-line totals and a small number of itemised programs. They do not, in the form they reach the public, disclose category-level breakdowns of capital expenditure on equipment, surveillance technology, paramilitary capability, or specialist units. Some of that detail emerges in answers to written parliamentary questions; some becomes visible only after FOI requests; some is known only to the police themselves.

What can be reconstructed from the public record:

Wages and operations. The bulk of the police budget — like every police budget in every Australian jurisdiction — is salaries and overheads. Officer numbers, training, station running costs, vehicles, communications. This is the unspectacular majority of the spend.

Equipment. The 2024 budget allocated $4.6 million for "essential items" including communications systems, electronic recording-of-interview machines, forensics equipment, boats, and emergency-services rescue equipment. Eight Polaris all-terrain vehicles were funded as part of the same package.[3]

Capital and infrastructure. Successive budgets have included multi-million-dollar allocations for new police stations, watchhouse refurbishments, and remote policing infrastructure. Capital allocations are typically presented as a single number; their composition is not always disclosed.

Specialist units. The Northern Territory Police Force operates a Tactical Response Group (TRG), one of eight police paramilitary units across Australia.[4] Equipment for these units — including, in the case of every Australian jurisdiction's TRG, a Lenco BearCat armoured rescue vehicle purchased at approximately $400,000 each via Commonwealth funding — is in part funded outside the headline state police budget.[5]

Surveillance technology. Drone capability, automated number-plate recognition, and other surveillance systems are increasingly common in Australian state and territory policing. The NT-specific composition of this spend is not well documented in the public record. This is itself a finding: a budget item that the public is paying for but cannot inspect.

Question two: does more spending produce less harm?

The political argument for an ever-larger police budget rests on a chain of assumptions: more funding produces more officers; more officers produce more deterrence and faster response; deterrence and response produce less crime; less crime produces a safer Territory. Each step in that chain is testable. The full chain is rarely tested in public.

What the evidence actually says, drawing on the substantial criminological literature:

The relationship between police numbers and crime is weaker than political rhetoric suggests. Meta-analyses of police-numbers research consistently find that increases in officer numbers produce small reductions in some categories of crime — typically property crime — and very little measurable effect on others. The marginal dollar performs worse the more officers you already have.

The relationship between policing and harm is even weaker. Crime statistics measure reported offences. Harm — to victims, to communities, to people drawn into the criminal-legal system — is a different and broader category. A policing strategy that reduces a particular crime statistic by 5 per cent while increasing the prison population by 30 per cent is not, on most reasonable definitions of public good, a successful strategy.

What does reduce harm, on the published evidence, is upstream investment. Housing, employment, mental-health services, alcohol policy, early-childhood support and Aboriginal-controlled programs have stronger and longer-running evidence bases for harm reduction than additional officers. The Productivity Commission, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, and successive Royal Commissions have all said so, in different vocabularies, for decades.

The question is not whether to fund the police. It is whether each additional dollar is being asked to do work that no other dollar could do better.

The Territory is now running a natural experiment on this question. If a record police budget, paired with a "community safety" legislative agenda, produces a measurable and sustained reduction in harm — not just in reported offences in the months after the budget, but in incarceration rates, deaths in custody, recidivism, and the underlying drivers of crime — that should be visible in the data within a few years. If it does not, that should also be visible. We will be tracking it.

Question three: what would a defensible alternative look like?

"Defund" is a slogan, not a policy. The serious question is what mix of investments would, on the evidence, produce more safety per dollar than the current one.

The shape of an answer is not mysterious. It looks something like this:

Smaller police budget, structurally — not by cuts to the existing workforce, but by holding the nominal figure steady while inflation and population growth shift the relative composition of public investment. The political risk of explicit cuts is high; the policy effect of standing still while alternatives grow is the same.

Substantially larger investment in upstream harm-reduction. Housing-first programs. Alcohol-supply measures. Aboriginal-controlled justice reinvestment. School-based and community-based mental health. Youth diversion and bail-support services. Each of these has a stronger evidence base for reducing the kinds of incidents that produce custody events than the equivalent dollar spent on more officers.

Transparency on the existing budget. Quarterly publication, by line item, of capital expenditure on equipment, surveillance technology, and specialist units. There is no national-security argument against disclosing how much of a state budget is being spent on drones.

Independent evaluation. Every major new police program funded out of the budget should come with an independent evaluation requirement — published, peer-reviewed where possible, and not conducted by the agency being evaluated.

None of this is original. All of it has been said, in different forms, by Productivity Commission reviews, by the Australian Institute of Criminology, by the Law Council of Australia, by the Aboriginal Legal Service movement, and by successive Auditors-General.

What is missing is not the analysis. It is a media environment in which the analysis can be heard.

1. NT Government, Budget 2025–26: Supporting Police. budget.nt.gov.au/our-budget/supporting-police
2. NT Government, Budget 2024 — Making the Territory Safer. budget.nt.gov.au/key-deliverables/safer-territory
3. NT Government, Budget 2024 fact sheet, "Making the Territory Safer". budget.nt.gov.au (PDF)
4. Police Tactical Group entry, including listing of Australian state and territory tactical units. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_tactical_group
5. Background on Lenco BearCat procurement for Australian state and territory police tactical groups, summarised at the Australian Institute of International Affairs, "Police Militarisation, Racism, and Colonialism". internationalaffairs.org.au