Katarina Carroll

The view from the top is across the city of Brisbane, with all its potential for pain. Her large corner office with its deep, masculine leather sofas is high up at Police Headquarters, looking out over office blocks, across the river, the tin roofs and neat gardens of suburbia, to the mountains. Way down there, in those civic streets, are all the daily dramas, the abrupt violence, the casual cruelties – all the extremities of human behaviour. Beyond that is the unpredictable state of Queensland: vast, disaster prone, disparate, often in disarray.

All of this, and 16,000 police officers and staff, are under the command of Katarina Carroll, 57, Commissioner of the Queensland Police Service.

And this week had been a trying one, even for the redoubtable Commissioner, a woman who has seen pretty much everything human beings can do to each other. This week Queensland knocked itself out on the bad behaviour front. “It was absolutely one of the most difficult weeks. We had the child [who died] on the bus in Cairns, we had five cyclists die, a terrible domestic