The ACT Director of Public Prosecutions’ increasingly emotive and promotional social media presence raises broader questions about whether prosecutorial offices should market themselves like modern corporate workplaces.
“All rise for Roxy – our Chief Comfort Officer.
“As part of our wellbeing initiative, we welcome four-legged friends on Fridays to bring light-hearted relief to a high-pressure environment.”
The above staff-morale boosterism comes complete with a picture of a smiling dog, plus paw and puppy emojis on LinkedIn.
Cute, eh?
Who’s posting? A vet? A pet groomer? Maybe just a good, honest small business somewhere?
No. This is the Office of the ACT Director of Public Prosecutions. And it gets worse.
“Here’s Roxy fur-mly upholding the law of comfort, settling in with quiet authority and offering exactly the kind of fun and loveable presence that helps our team take a moment to relax and reset.
“Verdict? Roxy delivered a judgment in favour of ear scratches, snacks and belly rubs.”
Oh, please.
This, one assumes, is a result of the office appointing a media director, the very concept of which would have been seen by many lawyers and journalists as an unnecessary grotesquery not so very long ago.
Are internal staff matters and team-priming of any interest to the public, let alone to complainants and defendants in criminal matters, the people most affected by decisions at the DPP’s office?
The Victorian Office of Public Prosecutions has a media office but no social-media presence, its Media Advisor and Principal Solicitor Jacqueline Harris confirms.
The NSW Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions has a Linked In presence (9000 followers), headed by four posts that were straightforward job ads, followed by ‘Company Spotlights’, which linked to a version of the ‘About Us’ page from the office’s website. Further posts were short: one paragraph on a Supreme Court appointment, and no more than five pars each on recent engagements of the office and the director at summits, conferences, careers fairs etc.
All dead straight.
The ACT DPP is different, with a lot a lot more emotive material, in my view.
For example, “The increased focus on psychosocial safety has been a priority of Director Victoria Engel SC since coming to office in 2024, as the ACT DPP seeks to transform into a best-practice, modern prosecution service – bringing [it] into line with similar moves in most other jurisdictions.”
And then there are the several posts in support of victims and witnesses generally and for Domestic and Family Violence Prevention Week especially.
Fair enough for an office that deals with victims and witnesses? Or is that material better left to the Domestic Violence Crisis Service, the Women’s Legal Centre and other advocates?
Other posts are arguably not only appropriate but seriously worthwhile, as well as newsworthy.
For example, under the headline, ‘From Pilot to Permanent’, one post tells the story of the Nominal Informant, which is basically an initiative to have a police sergeant at Court daily to assist with information on bail applications. Where previously defendants were stymied by junior prosecutors not being able to make decisions, or lacking answers to a Magistrate’s questions, now the logjam is broken. The Court is well served.
Other posts zero in on particular cases, including one on the “the first conviction and sentence following the commencement of the Crimes (Stealthing) Amendment Act 2021 (ACT), which expressly recognises intentional misrepresentation about condom use as negating consent.”
Fair enough and, before hitting the link to the case there is a trigger warning that it contains details of sexual offending. That’s good.
Another hails the DPP’s success in having expert defence evidence excluded in a matter. There was no new law here. It was interesting enough to some of us, but just a case.
There are more posts, but among them I’m yet to find one where the Prosecutor’s office didn’t win.
Criminal defenders like me are allowed to win (and, yes, to put up testimonials on our websites), but prosecutors aren’t supposed to win or lose. Their job, as “ministers of justice”, is to present the best evidence possible – whichever side it might favour.
They are not to be partisan nor political. Some people might argue that posts featuring only convictions are somewhat partisan and that others, perhaps the blanket support for certain causes, are somewhat political.
Like NSW, there are job ads. LinkedIn, of course, proclaims itself a recruiting, networking and job-searching site with more than one billion participants globally.
Curious though that there have been so many ACT DPP job ads posted over the course of recent months, given the Director’s crying-poor budget routine. (That said, the ACT Budget has just included funding of almost $19 million for 24 new positions in the Director’s office.)
The best explanation might be what many practitioners have been contending for some time: that good staff have been falling out of the DPP’s office at an unprecedented rate, and that the office is struggling to recruit adequate replacements.
The DPP social-media presence is growing, most recently to Instagram: “We’ve launched this channel to share more about what we do and the outcomes we achieve for the Canberra community, and to help demystify how the criminal-justice system works day to day.”
Demystify? I think not. The picture created by the DPP’s LinkedIn posts is of a criminal-justice system in which every charged matter ends in conviction.
It just ain’t so.
Disclosure: Andrew Fraser is on Facebook and LinkedIn. His articles and testimonials are posted on his website: frasercl.com.au
Andrew Fraser began his journalistic career in 1979 and has been practising criminal law since 2008.