CONTRARY to public opinion, Ballarat remains a safe city at night, Chief Commissioner Simon Overland said in a visit to the region yesterday.
But addressing the perception the city is unsafe is as important to Victoria Police as protecting the community, he said.
"The reality is, Ballarat is a safe city but people don't feel safe and we have to address that as much as we do the actual violence that's occurring," he said.
Mr Overland was instrumental in developing the new 120-member Operations Response Unit (ORU), launched two weeks ago , a taskforce formed for deployment across the state to help local police deal
with late-night, alcohol-fuelled street crime.
He said the unit could grow to 600 members by next year and said such saturation-style policing was a significant step in helping to address public perceptions of safety.
"The interesting thing will be what the impact this saturation policing will have and what it does to the problem," he said.
"If it calms it down, how long does it calm it down for? Does it calm it down for good or for three months? Do we hit it, calm it down and then come back in two months and hit it again?
"That's the sort of level of thinking and analysis we need to do to keep disorder and crime at an acceptable level."
Mr Overland has also spent his first year in the top state police job campaigning for greater police powers, such as on-the-spot fines for drunken revellers, introduced in December.
This week, the Victorian Government extended these powers, enabling police to issue fines of nearly $500 and ban troublemakers from entertainment precincts for 72 hours.
"I know at times my members don't feel they are adequately supported by the judiciary and I at times understand their frustration," he said.
"But, ultimately, sentencing is matter for the legislature and the courts.
"The fines and banning notices are starting to have an impact. They are going up to nearly $500, which starts to make it a very expensive night out."
Mr Overland said the ORU would be used as often as required on Ballarat city streets on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, but he denied Police Association claims that the city needed 98 more officers to effectively patrol their area.
"I don't know how they have worked that figure out.
"This police service area is fully resourced, in fact it's over strength by three at the moment, so I can only allocate the numbers I have got.
"Would I like more? Of course I would.
"But it doesn't matter how many resources we have got, we know the nature of crime will move around.
"Now, with the ORU, if we have a problem we have to deal with, I have to have the flexibility to move the resources to where the problems are."
Mr Overland said a shortage of officers one day last month that led to the officer in charge of Ballarat police station, Senior Sergeant Peter McCormick, performing court security duties was not a
resourcing problem.
"It would seem to point to (not having enough members) but within Ballarat itself there are five vacancies in the station in the process of being filled and if you look across the PSA, they have more police than they are funded for by three," he said.
"If those sorts of things are happening, it's local management issues.
"If they are short to that extent, I am really interested in finding out why because it doesn't make sense with the data around their actual numbers and vacancy rates."
Email a friend