The new family violence specialist police officers deployed to Ballarat will help the entire community, according to Superintendent Jenny Wilson.
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Announced yesterday, Ballarat's police will be reinforced with 15 new general duties officers, while the six family violence specialists, four Highway Patrol officers, and crime scene services and crime investigation officers will be shared with the Moorabool police service area.
The Ballarat police station is being reconfigured to fit all these new officers in, Superintendent Wilson said, with the family violence team and sexual offences and child abuse team moving to a separate Dana Street premises over the road.
"That will look to combine those specialist skills to improve our service delivery into the future as well," she said.
"It's documented now that every six minutes police are responding to family violence incidents across Victoria, and Ballarat and Moorabool (are) no different, we have a significant issue around family violence."
Court liaison officers specifically for victims of family violence will be part of the deployment, which will help get more frontline officers onto the streets, and a new family violence training officer will help keep other police members up to date on the latest policies and practices.
The aim is to stop the cycle of violence, Superintendent Wilson said, which affects the whole community in various ways - other issues like substance abuse or lack of mental health support, can stem from the cycle, which in turn creates more crime.
"Family violence takes up a considerable amount of policing time and has a significant impact on the community - as far as I'm concerned, it drives a lot of our other crimes," she explained.
"If we can deal with family violence and get in at the beginning or deviate people along the way into services and change their lives, in my mind it's making the community safer."
She also praised the work that support and welfare agencies have achieved in Ballarat.
"I think that policing's evolved now, we can no longer take all the problems of the community and solve them ourselves, we're strengthened by working with our partnership agencies to do what we're best at doing in a multidisciplinary environment," she said.
"It's really identifying what are the strengths of each organisation and coming together to work out a process where we all bring our best to the table, all centred around the victims of these crimes."
The four new Highway Patrol officers, also shared across Ballarat and Moorabool, will be particularly useful given the alarming number of fatalities and incidents in the district recently.
"As we've been talking about regularly, we've got a real challenge around our road policing at the moment, so they will certainly be a welcome addition to the division," Superintendent Wilson said.
Some of the general duties officers will be recent graduates, and others may be more senior, she added.
One officer is confirmed to be moving to Smythesdale, and another to Ballan.
"We'll be looking at our more rural areas over the next couple of months to see whether all that deployment will stay in the city areas of this division or if we need to allocate them to some of the more rural locations," Superintendent Wilson said.
"We're looking at the growth in population and the calls for service, and where we can best put the right people in the right places."
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