Ballarat police Superintendent Jenny Wilson spoke about the issues of social safety, personal security, public order and what the community needs from police around crime prevention on Wednesday.

The public presentation was part of a Compassionate Ballarat weekly webinar series that provides practical advice and support to residents during the coronavirus pandemic.

Superintendent Wilson said offenders could take advantage of environments of chaos and that was creating new challenges for police.

She outlined the changing concerns for police, including risk of civil unrest, family violence, cyber crime and road trauma.

"Civil unrest was very much on our doorstep on the weekend with protests in Melbourne that turned violent and we had some members injured," Superintendent Wilson said.

"We have seen that around the world. We are not immune to that civil unrest either."

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In regards to family violence, Superintendent Wilson said the number of reports had not changed since isolation rules, but more reports were from families who had never reported a family violence incident before.

"We also have a concern about a lot of families that would usually have casual surveillance through children attending school and interacting with health workers that would be able to keep an eye on what is happening in people's lives and be able to intervene if they need to," she said.

"We are wondering what is happening behind those closed doors and what we can do about that. We are running an operation at the moment where we are trying to link in with families regularly involved in family violence incidents."

With more people on devices during isolation, the risk of cyber crime has also increased.

Superintendent Wilson said police had seen an increase in identity theft and a change in the nature of scams now linked to superannuation and other relevant topics.

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She said she was concerned paedophiles could take advantage of children who were using devices more frequently and scammers could target elderly people who were not used to managing technology.

While there have been less cars on the roads during isolation, police have caught more drivers at higher speeds and many with high readings of drugs or alcohol in their system.

Superintendent Wilson said another issue was more trucks on the road in response to increased demand for road freight.

"Trucks are not being slowed down in the congestion of traffic, so they are going faster," she said.

"We probably have inexperienced drivers who are being brought in to help keep freight going.

"That is a real concern to us getting drivers who aren't used to driving long distances, working with freight, drug use in those industries and fatigue. That is something we are looking at as well."

As restrictions are eased and more people get back on the road, police expect road trauma to increase.

"Suddenly we will be able to drive again but we haven't done it for quite some time and we are coming into winter," Superintendent Wilson said.

"We have challenges of weather, poor driving conditions, black ice, less traffic on the road and people driving faster.

"We have an expectation and there is a risk we are going to see road trauma increase significantly if we don't adapt to these new conditions we are driving in, realise we have to slow down and be careful - we have gotten used to not driving for a period of time."

Superintendent Wilson said the overarching question for police members since COVID-19 was 'how do we balance the safety of the community and balance being fair to the people we are dealing with?'.

"That has been a change in mindset for our members for the regular work they do," she said.

"I think at these times we need to show compassion and understanding in some situations people get themselves into.

"One of the tricky times for us in this environment is it is important we try to maintain public confidence, because public confidence gives us the authorising environment to go out and manage the community.

"It is really important through this time we keep pace with what the community is wanting and we are transparent and fair in the whole range of things we are doing, so we maintain confidence in how we are policing the community."

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