With the latest crime statistics released, we have seen slight declines overall in Yarriambiack, Horsham and Ararat municipalities, but an increase in crime across Northern Grampians Shire.

Stawell and St Arnaud are where we’ve seen our greatest increases.

It is concerning for us, and it’s concerning for the community.

We are seeing an increase in burglaries and thefts of motor vehicles, so vehicle crime is high on our agenda. 

They are quite often linked – we find that people we catch committing burglaries will also steal a car for whatever reason.

But for us it’s about holding those perpetrators to account, ensuring we’re always targeting the individuals that we know commit these crimes.

We are stringent in the way we follow up with our crime scene work with our detectives following every lead we can to bring these people to justice.

Bail breaches are another area where there has  certainly been an increase.

But it’s a bit of a good news-bad news story.

It’s bad that we’ve got people out there breaching bail in the first place. We don’t want people to disregard our state laws.

But the good news story for the community is that police are actually catching these people for committing breaches.

I’m looking at it on the upside that we are holding offenders to account at every available opportunity, and the strengthening of bail laws across the state is certainly assisting us to do our job and hold offenders to account.

We’ve been already targeting those areas and making sure we’re paying the right amount of attention to them, and that will certainly continue to be the case until we can bring this crime data under control.

Recruiting

We are recruiting heavily across Victoria Police right now.

We have some vacancy capacity issues at times across our area, and we are in that position right now. But the community can rest assured that despite these issues, we are making sure we alter our service delivery and we’re putting the police that we have got in the right areas. We’re putting divisional vans on the road every day in our locations, and it’s nothing for the community to be concerned about, but absolutely we could do with more police.

People interested in joining Victoria Police are reminded they can now request to return to their home area after completing training at the academy.

I think its been a bit of an inhibitor in the past where people will say they don’t want to leave their home in Nhill or Horsham or wherever it might happen to be, to go away for two years to Melbourne and then potentially not come back.

Now, from the outset, people can detail to our recruiting branch they have an interest in staying in rural or regional Victoria.

It’s a great news story for us. It means that we can recruit locally and retain locally, which I think is a real bonus because the local knowledge those members bring when they come in, and the fact that they’ve already got a footprint within their own community is fabulous.

It’s a great career and if people want to stay local to their area, they can. Otherwise there are so many opportunities for people to move across the entire state.

People can specialise in so many areas – be a detective, stay in uniform, drive the divisional van, ride a motorbike, get in a helicopter, fly a drone, get in a plane or a boat, or even have a police dog.

There’s so many different careers within our career. It’s a fantastic career and I can’t recommend it highly enough to anyone to join.

If people want more information, they can firstly visit our website at www.police.vic.gov.au/police-officer-careers or I’m  more than happy for members of the public to turn up to a police station and have a chat to our staff.

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