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ShareWe have dinners with different communities. We get together with, for instance, the Muslim community once a year, with the Jewish community likewise once a year... We have a multi-faith council, which once a year brings leaders and religious representatives from right across the community together to work with us to talk about policing issues and to talk about how we can better engage with the communities.
This hasn't been understood. There has been a lot of very misinformed, ignorant criticism of the Victoria Police. I get a little bit annoyed about so-called experts and commentators coming along and saying, 'If the police did a better job, this wouldn't be happening'. Well, they may like to take the time to inform themselves of exactly what we are doing before they offer opinions about how to deal with this issue.
You have taken over only some months ago, and you have a full term ahead, and no historic legacy to defend. What vision do you have for the Victoria Police, particularly in the context of recent organised crime violence, and how do you propose to change the way the police is perceived by the public?
If you ask the people here, they actually have a very good opinion of the Victoria Police. Some of what happened here has become an international issue and it has been quite distorted in terms of the view and the reporting of it. We need to work to address that, obviously.
But what is at the core of policing hasn't changed for 200 years and won't change. It's about looking after the community and making sure it's safe. That's our job. So in terms of my vision, it's about looking after the community and keeping it as safe as we possibly can. But we have to do that with the community. We have got our job to do, but we can't do it on our own. We are actually much more effective when we work with the community and the community works with us.
One of the problems with law enforcement is the perception that if it's a safety issue, the police is responsible. But there are things that are in our control that we should be responsible for, but there are a lot of other issues that other people are responsible for, too. That's the case with pretty much any major crime issue you talk about. There are things that we can and should be responsible for and we will be responsible for, but others need to play their role as well. And so the challenge for us is to work with the community, to work with partners, with other people to make sure that everyone does their bit.
That's the direction that the Victoria Police has always pursued. My job is to make sure we continue to do that. What changes is the context and the environment and we need to be able to respond to changes in those. They change quickly and in unexpected ways. That's the challenge.
What has been lost in this is that we are successful and we have been successful in reducing crime, death on the roads, working with communities... all of the objective evidence and data survey results we do show that. But that doesn't get listened to in an emotive -- and understandably emotive -- response to violence on the streets.
