The media headlines scream the plight of Melbourne’s affluent leafy suburbs and the burgeoning crime rates affecting the wealthy areas of Melbourne.

The Police are just as quick to quote statistics allegedly disproving any neighbourhood concerns, accusing them of over-egging the problem. The difficulty with that approach is that Police are trying to second guess how the community feels. If they don’t feel safe, all the statistics in the world will not enhance their eudemony.

As reported, the residents of Middle Park are hiring private security guards to patrol their neighbourhoods to help keep their streets safe. Other private security companies have already been patrolling areas in Werribee, Wyndham Vale, Camberwell, Hawthorn, Toorak, Brighton, Caulfield and Balwyn for months.

What concerns the CAA is that with nine or ten communities already hiring security, what of the suburbs that cannot afford this approach? Are they metaphorically kicked just down the gutter?

With the growth of private security services, communities deem it necessary for their safety because of Police ineffectiveness; the risk of litigation against Victoria Police must be considered a reality, particularly if all of the aggrieved communities join together with those who cannot afford security and pursue a class action against VicPol for lack of service. Apart from a class action, the group may form a serious voting block, developing clout with a political bent.

Victoria police, for its part, quotes crime statistics to counter the arguments of lack of Police service, and therein lies the problem. There are numerous excuses, but admitting failure is not one of them; it would, however, be a good place to start.

Victoria Police just doesn’t get it.

Policing in Victoria has lost touch with its primary function, preventing crime. That there are many arrests and successful police operations does not address the crime issue in its broadest context; arrests are only the measure of the failure of policing to prevent crime.

The CAA has spoken with many police executives and is disappointed that they do not even know or understand the basics of policing.

Over time, the Force has manipulated the narrative of proactive policing to encompass any action that the police perform; in other words, investigations are considered proactive, and this phenomenon is not restricted to a couple of outlier senior commanders but to command as a whole led by the Chief Commissioner.

The proactive, reactive conundrum example is that a Police patrol tasked with a particular function to apprehend felons in a given area at a given time is classified incorrectly as proactive; it is active policing. Alternatively, Police tasked with reducing criminal activity in a given location is proactive policing; any crime detected as opposed to prevented is coincidental.

The difference is not too subtle. If a police operation is focused on trying to catch crooks, hiding behind bushes to catch them out has success. Their success is measured by the number of arrests, but do those arrests translate into crime reduction?

The most relevant assessment of Police effectiveness is not the number of arrests but advice from those whom policing is asked to deliver its services, and that is not the crooks and not the politicians. It is the victims.

To better understand the proactive reactive conundrum, the actions of a previous Chief Commissioner, when confronted with a strong recommendation to close a Country Police Station, come to mind.

The recommendation was based on the lack of arrests and the lack of crime reports over an extended period, inferring that the police member was lazy, incompetent or both. This particular station had the worst statistical data used as a benchmark for Police performance for the State.

The Chief Commissioner denied permission to close the station but directed the report authors to clone the police member as he was achieving the perfect record of any police station in the state.

There was no arrest because crime and crime reports were absent—the ultimate proactive policing model. That police member was involved in over twenty community organisations. The impact was that no one in his area wanted to let him down by committing offences.

Another classic example is the Police Highway Patrol (HP) working the Hume Highway out of Seymour one easter.

Renowned for the high accident rate, it was not abnormal to have a couple of fatalities over this period.

The Seymour HP patch was Kalkallo to Euroa. The Seymour car initially drove to Euroa, turned around, put on the car warning lights and drove south to Kalkallo ostensibly as a visual emergency vehicle.

The HP then returned to Euroa with the flow of traffic and then repeated this process for the duration of the shifts over Easter. The rationale was that the vast majority of vehicles using this part of the highway would have been exposed to the police car.

All hell broke loose when the Seymour HP supervisor at Benalla compiled the statistical returns after Easter.

The number of bookings by each office showed a stark disparity between the two offices.

At that stage, Benalla had the infamous HP member known to the truckies as 1080, as deadly as rabbit poison, and his sidekick 540, only half as bad.

The bullocking came, and it was severe including threats that the Seymour HP would be kicked off the Highway back to a station, and on it went. Eventually, the Sergeant took a breath when he was reminded that there had been no fatalities between Kalkallo and Euroa for the whole of Easter, but on his Highway, Euroa to the NSW border, they had three.

That is a classic proactive versus reactive approach to policing. The Benalla crew had heaps of bookings achieved by all sorts of creative techniques, but does that justify the three lives that could possibly have been saved had a proactive approach been adopted?

The supervisor never raised the issue again, and the Seymour HP member was not rated down on annual assessment.

Victoria Police has lost the ability to understand the essential policing role and refuses to address the anomaly in the Force strategy; we suspect predominantly through ignorance; however, when Senior Command doesn’t even know the difference between proactive and reactive, what hope do the subordinate officers and troops have of implementing proactive strategies?

The test should be not what the command thinks but what the public thinks and what type of policing they want because, currently, they are paying out the billion-dollar bills for a Force failing to deliver the outcomes they are employed to provide. The Force could well do with a decent injection of accountability to the community it is supposed to serve.

The advent of communities employing their own security to achieve a level of safety that police are not providing strengthens the argument that police in this state are failing.

If you have any doubts as to this failure, ask yourself why, if we are told there are all these crooks being caught, why do we feel less safe, and why are there more vicious and disturbing crimes being committed?

The CAA membership is growing through disenchanted members of the public angered by the lack of Policing effectiveness – we are heading for a crisis of lawlessness, and the community is acutely aware of it. Victoria Police seem to be in denial of the inevitability.

We already have a number of community members joining the CAA who are disenchanted with the status quo, whether it is the residents of North Richmond near the drug injecting room, A crime spree at a local Bingo Hall in the west, retailers in St Kilda dealing with drug addicts, community group in Dandenong being bullied by Local government, NSW Tobacconist being threatened by unlawful tobacco cartels, one punch victims in Eltham, a single small business owner in Croydon, issues with forest areas of the Yarra Valley, problems for night clubs in Prahran, or problems with Police corruption.

The CAA gives all these people who are disenchanted by policing a voice.

We have given Victoria Police ample opportunity to address their and others’ concerns. Still, there is a definite lack of enthusiasm on behalf of the Force to do its job.

There are many success stories; however, a typical response is to blame the victim, which is the lowest form of responsibility rejection, and that is, more often than not, from very Senior people who should know better but do not.

Perhaps we can assist the public in coordinating security services or provide advice and guidance in their situations.

With over 400 years of executive police experience in our group, we will surely be able to help.

If anyone is interested in assisting the CAA in helping yours and other communities, contact us at info@caainc.org.au.