Published in the Herald Sun on the 21^st of May 2025, the shocking results of surveys of community confidence in Victoria Police have seen community confidence tank.

The Force target for community confidence is circa 80% but has been on a downward spiral in the last decade or so, with its current trajectory likely to break through the wrong side of 50%.

Unfortunately for Victorians, the community confidence measure directly correlates to the Force’s ineffectiveness.

Spin will not alter that dynamic.

All we have heard from the Force over the last decade is excuses, and blaming the Pandemic is front and center. Next, they will blame the victims.

There is no doubt that the performance of the police during the Pandemic has heightened the fall in community confidence, but that is entirely down to the seemingly lack of competency of the Force command, and this is what you get with arguably incompetent leadership, incapable of doing their job.

Making the Pandemic the whipping boy is disingenuous when the CAA provided VicPol with Plan 100.1 in 2018, two years before the Pandemic, highlighting many failures and weaknesses in force policy. The Pandemic then only exacerbated the issues identified by the CAA; it didn’t create them.

The content of Plan 100.1 was drafted from the combined expertise of former Police officers in the CAA, representing over 400 years of experience, a broad cross-section of the community from a variety of disciplines, including victims, providing a unique alliance for feedback and advice to the Force.

It would have been a substantial benefit to the Force and the State if the police leadership had taken more notice of the Plan, and they may not have ended up where we are today, struggling to achieve the support of half the State.

To understand how the Force could have saved the embarrassment of failure in community support, the 2018 CAA Plan makes for an interesting read. Plan 100.1 is available at

https://caainc.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Plan-100.1November18.docx

Most disturbing is that the trend has no signs of abating this downward spiral of confidence, or when it will bottom out.

Unfortunately, many Senior Officers have been party to the failures and are still in executive positions, making it harder for the incoming Chief. He will no doubt want to put his stamp on the organisation. Still, he is likely to find resistance from those promoted under the old unaccountable system, where competence and performance were not considered valuable assets, but who your friends were above you was what counted, nepotism.

To achieve a turnaround, the Force must undertake a complete attitude change and approach the issues head-on, adopting a service delivery and victim-centric approach.

The challenge for the new Chief Commissioner is to implement a policy of accountability force-wide with clear Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s), not just indicators based on their popularity, for every member irrespective of rank, accompanied by non-negotiable consequences for performance failures.

If the consequences for poor performance are known and the targets are clear, there will be no room for grievance.

This will root out and expose nepotism and the stifling of competent members at every level.