Victoria Police adapt its career structures to reflect family violence as core business

Implemented

Who is leading the change

Victoria Police

Victoria Police adapt its career structures to reflect family violence as core business by:

providing an organisational structure for specialist family violence positions
providing a clear career progression path for members who have a continuing interest in family violence policing—including through gazetting additional positions
having positions with appropriate ranks to represent family violence policing in key operational and strategic management forums and processes
ensuring that resourcing models and processes enable police in specialist family violence roles to perform their functions
considering involving non-sworn employees with relevant skills in incident response
recruiting personnel from a broader range of disciplines—such as social work, psychology or specialist family violence services

Victoria Police has conducted a review of family violence team arrangements. The review examined the roles and responsibilities of family violence teams and recommended how to best provide a consistent structure and operating model for policing family violence.

The new operating model provides a strengthened focus on investigation and intelligence for family violence, supported by a new education framework and improved career structures within family violence policing.
Victoria Police commenced implementation of the Family Violence Investigation Model in July 2018.

The model provides for a specialist investigative response by a range of dedicated, ongoing police and support personnel, including family violence-specific training officers, intelligence analysts, police managers, investigators, trainers, court liaison officers, clinicians and project personnel.

The Community Safety Statement (CSS) 2017 announced a significant investment in resourcing these roles, including the funding of 415 specialist family violence police roles which will be progressively deployed over the next three years commencing in mid-2018.

Also, as part of the CSS, Victoria Police has recruited 38 additional Police Lawyer roles. These roles will support new Specialist Family Violence Courts.

New family violence intelligence analysts have been embedded in existing police family violence teams across Victoria. These roles are critical to strengthening the investigative focus of police FVTs and moving to the Family Violence Investigation Unit (FVIU) model.

As these significant organisation reforms are embedded, Victoria Police’s family violence capacity and capability will improve year on year.

Given the magnitude of organisation structure, staffing change, lead times for recruitment and operational training of members that will be required to fully implement this recommendation, will occur over two years.

As the requisite change for policy and operating model is now in place to respond to the reforms required by the Royal Commission into Family Violence, Victoria Police has transitioned this project to business as usual and will continue reporting through the CSS reporting framework.

Updated 18 May 2020