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Police to get more state direction

Toyah ShakespeareEastern Reporter

This follows an announcement from Police Commissioner Karl O’Callaghan last week about changes to his Frontline 2020 model, with more than 700 police officers set to follow commands from the centralised body.

Ms Harvey, who spoke to the Eastern Reporter from Dianella’s Coffee with a Cop event, said intelligence gathered by the state control centre would now be directed towards local police teams rather than solely to the response team.

“The teams are staying intact, but what will happen is the state control centre … will be bit more directed in directing the local policing teams to hotspots for burglaries, domestic violence and theft, which are the three key areas we’ve seen increase with our crime stats compared with last year,” she said.

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But Ms Harvey said the local policing model, which was rolled out in December 2014, was successful in dealing with houses that attracted police attention.

“At the moment in every district police officers are attending 30 or so homes, everyone knows who they are, they’re usually the problem house on the street, there’s usually a dozen half-wrecked cars on the front lawn, people coming and going,” she said.

“So in keeping pressure on them you actually get a better outcome.

“We’re not going to abandon that, that will still form part of the LPT function, but at the moment we need to address those burglary and domestic violence rates.”

Morley police station officer-in-charge Tony Vuleta said there would be no change to his station’s local policing team structure.

“(The changes have) been released but not the nuts and bolts of it at this stage,” Sen Sgt Vuleta said. “It’s business as normal for us, we’ll still be responding to jobs, doing crime investigations.”