Assistant Commissioner Rudi Lammers was announced as the new chief of ACT Policing last week, after the departure of Roman Quaedvlieg in April.

Chief Police Officer Lammers last served in the ACT Policing arm of the Australian Federal Police a little more than a decade ago, when, as Superintendent in 2001, he helped launch Operation Anchorage, an intensive action that resulted in police arresting more than 230 people over four months, and reducing burglaries by about 20 per cent.

The operation targeted repeat offenders, who accounted for more than 70 per cent of arrests, and whose absence from the city streets contributed to an overall drop in crime of about 38 per cent over the year, he said.

After the issue of crime statistics on Monday night, he said he would ensure police continued to work on stopping recidivist crime in the territory.

“We focussed very heavily on recidivist offenders, so known offenders, and through intelligence-led policing we could actually identify which people to target more heavily. We targeted all the burglary and theft hotspots, but we also very heavily concentrated on repeat offenders, and made sure that we took those offenders out of circulation,” he said of Operation Anchorage.

“One of the things we’ll be concentrating on again … is maintaining a concentration on recidivist offenders, and make sure we target that small part of the community that cause so much grief for the rest of us.”

Chief Police Officer Lammers applauded police for the significant decline in the overall crime rate across Canberra over the three months to June 30. This included falls in assaults, armed robberies, and motor vehicle thefts, but said small increases in burglary and theft would be targeted.

“The sort of thing that causes fear in the community have all gone down. And they’ve gone down not just by 1 or 2 per cent, but they’ve gone down across the board by about 14 per cent in total. For us, that’s a terrific result,” he said.

“We look very closely at the crime trends, and that helps us we think in a very clever way to target our resources.”

He said he would continue to focus on public engagement and on improving perception of crime in the community.

“One of the things that we have to make sure we do is not only make sure they are safe, but make sure they do feel safe – it’s a tough thing to do,” he said.

“Canberrans have always expected a high level of service. They’re a very demanding community, and they’ve expected a high level of service from their police officers for as long as I can remember. It’s not so long ago, it feels not so long ago that we stopped investigating stolen milk money from the front porch. And that came with some outcry from the public as well.

“But I think the public are realists as well, they understand we need to target our resources to where they’ll have the greatest impact.”