Today, he’s at the helm of the force in which he began his career, and many of his new recruits can’t remember a time before Facebook.

And Canberra, ever the progressive city, may be about to legalise cannabis - albeit in small amounts and for personal use only.

It’s just one of many changes, big and small, that have taken place in Canberra in the past three decades.

But for Mr Johnson, many things about policing never change.

“As communities change, a challenge is to keep policing connected to the community,” he said.

“I think every police officer in the ACT is part of the ACT community, they're all passionate about where they live.”

Although he’s still settling into his new role as ACT’s Chief Police Officer, he said it was in many ways a homecoming.

Born in Jindabyne, he joined the AFP in 1985 and spent 13 years on the beat, before heading off on international missions in East Timor, Cyprus and China, where he was a regional manager for AFP international operations.

He has led special operations, professional standards and AFP operations in the Northern Territory and New South Wales, and now, he said, he’s back home.

“It's quite comfortable in many ways, something I'm familiar with,” he said.

“It's fundamental that the people who are doing policing here are the same community-spirited group that I remember.”

But he said there would plenty of challenges ahead for him and his team, including an ever-increasing workload and a move towards a preventative, rather than just a responsive, model of policing.

“I don't like to categorise it as keeping me up at night, because I'm confident in the skills and capabilities of the police officers we have here to do the job they do, with all the support staff and professional staff that we have,” he said.

And he disagreed with the notion that - attitudes to cannabis notwithstanding - Canberra is perceived as a type of safe haven for organised crime.

“I know some very dedicated people working quite hard on issues around organised crime generally, the gangs particularly,” he said.

“We've got a reasonably good range now of laws that allow us to take the profit out of crime, which I think is an important thing.

"At the end of the day, all organised crime is designed around making a profit. So if you can take the profit out of it, it makes it less attractive as an option. Trying to divert people from going into that in the first place - that’s where we interact with education. I wouldn't suggest that the ACT is a safe haven by any stretch.”

He said that violence, in all its iterations, remained a priority when it came to preventative policing.

“People should be able to feel safe from violence against the person in their community as much as possible,” he said.

“Every one of those statistics is a person's experience. It's only when you hear those individual experiences [that] you get through those statistics and you get to the lived emotional experience of someone who's been through it.”

He said he occasionally missed the individual human interactions that came with being a policeman on the beat, back in the first third of his career.

And he said it would be probably take another 10 years before he could point to his own influence on the ACT police force.

“At the end of the day, probably, it's the people I lead who are going to make a difference,” he said.

“My job is to make sure that they've got what they need to make that difference. I think you'll see that over the next two or three years.

“Any organisation’s internal change programs take quite a long time to embed themselves.”

In any case, he maintained that he was in it for the long haul, although he had already weathered his fair share of quips about the short tenure of his predecessor, Justine Saunders, who left her post after just two years to take up a post with the Australian Border Force.

“I've said this to a couple of people - this is the best job in the AFP,” he said.

“Whilst there was no grand plan to get here, the fact that circumstances have conspired to allow me to be here is an honour.

“It's a community I'm familiar with, I'm passionate about, to have the opportunity to be able to lead the service - that's just a hell of a privilege. I'm not planning to go anywhere soon.”