Thursday morning will reveal the latest official quarterly crime statistics bulletin, the last one before the election.

Saturday is the sixth anniversary of the rape and murder of Jill Meagher, a tragedy that continues to cast a long shadow over the state’s justice system.

Thursday’s numbers matter in an election campaign that Opposition Leader Matthew Guy wants to fight on a law-and-order platform.

If the crime rate is up, it makes life awkward for Premier Daniel Andrews and Labor, as they try to bat away the relentless law-and-order attacks by Guy and his Coalition colleagues.

A continued decline in the overall offending rate will help Andrews, a little, but won’t deter Guy.

The Opposition Leader has little choice but to continue to bang the law-and-order drum, regardless of what Thursday’s stats say because he’s been locked-and-loaded for an election about crime for about two years.

How loaded? Well, a couple of months ago the Coalition collated their first 100 policies.

Thirty-five of them related to law and order, more than three times as many as health and education combined.

They’ve done lots of policy work since then, of course, but the Coalition has put so many of its policy eggs in the crime basket, it couldn’t change tack now, even if it wanted to.

Besides, they have a plan to cope with a set of figures on Thursday that don’t fit their narrative.

In the face of persistently declining crime rates, the Coalition has hit on the technique of mining the data for offence types that are on the rise and shifted its message to highlight crime levels that are still higher than under the previous government.

The political thinking behind the tough-on-crime campaign is sound enough: "make Victoria safe again" is as good a political slogan as you’ll get.

The pitch keeps it simple and appeals to two powerful emotions; fear - that we’re not safe - and anger - over all the crime that’s going on out there.

The campaign been ugly at times too, with the Liberals’ federal colleagues breezing into town to demonise minorities, trying to tap into the darker places of the electoral psyche.

But there’s no doubt that the pressure heaped on Andrews’ government has dragged it into places on law and order that it would rather not have gone.

As always with this government, you need to look at what it does, not what it says.

Whether it’s tougher sentences, bail reforms, treating young offenders as adults or ticking off on every item on the police union’s wish list, Andrews and Labor have had to kick hard to keep afloat in this debate.

Mandatory jail for people who attack emergency workers is another case in point.

Labor people privately concede that the tough legislative response to the case of Amanda Warren and Caris Underwood, freed on appeal after their serious assault on a paramedic in 2016, probably won’t deter such attacks in future.

But under pressure from the police and ambulance unions, as well as the opposition and the media, Labor had little choice, politically, to remove the “special circumstances” clauses that saw the two Reservoir women’s jail sentences overturned.

It’s also a sign of how far the conversation on criminal justice has moved in recent years that people who regard themselves as fairly progressive on the subject wondered just how serious the offending of Warren and Underwood had to be before they were locked-up.

OK, the pair both had backgrounds shocking enough for the magistrates court to accept in mitigation, they were off their guts on drink and drugs at the time of the assault and probably mentally impaired too.

But then, does that mean there’s a group of people in our community, who because of their backgrounds, have a get-out-jail pass for quite serious crimes? That doesn’t make you feel safe.

The Liberal strategy has tapped into those kinds of doubts, that loss of faith in the justice system that really began to take hold in the wake of the rape and murder of Jill Meagher in 2012 by a man who by any sane measure should have been in jail.

A succession of horrific, senseless and preventable crimes since then, committed by men who would not have been free to kill if somebody somewhere had done their job properly, has chipped away at our confidence that the system can protect us.

One of the results of that loss of confidence is a Victorian public very wary of giving anybody the benefit of the doubt by the criminal justice system. It seems like we've been let down too often.

Both major parties are now fully plugged into that uneasiness, but it’s Labor that has had to be dragged to that position, often against its progressive instincts.

So Matthew Guy might not get to be premier in November, but in a way, he’s already made his mark on the state.

Noel Towell is Age state political editor.