The territory's top cop Rudi Lammers has praised outgoing Australian Federal Police chief Tony Negus and said his successor must continue to steer the national law enforcement agency to tackle increased threats from cybercrime and homegrown terrorists.
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Commissioner Negus will call time on a 32-year policing career when he steps down as the nation's top cop on Sunday, September 7.
ACT chief police officer Rudi Lammers and Commissioner Negus both started as new recruits in different departments with ACT Policing in 1982.
"We often share stories about what it was like back then and how policing in the ACT has evolved over the years," chief police officer Lammers said.
He had seen Commissioner Negus "pretty much every day" since chief police officer Lammers began in his current role 13 months ago and he'd shown a high interest in what went on in the capital.
"Tony Negus has been an innovative, progressive commissioner, who has had the success of the AFP, and that includes by definition ACT policing, at heart all the time he has been here," chief police officer Lammers said.
"He has focused very heavily on reinvigorating investigative capabilities across the entire organisation, making sure police return to bedrock tradecraft of policing, but making sure we leverage off technology at the same time, and he's had success there."
A successor for Commissioner Negus is yet to be announced.
Chief police officer Lammers would not be drawn on who might fill the role, other than to acknowledge there had been a lot of speculation within police ranks.
Among the rumoured contenders is his predecessor, former ACT top cop Roman Quaedvlieg, who is currently deputy head of the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service.
"The AFP will get a competent commissioner who will build on what Tony Negus has done over the past five years, and who will I'm sure look to the future and where this organisation needs to be placed in the next five to 10 years," chief police officer Lammers said.
He said the new AFP chief would need to maintain "a very credible and sustainable police organisation" and look ahead to how officers would respond to new safety threats.
"I think the challenges of the next 10 years will be around cybercrime, and around the radicalisation of people who leave Australia, who purport to be freedom fighters, who go across to other countries and commit atrocious acts of violence and then come back to Australia and seek to influence the Australian community to do the same thing.
"We will have more and more resources, not just AFP but various agencies throughout Australia, will have much more involvement over the next few years in preventing that from happening.
"Because there is a very real risk that these people will come back, having been radicalised, and be a very grave threat to the Australian community."
"The ACT, being a community that accommodates a broad range of nationalities, is not immune from that touch."
Chief police officer Lammers said there had not yet been any specific incidents of concern in the ACT, but the territory's porous borders and the speed with which such behaviour could escalate meant police could not grow complacent.
"That's why we have a whole of Australia and whole of government approach to making sure that terrorism doesn't get a foothold in Australia," chief police officer Lammers said.
Commissioner Negus announced in June he had made the unprecedented decision to not seek a second term when his five-year stint as chief of the national police force comes to an end.
Both his predecessors, Mick Keelty and Mick Palmer, went on to serve a second term.
Commissioner Negus came under fire earlier this year after allegations his son, Mitchell, had been given special treatment when he was allowed to graduate from the AFP while injured and under investigation for a motorcycle crash.
There is no suggestion his resignation was linked to the allegations.
