The first roll-out of officers dedicated to proactive policing and crime prevention in Canberra has been announced as a direct outcome of the $33.9 million funding directed to this initiative in last year's ACT budget.
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The fallout from the COVID-19 outbreak has delayed the roll-out until now and it's telling that the experienced head of ACT Policing's coronavirus taskforce, Superintendent Jason Kennedy, has now been seconded across to run the new proactive unit as police shuffle their numbers to run the new "services model".
Repeat calls for service are ongoing issue for police, continually tying up resources despite the roll-out of new technologies such as the latest mobile responder system where police "jobs" are allocated directly to their encrypted mobile devices.
Part of the funding model puts intelligence teams inside the operations centre, alongside the call-takers and operators at Winchester Police Centre where they analyse the data coming in and determine where proactive members can head off potential or emerging issues.
"Operationalised intelligence can tell us where to concentrate our resources and work with our key partners," Supt Kennedy said.
"Quite often police attend a lot of jobs that aren't necessarily a crime but if we don't solve them, they do eventually turn into a crime and people enter the criminal justice system.
"We look at why do we keep dealing with this person, why do we keep dealing with this location and why do we keep dealing with this issue, and being smarter about the way we use our resources."
The first of the new teams will be based out of Belconnen police station but will operate across the territory. The first team of 10 will be on the ground by September, with two more teams in coming years.
The program is based around similar concepts adopted overseas, in particular by police in the UK city of Birmingham.