Every state election in Victoria for the past forty years has featured a debate about police numbers. Both major parties promise more officers. The Police Association of Victoria publishes a tally of how many it thinks are needed. The Government of the day publishes recruitment figures. The opposition produces a different set. Comparisons are made with New South Wales and Queensland. The whole conversation begins again twelve months later with new figures and the same shape.
Our newsroom is asked, fairly often, to translate this into something readers can actually use. Jack Renton has put together a plain-English guide to where the numbers come from, what they mean and where the genuine policy question sits.
The headline numbers
Victoria has, in recent years, somewhere in the order of 16,000 to 18,000 sworn police officers, depending on the date and the counting convention. In addition there are several thousand Public Service Officer roles in unsworn capacities — analysts, station officers, custody officers, communications staff — and several thousand Protective Services Officers, who are sworn but with a more limited set of powers and a specific deployment to public transport and a small number of designated places.
The state’s resident population is about 6.9 million. The straight ratio of sworn officers to population is therefore in the order of 240 to 260 per 100,000 residents. That number, the “officers per 100k”, is the metric most often used for state-by-state comparison.
By that measure Victoria has historically run a little below New South Wales and Queensland. The Northern Territory and Western Australia run substantially higher because of the geography; thinly populated states need more officers to cover ground regardless of crime rate. Tasmania and South Australia run roughly in the same band as Victoria.
Why the ratio is a misleading metric, on its own
“Officers per 100k” is a useful summary number but a poor stand-alone indicator. Three reasons.
The first is that not all officers do the same thing. The proportion of a force that sits in the response, investigation, intelligence, traffic, court, training and management roles varies between jurisdictions. A force with a higher per-capita number but a heavier back-office tail may have fewer officers actually responding to calls than a smaller force with a leaner structure.
The second is that geography drives demand in ways the population number does not capture. A regional command covering a large area with a dispersed population needs a minimum complement at every station regardless of how few people live there. A dense metropolitan command is a different operating environment.
The third is that demand on policing is not just crime. Mental-health welfare checks, missing-persons searches, family-violence responses, court attendances and assistance to other agencies make up a larger share of the operational load than recorded crime alone. Two states with the same crime rate can have very different policing demand.
This is why the Productivity Commission’s Report on Government Services, which publishes the comparable data each year, hedges its conclusions about state-by-state efficiency.
Where the Police Association sits
The Police Association of Victoria — the union representing sworn members — has been the most consistent advocate for higher numbers. Its submissions to parliamentary committees and public statements over the past decade have argued that policing has been chronically under-resourced relative to the growth of the state’s population, the complexity of contemporary investigations and the rise of administrative load on individual members.
The Association’s specific claims have varied year to year but the structure is consistent. It points to call-response data, to administrative paperwork per arrest, to a count of full-time-equivalent vacancies, and to the proportion of members who report excessive overtime in its internal surveys. It then translates that into a request for an additional cohort of officers, typically in the range of 1,000 to 3,000 over a multi-year period.
Government responses, regardless of which party has been in power, have generally been to commit to a portion of the requested number, package it as a multi-year recruitment plan and roll it into the budget cycle. The 2018–22 expansion under the then Andrews government, which committed to recruiting some 3,135 additional sworn police, was the largest single such commitment in modern Victorian history.
The regional staffing question
Behind the headline number sits a different debate: not how many officers in total but where they are.
Victoria’s regional and rural stations include a substantial number of single-officer stations — small townships served by one resident sergeant or senior constable. Whether the single-officer model can be safely sustained, and whether it should be replaced with consolidated multi-officer stations covering a wider area, has been a recurring policy question for decades.
The arguments for the single-officer model are continuity, local knowledge and visible local presence. The arguments against are officer safety — a single member responding alone to a serious incident is at greater risk — and the practical reality that a single-officer station closes when the resident officer is on leave, sick or on training. In some recent years the proportion of single-officer station hours that are unstaffed has been the subject of pointed parliamentary questions.
The Police Association has long advocated for the abolition of the single-officer model. The successive Chief Commissioners have generally advocated a hybrid approach: some single-officer stations retained, others consolidated into hub-and-spoke arrangements with mobile patrols, and some closed. Local communities, predictably, have resisted closures regardless of the operational case.
Recruitment and attrition
The other side of the staffing equation is attrition. Recruitment numbers tell only half the story; what matters operationally is the net change after retirements, resignations, medical separations and dismissals are accounted for.
Police separations in Victoria have, on average, run somewhere in the order of 4 to 6 per cent per year of total sworn strength. To grow the force you need recruitment to exceed that baseline by a meaningful margin. The Victoria Police Academy at Glen Waverley operates on cohort cycles; expanding throughput requires capital investment, additional trainer capacity and additional supervised placement opportunities at the receiving stations.
Recruitment has tightened in recent years across most Australian policing jurisdictions, partly because of competition from defence and private security and partly because of the cumulative impact of the post-COVID labour market. Victoria Police has, like its peer agencies, run sustained recruitment campaigns, including targeted campaigns for women, regional applicants and applicants from culturally diverse backgrounds.
The genuine policy question
Stripped of the political theatre, the real policy question about police numbers is not whether the state should have more or fewer officers but how the marginal officer is best spent.
Reasonable people disagree about the answer. One view, advanced by the Association and by many in the operational ranks, is that the marginal officer is best spent on response and uniformed presence: more cars on the road at three in the morning, more members at every regional station, fewer single-crew shifts. Another view, advanced by some policy researchers and victim-advocacy groups, is that the marginal officer is best spent on specialist roles — family-violence response, sexual-offences investigation, child-abuse units, organised-crime intelligence — where capacity gaps produce the largest harms.
The honest answer is probably both, in different proportions, in different parts of the state. That is a less satisfying conclusion than a press-conference number, but it is the one the evidence actually supports.
What this means for readers
Police numbers will be debated again at the next election and the one after that. Our newsroom’s view, for what it is worth, is that the debate is healthier when it engages with the structural questions — where, doing what, to what end — than when it stops at a single per-capita figure.
If you have a concern about policing in your community, your local Member of Parliament’s office is the appropriate channel. For non-emergency police matters the line is 131 444; in an emergency, 000.
