Victoria Police covers a state of more than 227,000 square kilometres with a workforce of around 22,000 sworn and unsworn personnel. How that workforce is structured — and where it is deployed — shapes the experience of policing for every Victorian outside Melbourne. Our newsroom has been pulling together publicly available material from Victoria Police’s annual reports, the Police Association of Victoria, the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office and parliamentary inquiry submissions to map how regional policing actually works.
The headline: Victoria Police is organised into four geographic regions, each headed by an Assistant Commissioner, and the resourcing gap between metropolitan and country stations remains one of the most contested issues inside the force.
The four regions
Victoria Police’s geographic structure is built around four regions covering both metropolitan and country Victoria. The exact boundaries and naming conventions have shifted over the years through restructures, but the contemporary structure groups divisions and police service areas under four regional commands:
- North West Metro Region — covering the inner north and west of Melbourne, the CBD and the western suburbs out toward Werribee.
- Southern Metro Region — covering the south-eastern and bayside suburbs through to the Mornington Peninsula.
- Eastern Region — covering the eastern Melbourne suburbs and stretching out to include eastern Victoria, Gippsland and parts of the north-east.
- Western Region — covering the western suburbs and a vast country footprint that takes in Geelong, Ballarat, the Wimmera, the Mallee and the south-west.
Each region is led by an Assistant Commissioner. Beneath them sit divisions, then police service areas (PSAs), and finally the individual stations and 24-hour response units that the public actually interacts with.
Single-officer stations and small-town policing
Victoria has dozens of single-officer stations, particularly in the north-west, the Mallee and parts of east Gippsland. These are stations staffed by one sworn member, often living in a police-owned residence attached to the station, who is the local face of policing for a community that might be hours from the next town.
The model has obvious strengths. The local officer knows everyone, builds relationships with schools and farms, and can de-escalate situations that would baffle a city-based responder unfamiliar with the landscape. It has equally obvious weaknesses. The officer is on call essentially around the clock. Any incident that needs a second officer requires backup from a town that might be 30 to 90 minutes away. Annual leave, illness, training and family commitments leave coverage gaps.
The Police Association has campaigned for years on the welfare and resourcing of single-officer postings. Successive governments have committed to additional rural numbers, and the rollout has been steady, but the structural pressure has not eased. Population growth in regional cities like Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo has pulled resources toward the larger centres, sometimes at the expense of the smaller stations beyond them.
The country resourcing debate
Whether regional Victoria is properly resourced for policing is a debate that resurfaces every election cycle. The arguments are familiar.
One side points to per-capita officer numbers, which often look reasonable on paper for regional areas, and to the steady additions announced under the Community Safety Statement and successive budget commitments.
The other side points to geography. Per-capita figures mean little when an officer’s “patch” is the size of greater Sydney. The Police Association and several rural mayors have argued for a coverage-and-distance metric rather than a population-based one.
Submissions to the parliamentary inquiry into policing in country Victoria have raised the same issues repeatedly: the closure of overnight reception hours at small stations, the consolidation of 24-hour response into larger PSAs, and the practical reality that “your local station” might not have anyone behind the front counter when you walk up to it.
Response times in the country
Victoria Police publishes response time targets and outcomes by category. Priority-one calls — those involving immediate threat to life — are the headline metric. In metropolitan Melbourne, the median response is measured in minutes. In remote regional areas, it is measured in tens of minutes, sometimes longer when officers are tied up at another job.
The reasons are not mysterious. Distance is the dominant factor. So is the depth of the available pool: a metropolitan division might have a dozen units available on a given shift, while a country division might have two or three covering an area the size of a small European country.
The force has invested in a range of partial fixes. Highway Patrol units, dog squad deployments and Air Wing helicopter support all stretch the available footprint. Mutual-aid arrangements with neighbouring divisions help when a major incident hits. None of it fully closes the distance gap.
The Police Custody Officer rollout
One of the more significant operational reforms of the past decade has been the introduction of Police Custody Officers — non-sworn personnel trained to manage people in police cells, conduct searches, and handle custody administration. The PCO role was rolled out to free up sworn officers from custodial duties and put them back on the road.
The rollout has reached most major regional stations and a number of metropolitan ones. Independent reviews have generally found the model has delivered the operational time savings intended, while raising legitimate questions about training depth and the welfare of detainees in PCO-managed cells. Implementation has not been uniform, and the Victorian Ombudsman and the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC) have both examined custody-related concerns at various points.
Aboriginal Community Liaison Officers
Aboriginal Community Liaison Officers (ACLOs) are non-sworn Aboriginal members of Victoria Police who work between the force and Aboriginal communities. The role was introduced to build trust, support culturally appropriate policing, and help with engagement around family violence, youth diversion, deaths in custody and the daily friction points that occur between police and Aboriginal Victorians.
The ACLO program has been recognised as valuable by both Aboriginal community-controlled organisations and successive Police Ministers, but the cohort remains small and the demands placed on individual officers are significant. The Yoorrook Justice Commission’s hearings have included extensive testimony on policing of Aboriginal Victorians, and the role of ACLOs has been a recurring thread in those proceedings.
What this means for country Victorians
For people living outside the metropolitan footprint, a few practical realities flow from the structure described above:
- The local station’s hours might not match the hours on the door. Response is increasingly run from the nearest 24-hour PSA.
- Triple-zero remains the right number for emergencies, regardless of how far away the responding unit is.
- The Police Assistance Line on 131 444 is for non-urgent reports and is staffed centrally, which can frustrate locals expecting to talk to “their” sergeant — but it does get matters logged into the system.
- Crime Stoppers Victoria on 1800 333 000 takes anonymous reports of crime statewide.
The structural debate about regional policing will not be resolved by any single budget announcement. Victoria Police has to balance population growth in the regional cities, geographic spread across the bush, and the inescapable fact that an officer can only be in one place at a time. Our newsroom will keep tracking how those trade-offs play out — particularly as the Yoorrook process and ongoing IBAC oversight continue to shape what policing in regional Victoria looks like.
If you have an immediate safety concern, ring 000. For non-urgent crime reports, the Police Assistance Line is 131 444 and Crime Stoppers Victoria is 1800 333 000. For Aboriginal Victorians seeking culturally safe support, 13YARN is on 13 92 76. Lifeline is on 13 11 14.
