When Victoria Police began rolling out Police Custody Officers across the state’s watch-houses in the late 2010s, the pitch was straightforward: free up sworn officers for frontline duties by placing trained civilians in charge of detainee management. Five years into the expanded rollout, VCN has examined the publicly available data, parliamentary reports and Victoria Police’s own workforce publications to assess how the model is tracking.
The picture that emerges is broadly positive, but patchy — and the questions being asked inside police stations today are more nuanced than the simple headcount arguments that drove the program’s original expansion.
What a Police Custody Officer actually does #
A Police Custody Officer — universally called a PCO inside Victoria Police — is a sworn, non-operational employee whose statutory authority is specifically limited to the management of people held in custody at a police station. Under the Victoria Police Act 2013, PCOs can search detainees, record property, manage cell welfare checks, administer the initial rights-and-cautions process, arrange medical assessments, and liaise with the on-call Custody Nurse Practitioner program where it operates.
What PCOs cannot do is respond to calls for service, make arrests in the field, or exercise the broader powers of a sworn police officer. That distinction is the entire point of the model. The theory — borrowed from jurisdictions including Queensland, the United Kingdom and New Zealand — is that detainee management in a watch-house environment is a specialised, welfare-intensive function that does not require a full police officer to perform it, and that parking sworn officers behind a custody desk represents a poor use of expensive, hard-to-replace resources.
Where the program stands today #
Victoria Police’s publicly released workforce data and budget papers tabled in parliament indicate that more than 500 PCO positions have been created since the program’s first wave of expansion. Coverage, however, is not uniform. Metropolitan divisions — particularly those covering Melbourne’s CBD, the inner north and outer south-east growth corridors — were prioritised in the initial rollout and now operate with at least one PCO on each of the three shifts at their busiest watch-houses.
Regional Victoria is a different story. VCN understands that a number of stations in the state’s north and west continue to rely on sworn members to cover custody functions, either because PCO positions were never created for those stations or because recruitment to fill allocated positions has stalled. The Police Association Victoria has noted in its submissions to the state government that regional coverage gaps remain a live issue, and that the rostering flexibility promised by the model has been harder to achieve outside the metropolitan footprint.
Victoria Police said in a statement to the parliamentary Law Reform, Road and Community Safety Committee in 2023 that it remained committed to expanding PCO coverage, but acknowledged that recruitment pipelines and the cost of training had slowed progress in some areas.
Detainee welfare: what the data shows #
One of the strongest arguments for the PCO model has always been detainee welfare. A custody officer whose entire shift is focused on the watch-house — rather than one who is simultaneously fielding radio calls, writing statements and managing an urgent incident — is more likely to conduct timely cell checks, identify deteriorating medical conditions and follow the procedural requirements around at-risk detainees.
The Office of the Inspector-General for Emergency Management and, separately, the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission have each published reports touching on in-custody welfare standards. Findings from those documents, which are part of the public record, suggest that stations with dedicated PCO coverage have shown improvement in compliance with mandatory welfare-check intervals. VCN understands that the internal audit data held by Victoria Police points in the same direction, though that material has not been released publicly.
Deaths and serious medical incidents in custody remain a subject of intense scrutiny by the Coroners Court of Victoria. It would be wrong to attribute any single structural change as the cause of shifts in those figures, and VCN is not doing so. What can be said is that the professional and political case for dedicated custody staffing — separate from the response-time argument — rests heavily on this welfare dimension, and that argument appears to have strengthened over the five-year period.
Advocates for people in custody, including those working in justice reinvestment and Aboriginal community-controlled organisations, have welcomed the welfare focus of the PCO model while continuing to press for independent oversight of custody conditions. The treatment of First Nations people in police custody remains a distinct and urgent concern that the PCO model alone does not address.
The response-time dividend: real, but not universal #
The most frequently cited operational benefit of the PCO model is that it returns sworn officers to frontline duties — and, in theory, improves emergency response times. The logic is sound in principle. If a custody sergeant no longer has to conduct a cell check every 30 minutes, process a prisoner’s property or arrange a welfare referral, that is real time returned to operational policing.
The lived experience of sworn members, however, is more complicated. Police Association Victoria has consistently told the government that the response-time dividend has not been as large as modelled in some divisions, because PCO positions have not always been created in addition to sworn staffing — in some cases, sworn positions have simply been reclassified or not backfilled when vacated. Where that has occurred, the net operational benefit is reduced.
Victoria Police disputes this characterisation in its public statements, and the truth is difficult to verify independently because operational staffing data at the station level is not published. What is clear from parliamentary budget estimates hearings is that the PCO program was not funded as a pure addition to overall headcount across the board — there were efficiency assumptions built into the model from the outset.
In the metropolitan areas where the rollout has been most complete, senior operational commanders have publicly described measurable improvements in the availability of sworn members for patrol and response. In growth-corridor divisions where demand has risen sharply alongside population, those gains have been partially absorbed by increased call volumes rather than translating directly to faster response times.
Training, culture and the civilian-sworn divide #
Any workforce reform that introduces a new category of employee into an institution as culturally cohesive as Victoria Police will encounter friction. The PCO program has not been exempt from this. Early tensions around professional identity — who gives directions to whom in a custody environment, and how PCOs are integrated into the station hierarchy — appear to have eased as the program has matured, but they have not disappeared entirely.
The training pathway for PCOs includes a dedicated custody management course, first aid certification, de-escalation training and — critically — training specific to at-risk detainees, including those experiencing mental health crises. That last element reflects a reality that has become impossible to ignore: a significant proportion of people who pass through Victoria’s watch-houses are doing so in the context of a mental health episode, substance dependency or both. Having a custody officer who is specifically trained to identify and respond to those indicators, rather than a sworn officer who is simultaneously managing a dozen other priorities, has genuine welfare value.
The question of whether PCOs are adequately supported when managing complex or volatile detainees — and what escalation protocols look like when a watch-house situation exceeds a PCO’s authority — remains an area of ongoing discussion between Victoria Police and the Police Association.
What comes next #
The state government’s most recent budget included ongoing funding for the PCO program, and Victoria Police has signalled that further expansion into regional stations remains a medium-term goal. The outstanding questions are about pace, geography and whether the staffing assumptions underpinning the program are realistic in a tight labour market where both sworn and unsworn Victoria Police recruitment is under pressure.
Parliamentary scrutiny of the program is likely to intensify as the five-year mark prompts formal reviews. The Law Reform, Road and Community Safety Committee has flagged the custody model as a subject of interest, and VCN will continue to cover those proceedings as they develop.
For now, the PCO model represents one of the more substantive structural changes to how Victoria Police manages its watch-houses in a generation — imperfect in its rollout, uneven in its coverage, but broadly supported by the welfare and operational data that is publicly available.
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