CAREER IN FOCUS
DIFFERENT EVERY DAY She’s been a police officer for little more than six years, but Senior Constable Rebecca Rose already has a career’s worth of policing experiences to her name.
“The following day I went to Mallacoota where we worked with the Australian Defence Force on the HMAS Choules in evacuating about 1,100 people.”
PORT members were among the first tasked to Operation Sentinel, an operation that required 500 police per day across the state for coronavirus-related tasking.
From policing onboard a navy ship during the 2019-20 bushfires to conducting daily checks and duties to help community safety during a global pandemic, 2020 was a year of extreme experiences for the senior constable in particular.
Being one of only four police onboard with more than a thousand civilians in the middle of a devastating emergency provided an experience that Sen Const Rose said she felt honoured to be part of.
“When you sign up to become a police officer, you don’t imagine that you would spend shifts checking that people are following health directions to help slow the spread of a virus,” Sen Const Rose said.
“It was cramped conditions and people were very stressed and anxious because they didn’t know what was going to happen and whether they’d lost their homes,” Sen Const Rose said.
“Whether it’s working Sentinel shifts, where we would be out and about ensuring people were following the Chief Health Officer directions, or policing demonstrations where people were protesting the restrictions, PORT worked COVID-related duties for a large part of 2020.”
In her role as a member of Victoria Police’s Public Order Response Team (PORT) – a frontline support unit that provides increased frontline capacity across the state as operationally required – Sen Const Rose started the year deployed to East Gippsland as part of the organisation’s response to the bushfires. “I’d worked a New Year’s Eve shift in the city and I received notification on 1 January that officers were needed in East Gippsland and I was deployed to Bairnsdale for briefings,” Sen Const Rose said. 24
POLICE LIFE | AUTUMN 2021
“The experience really helped me learn how to engage with the community in a way I’ve never had to before and it’s something I’ve taken with me during my everyday role.” After the fire response wound down, Sen Const Rose found herself on the frontline of another huge organisational response, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
While the experiences of last year were out of the ordinary, Sen Const Rose said daily duties in PORT are always varied, which is what drew her to the unit.
