Different every day

Editorial: Danielle Ford

Photography: Grant Condon

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

Her name is Rebecca Rose, but the senior constable has had anything but a garden-variety career with Victoria Police. From administration work as a Victorian Public Service employee, Sen Const Rose is now a member of the Public Order Response Team and enjoys being at the frontline of the police response to major emergencies and events.

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.

“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.

“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.

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.

“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.

“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.”

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.

“You get to work in a lot of different areas and respond to a wide variety of jobs,” she said.

“We have daily tasking to different policing regions to help with targeting high-harm, high-impact offending, so you get to work in different areas all the time.

“You also get to be a part of different operations from road policing to summer safety and major events.

“Plus, we perform our specialist public order response role at protests and public order events.”

But it’s not just the operational side of Victoria Police where Sen Const Rose has experience.

Her journey with Victoria Police started prior to donning the blue uniform, first joining as a Victorian Public Service (VPS) employee in 2011.

“I previously worked in the financial services industry and when the global financial crisis happened the sector was hit pretty bad, I was made redundant,” Sen Const Rose said.

Growing up, I’d always been interested in policing and thought if I was ever going to become a police officer, this was my chance.

“I wasn’t quite ready to join at that stage, though, so I applied for VPS positions so I could work within the organisation and get an understanding of what it was like and learn about the different areas.”

Spending time working in administration and support roles at the Victoria Police Academy and the Operations Response Unit (now known as PORT), Sen Const Rose said her time as a VPS employee cemented her desire to be a police officer.

“I used that time to network and ask as many questions as I could about the job,” she said.

“I consider myself really lucky to have been able to experience so many parts of the organisation and to have been on the frontline during huge, historical responses Victoria Police has been involved in.”