Note: This article contains the name of a deceased Aboriginal person
As Victoria heads toward another election, the script is painfully familiar.
Crime panic. “Community safety.” More police. More funding. More blue uniforms on the street.
And absolutely no imagination.
What we are witnessing is not leadership. It is the political equivalent of muscle memory, a reflex so deeply ingrained that governments cannot conceive of safety outside cops, courts and cages. No matter the problem, the answer is the same: recruit more police, expand powers, and pour public money into a system that has never delivered safety for the people most at risk.
This is not a policy failure. It is a failure of imagination.
The System That Investigates Itself
Take Victoria’s own police oversight system.
We now have the extraordinary situation where the state’s anti-corruption body has had to publicly apologise to a victim of police-perpetrated family violence for how it handled her complaints. That apology did not come easily. It came after years of denial, defensiveness, and institutional protection.
The story: A woman reported violence by a police officer, her complaint is handed back to police. Police investigate their own colleague (as usual) and information is leaked, leaving her safety significantly compromised.
And the watchdog, the body meant to protect her, became part of the harm.
This is not an aberration. It is the design.
When institutions are built to protect themselves, accountability becomes theatre. Oversight becomes referral. Harm becomes paperwork. And the burden of truth falls, once again, on the person who has already survived the violence.
Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied, By Design
Look north to the Northern Territory.
More than ten months after the death in custody of Warlpiri man Kumanjayi White in Alice Springs, his family is still waiting.
Waiting for answers, accountability and to be treated with basic dignity.
An “independent” use-of-force review has been completed, but the family were not told, and the officers involved remain on duty, and no charges have been laid.
Instead, the family is forced to demand what should be automatic:
- Release the footage
- Conduct a genuinely independent investigation
- Withdraw harmful character smears
- Tell the truth
This is what policing looks like when it turns inward: secretive, defensive, and utterly indifferent to the people it harms.
And here is the part that completely shatters the political narrative.
The Northern Territory already has the highest number of police per capita in the country. In 2024–25, operational police numbers rose from 1,920 to 2,011 which was the sharpest increase in recruitment on record, equating to 767 officers per 100,000 people.
If more police meant more safety, the Northern Territory should be the safest place in the country.
It is not.
In 2023–24, only 56 per cent of physical assaults were reported to police: meaning nearly one in two people experiencing violence did not go to police at all. That is not a sign of safety. It is a sign of mistrust.
And in 2024–25, just 55 per cent of Territorians reported general satisfaction with the police – the second lowest rate in the country.
So, what exactly is being built here?
Certainly not trust, safety, or justice.
What we are seeing is the expansion of a system that people are increasingly unwilling to engage with, even when they are experiencing harm, and that, when tested in the most serious cases, still cannot deliver truth or accountability.
And still, the answer from governments is more police.
Recruitment Crisis or Legitimacy Crisis?
The public are told this is necessary because police numbers are down, because officers are leaving, and morale is low.
But what if this is not a recruitment crisis?
What if it is a legitimacy crisis?
Across the country, police forces are struggling to recruit and retain staff. Governments respond by lowering standards, widening eligibility, and offering cash incentives, as if the problem is simply not enough applicants.
In South Australia, senior police have reported a toxic culture by staff, and recruitment tests were subsequently diluted, with then Police Minister, Stephen Mullighan confirming SAPOL had removed standalone numeracy and spelling requirements to “broaden the pool.”
This is what desperation looks like, and certainly not a system that is trusted and valued, rather a system that is scrambling to sustain itself.
Bipartisan, Borderless, and Boring
The political drive to increase policing isn’t just seen in Victoria.
In South Australia, the Malinauskas Labor Government wrapped up its last term and headed into the election with the same tired playbook dressed up as progress, and sold as safety.
Millions poured into police equipment:
- $6.5 million on new multi-purpose vests
- $6.8 million on new pistols
- More than $200 million on infrastructure
Alongside a commitment to expand the force by more than 400 additional sworn officers, pushing police numbers beyond 5,000 by 2031.
This is what passed as their “vision” of community safety.
More weapons. More uniforms. More buildings.
And, inevitably, more police.
There is no meaningful distinction here between Labor and Liberal approaches. The language may shift: “modernisation,” “community safety,” “supporting frontline officers,” but the substance does not.
It is the same investment in the same system, regardless of how many times that system has demonstrated its inability to keep people safe.
What we are seeing is bipartisan consensus around the narrowest possible definition of safety. One that excludes any serious investment in prevention, in community, or in the conditions that actually reduce harm.
More Police Does Not Mean More Safety
The fundamental lie at the heart of these election promises is that more police equals more safety.
It does not.
We have decades of evidence showing that policing does not prevent violence, particularly not the kinds of violence that governments claim to care about most.
Police do not prevent domestic and family violence. In fact, they routinely harm victim-survivors, and, as we have seen, are themselves aggressors.
Police do not deliver justice for Aboriginal people. They preside over deaths in custody, over-policing, and systemic neglect.
Police do not build safer communities. They respond after harm has already occurred and often escalate it.
And yet, every election cycle, we are told to accept the same narrow vision of safety. One that centres enforcement, punishment, and control, while ignoring the social conditions that actually produce harm.
The Violence We Refuse to See
There is a deeper problem here.
Governments are not just lacking imagination. They are actively refusing it, because imagining other solutions would require confronting uncomfortable truths:
- That policing is a site of violence, not just a response to it
- That communities are safer when they are resourced, not surveilled
- That housing, healthcare, and community-led support prevent harm more effectively than any number of officers
It would require a redistribution of power, money and trust, and that is something governments are far less willing to offer over another police academy.
Beyond Cops, Courts and Cages
If governments were serious about safety, the conversation would look very different.
It would centre community-led responses to violence, housing as a frontline safety measure, properly funded, culturally grounded support services and investment in people, not punishment
It would listen to those who have survived the sharpest edge of the system, particularly Aboriginal communities, criminalised women, and those who have been failed time and time again by police.
Instead, we are offered a $1.5 billion expansion of the very system that produced the harm in the first place as an election promise.
The Real Question
The question is not whether we can afford more police, it is whether we can afford to keep pretending that this is what safety looks like.
Because what we are seeing in Victoria, in the Northern Territory, and across the country is not a system that is achieving its stated goals, rather it is a system being propped up.
A system that cannot account for its own violence, and one that cannot deliver justice. It is a system that governments cannot imagine living without.
And that is the most dangerous failure of all.
