Victoria’s women in blue: Meet the female police officers who are a force to reckon with
LOREN Truter has a seven-month-old baby. But it hasn’t stopped her tackling violent and armed offenders as a member of Victoria Police’s Critical Incident Response Unit.
VIC News
Don't miss out on the headlines from VIC News. Followed categories will be added to My News.
AS numbers of women in Victoria Police grow steadily, officers such as Loren Truter of the Critical Incident Response Unit are showing even recent motherhood need not slow you down.
Truter, whose baby is seven months old, is one of two mothers in the Critical Incident Response Team with children under one.
“I was probably at my peak fitness two years ago, training hard, lifting heavy, doing lots of running. I was in the gym until a couple of day before I gave birth and back in the gym a couple of weeks later.
“I knew I wanted to come back to work six months after the baby so I set goals so I knew I would meet the deadline and be fit enough,” she said.
In 2001 only 16 per cent of Victoria Police were female, now it is 28 per cent (34 per cent if you count those currently coming through the academy).
We meet four women working to make Victoria safer.
Senior Constable Loren Truter
Critical incident response team (CIRT)
WHEN Loren Truter told people she wanted to get into Victoria Police’s critical incident response team (CIRT), she often cringed at their reply.
“I had lots of people say to me, ‘Oh, you’ll be right, Loz, you’ll get in, you’re a chick,” says Truter at her unit’s Flinders St police headquarters. “I remember thinking, ‘Screw that, I want to get in because I’ve beat everyone else, because I’m the best applicant, because I can do this’.”
Truter, 26, worked and trained hard in the run-up to the arduous testing process and did the selection course, during which applicants deemed unready are dropped at any point. She proved strong enough. Then again, it seems Truter had known that for a while.
Asked as a kid what she wanted to be when she grew up, Truter answered “policewoman”, but when she hit year 12, she got serious. Her instinct that she would love the active life of an operational police officer proved 100 per cent right; she loves the hard physical training.
“Every day you don’t know what’s going to be happening; the only routine part of the job is knowing what time I get up to get ready for work. It’s a constantly changing environment.”
She may be called to bust into a house containing a violent offender, or find herself at a siege where an armed offender may burst out at any moment.
“We deal with jobs outside of the realm of general duties and if a job escalates to the point where general duties can’t deal with it,” she says. “Armed offenders, sieges, anything where violence is likely or violent confrontation might be involved.”
Defensive tactical training and drills in take-downs and holds keep Truter and fellow team members in form, so when they need to put their bodies on the line, muscle memory kicks in.
“Have I had to take someone down? Yep, yeah, do it every day,” she says.
She gets a bit of a kick from the surprise expressed by some criminals when stopped in their tracks by a woman.
“It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside when I get a handle on a crook and they realise I’m a girl and they go, ‘Aw (groan)’, and all that sort of stuff.”
But her dad needed a little convincing that his strong daughter would be safe.
“I took him shooting one day and when he saw me shoot he went, ‘OK, I’m happy’.”
Constable Clare Butler
Police air wing pilot
IF your daughter has a big dream, make sure she knows about women such as Victoria Police helicopter pilot Clare Butler.
As a seven-year-old with an eye to the future, she decided she wanted to fly choppers — and she quite liked the idea of growing up to be a policewoman.
“One weekend we saw the police helicopter land in a park and pick up an injured person, and I realised I could bring those two things together; flying and police,” says Butler, 42, a mother of three.
After school she spent a year as a farmhand in the Northern Territory, hoping to save the money to get her commercial chopper pilot’s licence and then clock up hours heli-mustering.
When this didn’t prove lucrative enough, she raised the cash in 18 months, driving trucks in the WA mines. Once she had her ticket, she returned to fly on stations in the NT before moving into piloting for tourists, then graduating to big twin-engine helicopters as a civilian contractor doing search and rescue.
From there it was on to shuttling to and from oil and gas rigs, rotating through bases in countries including Malaysia, Myanmar, South Africa, Canada and America.
Butler moved her family to Melbourne from Brisbane three years ago, hoping to land a job with the Victoria Police air wing.
“The overseas portion (of her career) was about three years spent bouncing from one country to another for a month or two at a time,” she says. “It was a great chance to see the world month-on, month-off with plenty of time to travel in between. I was single at the time and got a really good appreciation of what we have here. I came back to Australia realising what we have and being really grateful.”
One thing that stood out was Australia’s reliable police force and good level of law and order, compared with dysfunction and corruption she became aware of elsewhere.
“I like the way police work and help society with a mix of toughness and compassion, and I like the idea of helping to maintain a fair society, which is what they are all about, a very lawful society,” she says.
She says the flying experience she has with VicPol is highly stimulating.
“Police flying is like no other flying available … search and rescue one day, the next day doing car pursuit, the next day we might be doing a winch rescue,” she says.
Other days are spent on training exercises with “dogs and SOGs (the canine unit and special operations group), fast-roping on to the Portsea ferry. There is a variety of work in the Victoria Police air wing that I’ve not seen anywhere.”
Flying duties can take Butler and her crew to Mount Hotham for snow survival training or out over the ocean. The learning curve in the nine months since becoming the only female pilot in the Victorian force has been steep.
She still has police night-vision goggle flying and instrument flying training to complete.
Asked what she gets out of the work, Butler replies, “Making a dent on criminal behaviour is important and, secondly, working with a team of professionals who keep pushing me. We push each other.”
Senior Sergeant Helen Chugg
Family violence co-ordinator, Brimbank/Melton
HELEN Chugg decided she wanted to be a policewoman at just 16 (and joined after she turned 18), but her career light-bulb moment came when she spoke to an incest victim near her own age.
“At 20, I was seconded to the Altona North Police community policing squad (CPS). This was a unit responsible for taking sexual assault statements from children to adults,” she says.
“I recall taking an incest statement from a young girl who was only a year older than I was at the time. She detailed years of sexual abuse by her father from the age of eight to 20 years old.
“It was at this moment that I realised just how fortunate I was for my excellent parents and childhood. I felt the need to give back, and a passion was born in me to become a detective, investigating sexual assault offending.’’
Having joined VicPol in 1989, Chugg became a detective in 2000, and joined the sexual crimes squad two years later. She worked in the child abuse investigation team for five years, based in Footscray.
Chugg says survivors have taught her resilience, courage, “and the importance of trust for strength”.
“I supported them in my role as an investigator of sexual assault to uncloak their sexual predator, giving them closure and peace of mind with respect to reporting,’’ she says.
Chugg gained the power to have a real impact across her community when asked by Brimbank/Melton divisional command to manage family violence for the division in 2015. She “jumped at the challenge”, only to be faced again with a shocking statement early in the job.
“Within a week of taking on this role I read the most horrific statement of physical and sexual abuse endured by a female for a period of eight years at the hands of her husband.
“The violence was inhumane and I wanted to understand how a person becomes that evil. Is it born or created? I believe the answer to this question will assist us to find the solution.”
Chugg, now managing both the family violence and family violence investigation teams in Brimbank/Melton, has set no less a goal than ridding the community of family violence. She believes its toll can be reduced by pushing for “strong police accountability on perpetrators of family violence” and encouraging perpetrators to “take ownership of their violent behaviour and (to) seek behaviour change support”.
Working in such an emotionally charged area, Chugg says she is “constantly asked about taking on the emotion of the cases we manage”.
“For me personally, I think I have been able to manage my resilience by mentally living in the present and the future. I seldom look back.”
Senior Constable Kate McCall
Forensic crime scene investigator, Cardinia
KNOWING that her work at a crime scene can make the difference between locating a perpetrator, or not, is a driver for Kate McCall.
As a forensic investigator she has learned to see detail civilians may miss and to notice even slight abnormalities at crime scenes.
McCall and forensic officers like her find and piece together often tiny pieces of evidence that could help see a conviction for a serious sexual assault, a carjacking or home invasion. She finds the painstaking work and the outcomes it can produce for victims “incredibly satisfying”.
Narre Warren-based McCall was attracted to join the police force by wanting to serve others.
“I like helping people and want to make (society) a better place for my friends and family to live in,” the 30-year-old says.
McCall likes the people side of the work as much as the technical aspect.
“At nearly all the scenes we attend we deal with the victim; it might be the 15th burglary we’ve been to in a day, but it’s probably one of the worst things that’s happened to them in their life, so just trying to give them a bit of support and empathy is also very satisfying.”
A day’s work could involve collecting and photographing exhibits including DNA, blood and fingerprints at the scene of an aggravated burglary, a fatal car collision or even tragic light plane crashes.
Processing a scene, McCall says, involves technical skill, experience and instinct — “a mix of knowledge and your own gut instinct.”
Officers do a diploma in forensic investigation, which involves two courses (one of four weeks, the other two) and two on-the-job placements of 20 weeks.
McCall hopes to progress to the major crime scene forensic unit, which handles homicides. Though that work would be emotionally demanding, she says the support offered within the force makes even the most challenging scenes manageable: “Everyone looks after each other; you couldn’t get better people.”
Originally published as Victoria’s women in blue: Meet the female police officers who are a force to reckon with
‘Angels’: Hero Coles workers save mum’s life
A mother of three has opened up on how her life was saved after she suddenly collapsed while doing a routine supermarket shop.
Wildlife and traffic fears over music festival
Wildlife advocates fear a weekend music festival in central Victoria will endanger native animals including rescued joeys.