New top cop Mike Bush says of protests: ‘There’s a real social question here about social cohesion and polarisation’

Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Mike Bush has laid out how he plans to tackle Victoria’s crime crisis in his first interview since taking over the force.

New top cop Mike Bush has promised a back-to-basics policing revolution, to weed out extremists in “protest capital” Victoria and crack down on gang bosses behind the tobacco war.

In his first interview as the Victoria Police Chief Commissioner, Mr Bush also declared teens who repeatedly committed serious offences needed to suffer the consequences behind bars.

New top cop Mike Bush is vowing to weed out extremists in the ‘protest capital’. Picture: Jason Edwards

His immediate priority will be getting more officers “back out on the street” by overhauling the force’s ageing computer systems and slashing paperwork, while also changing the force’s approach to family violence and mental health incidents.

In the wide-ranging interview, a month after he was sworn in, the top cop also told the Herald Sun:

• Victoria’s surging crime rates of recent years must be reversed and he would be setting targets soon.

• He had not been asked by the state government to make budget cuts.

• The freedom and finances of organised crime figures, including those overseas, would be targeted in an effort to end the tobacco wars.

Mr Bush said officers were held back from police work by having multiple unconnected computer systems that frequently forced them to repeatedly carry out the same task.

He said the force had signed a technology partnership with his former jurisdiction of New Zealand to implement its systems, something he believed could be achieved within a year.

A team will head across the Tasman in six weeks to examine their system, which Mr Bush originally helped implement.

“Our people join the police to be out on the street, preventing crime, responding to crime, investigating and resolving crime. We want to make sure that they’re allowed to do that,” Mr Bush said.

Mr Bush says his immediate priority is getting more officers back out on the street.

Mr Bush said he had received feedback from officers about the need to streamline the response to family violence incidents. He said it took up to six hours to process those cases and, while police intervention was important, there had to be a more effective way.

Dealing with spiralling rates of high-level youth crime will be a major task for the new chief.

Mr Bush said community safety had to be top priority and consequences had to be imposed for those who put others at risk.

“No one wants to see young people in jail but there are some, especially repeat and recidivist serious offenders – they, for the sake of the community, unfortunately, that’s the only place for them,” he said.

Working with other agencies to find ways to intervene before young people offended will be a key component under Mr Bush.

He said Victoria seemed to be “the protest capital” of Australia and, while people needed to be able to protest peacefully, there were extreme elements whose behaviour would be tackled with a “quite surgical” strategy.

“There’s a real social question here about social cohesion and polarisation,” he said.

“There are only a small group of people who want to cause harm at both ends of that spectrum. It’s unacceptable and whether it’s through legislation or police intervention, that needs to be prevented.”

Mr Bush says he will take a ‘quite surgical’ strategy to tackling extreme elements of protests. Picture: Valeriu Campan

Mr Bush said he would soon announce targets to rein in the state’s constantly climbing crime stats, saying Victoria was “over-represented” for crime and declaring: “It has to be reversed.”

The man who replaced Shane Patton is a proponent of preventive policing and said the force would be working with other agencies to stop crime before it happens.

“That’s why we exist,” he said.

One of the biggest challenges facing Victoria Police is the influence of increasingly powerful underworld figures, some of them operating from the Middle East where they orchestrate big drug shipments and illicit tobacco-related crime back here.

Mr Bush said crucial partnerships with foreign agencies were increasingly successful in dealing with those players.

“I will be taking a very close look at whether or not we’re leveraging our current legislation to target the finances of these groups and individuals,” he said.