Transcript

Alicia Allen, New and Emerging Communities Liaison Officer:

Coming from refugee backgrounds always creates huge issues for communities to see police in a different way. Most people coming from new and emerging communities are used to seeing police as very authoritarian.

Marie Piu, Mulitcultural Advisory Unit:

This program is fantastic, we've been looking forward to its arrival. It's called the new and emerging communities liaison officer program, and we're going to have at the moment four officers placed in the regions, working to build a bridge between police and emerging communities. All four of the people who have been appointed have arrived in Australia as migrants - in fact at least three of them have arrived as refugees themselves. Two arrived from the Sudan, one from Eritrea, and one from Chile.

Simon Overland, Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police:

As we know, as people come into Australia, particularly as migrants, many of them under the humanitarian refugee program, there's real challenges for them, settling into a new country, often they don't really understand the way the country works, they don't understand the role of police. There can be mistrust and so the evidence says to us that they will relate most easily to people who have walked in their shoes. That was behind the idea in bringing the new and emerging communities liaison officers in. They are people who have migrated to this country, they've done it successfully, they understand the issues, they understand the challenges and they'll be able to work with us to help us understand better the types of issues these people are facing. Also to work with the communities themselves, to get them to engage better with us so that we can meet their needs.

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