Victoria’s top cop delivers stern warning

Details on restrictions covering the suburbs locked down, businesses shut, penalties and testing

Chief Commissioner Shane Patton said the very small window of police discretion was rapidly closing.

He said officers would be out in force, particularly in the 36 suburbs across the 10 locked-down postcodes, and people should expect to be pulled over and spoken to about why they are out.

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“While we may have been very lenient of recent times, with this emergency we’re experiencing, with this threat to public health and the safety of the public, that leniency is dissipating day-by-day,” Mr Patton said.

“I can assure you we will now be issuing the majority of people who commit these breaches with infringements. Very rarely will we be using discretion and warning them, only extreme cases of ambiguity will we be doing so.

“I want to be absolutely crystal clear, for those who are selfish enough to disregard these warnings from the chief health officer, the deliberate, obvious and blatant breaches, if they’re committing that we will be infringing them.”

Mr Patton couldn’t confirm whether any fines had been issued in the first 13 hours of Operation Sanus as the data was still being uploaded.

It comes as police this morning set up booze buses on major roads in and out of Melbourne’s 10 hot-spot suburbs where they are performing random checks on drivers and passengers.

Mr Patton said public order and critical incident response teams, mounted police, highway patrols and local police would all be involved in the operation.

“We’ll be having police on those targeted roads, some backstreets, some other roads, but also main arterials,” he said.

“We’ll be having a high volume presence in those high-volume public places, we’ll have booze buses out and about.

“We’ll be speaking to them to make sure that they are supposed to be out and about, that they are adhering to the reasons for being out and about and they are adhering to the chief health officer’s stay-at-home directions.

“Drivers and passengers can expect, and should expect to see us, and there’s a strong probability they’ll be intercepted and asked where they’re going and why they’re going there.”

Mr Patton said number-plate recognition technology would also be used to monitor vehicles.

He said having more than 1000 police specifically tasked to the coronavirus response was not an overreach when faced with a deadly public health emergency.

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