I have great empathy for Wade Noonan, who last week stepped down from his role as Victoria's Minister for Police to undergo counselling due to his exposure to traumatic incidents in this work.
Having worked at Victoria Police for 25 years, I know that it is a strange environment, whether it be taking stolen car reports, where I started out, or writing business and strategic plans and reporting, where I finished.
Recording stolen car reports — at that stage about 28,000 a year on average — meant working at the Stolen Motor Vehicle Squad at Russell Street.
You were part of a squad along with four teams of detectives. You got to see what decent hard working coppers do best, and what motivates them: the hard grind that provides unseen good results for the community they work for.
Working at Russell Street also meant working with the Homicide Squad, the Armed Robbery Squad and the last of the hard men, the Major Crime Squad.
It wasn't some abstract business for these blokes, it was simply about solving crimes, catching those responsible and seeing justice brought upon them.
You got to be involved in things; to help investigate crimes that many in our society have the luxury of not even considering in their everyday lives.
We ask our police to deal with the side of our community that we find distasteful; to deliver a community service by filling their lives with darkness so that we can live our own without it.
In darkness, fear breeds. In darkness, people seek comfort in fellow travellers and common understanding. In darkness, demons lurk and bad things fester.
At Russell Street I worked for a number of years on the same floor as the Homicide Squad. Unfortunately I sometimes found myself sharing a lift with some of their customers. If evil does not exist, something quite close to it does, in some of those individuals.
At least I got to get out of the lift. The Homicide Squad guys went back to work to deal with it all again and again.
Working at the other end of Victoria Police, on trying to measure and report to government and the community on the 'effectiveness' of the services police were providing, meant working in a truly bizarre world in which a 'good' outcome meant being 'less bad this year than last year'.
Homicides are up, but we solved more of them — that's a good thing, right? Crime stats are up,