Some years ago, Darren Franks made a decision – he was over locking up people with problems.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
“You know drunks and drug addicts and recidivist offenders,” he said.
“Everyone gets to a point when they go I’ve had enough of this.”
After 20-plus years, the now superintendent of the policing division encompassing most of central Victoria, said he had done his time.
“To be honest, the first 10 years, 15 years in the job, I had no real aspiration to being promoted, not beyond sergeant anyway,” Superintendent Franks said.
“And then I just found at each rank I would see things that I thought needed to be changed and the only way to change it was then to go up.”
It was this desire to effect change that led him to first apply for an inspector position within Victoria Police, and then superintendent in the years following.
“When you get to this point, it’s not about locking up crooks so much because I’ve done all that,” he said.
“Now it’s about hopefully building a solid structure, process and mentoring to help the frontline members to catch the crooks and provide the service for the community.”
Superintendent Franks now oversees 519 employees in his division, which is bound by Echuca in the north, Gisborne in the south, Maryborough in the west and Rushworth in the east.
The division – number five of Victoria Police’s western region – takes in the local government areas of Greater Bendigo, Campaspe, Central Goldfields, Macedon Ranges and Mount Alexander.
Six inspectors fall under Superintendent Franks, helping to co-ordinate these local government areas.
“A superintendent role is really one of those ones where you're meant to be across just about everything in that geographical area,” he said.
“Not necessarily be an expert in one particular issue, but certainly have enough experience and knowledge so that you can manage across a wide number of issues and subjects.”
When Superintendent Franks took up the role in Bendigo in July last year, he brought with him 28 years of experience in the force and a strong background in crime.
Half his career has been as a detective, and most of it was spent in Melbourne’s suburbs.
It began in 1988 when the then 21-year-old decided he would follow in his father’s footsteps – a police officer of 37 years by the time he retired.
“I was working in construction at the time and I was looking for something different,” Superintendent Franks said.
Early on he spent five years at St Kilda at a time when he said it would have been in its heyday, and Springvale when heroin was a big issue and crime had started to pick up as a result.
His time as a detective included working on the Embona Armed Robbery Task Force at Footscray, the armed robbery squad and the armed offenders squad.
He’s dealt with Christopher “Badness” Binse, and a number of old school bank robbers who he said were challenging to investigate and then lock up.
“I was fortunate enough as a detective to be exposed to some of the worst crooks in the country,” Superintendent Franks said.
“I've interviewed Carl Williams and investigated some of the biggest underworld figures that we’ve had over the last 20 years.
“Great experience and I wouldn't swap it for the world.”
But it was a trip to New Zealand during his time at the operations response unit that has been the highlight of his career so far.
In 2011 Superintendent Franks was sent to Christchurch to help with the devastating earthquake that killed 185 people.
“It really hit home around what it means to be a police officer because that was pure and simple helping people,” he said.
“You get sent to a disaster zone like that anticipating that your work is going to be around looting, and that sort of thing, and what the reality is, particularly for New Zealand, there was almost no looting.”
Superintendent Franks’ role was to manage a team of between 300 and 400 police officers from both Australia and New Zealand.
He said, while the group made the community feel safe in the two weeks they were there, it also involved some of the tough work in identifying victims and helping get their bodies home.
Superintendent Franks was a senior sergeant when he joined the newly created operations response unit and also travelled interstate carrying out its public order role.
In the same year as the earthquake, he was sent to Darwin for Barack Obama’s visit and CHOGM in Perth.
Back at home, it continued with major flooding in Victoria in 2011 and the unit supplying a team to help out in central Victoria.
It was after these experiences that Superintendent Franks moved into his first inspector role at Broadmeadows.
This was followed by the same role in Mill Park, but instead he was in charge of all detectives in the division, taking in most of Melbourne’s northern suburbs.
“It was and still is really busy,” Superintendent Franks said of the division.
“They have a lot of serious crime and volume crime issues.”
From there, he applied for half a dozen superintendent positions and landed in Bendigo, an area he knew quite well from his days of playing volleyball.
“This job is a minimum of three years in position so I’ve just scratched the surface as far as what I want to achieve here,” Superintendent Franks said.
Crime prevention focus for year ahead
Twelve months ago when Superintendent Darren Franks took up the lead role in division 5, crime was high on the list of priorities.
Internally, the focus was on improving processes around dealing with it, and, externally, it was about getting crime rates down.
Members’ safety was also at the top of the priorities list, along with road policing and reducing the number of lives lost.
“In mid-January, it was clear we had a big problem with our volume crime – I’m talking about stolen cars, burgs and people stealing from cars,” Superintendent Franks said.
“And what we’re finding, and what we’ve seen in the past in Melbourne, is it’s generally the same offenders offending across all those subjects.”
Police shifted their focus from an individual offence, to the whole group of offending – a smarter way to tackle the issue, according to Superintendent Franks.
At the beginning of the year a new task force was created and in March a joint crime crackdown campaign with Crime Stoppers was launched. The names and images of 20 men and women wanted for property-related crime were released and all have now been caught.
“By focusing on those people, we hit a good target,” Superintendent Franks said. “We had some tremendous results for people calling Crime Stoppers.”
By June, Superintendent Franks said, police had reduced theft of vehicles by a third; theft from vehicles by almost a half; and burglaries by about a quarter.
“I'd really love to thank the community for their input because it's the community that has actually affected the reduction in crime,” he said.
Now the superintendent would like to see the focus shift to prevention with the community’s continued help.
“Whether we like it or not, property crime is not going away, so we have to keep spinning that plate along with a couple of other plates that we’ve got,” he said.
“The only way we’re going to effect any change on our crime and our road trauma is for the community to get involved. Talk to us about the crime issues, don't be afraid to dob in a burglar or a car thief or a drug dealer. That's what we get paid for.”
There were 3170 theft offences recorded in the City of Greater Bendigo in the year ending March 2017.
Superintendent Franks said nowadays people were stealing cars without hesitation and community members needed to adjust their mindset.
“I get that we’re in a rural setting and, I get that once having grown up in the country, I get that we never locked our doors, we left our keys in the car, because crime wasn’t an issue,” he said. “That's changed now.”
Superintendent Franks said when a car was stolen, police had to weigh up the risks between pursuing a stolen car and the danger of a member being hurt or someone from the community.
“If people don't leave their keys in the car, don't give car thieves those opportunities, then I don't have to then worry about cars that are driving around at a million miles an hour potentially killing somebody.”
Road trauma is also a big issue for the division going forward, as is firearm thefts.
Superintendent Franks questioned speed limits for gravel and single-lane bitumen roads.
“I would ask the community, do we really need to do 100km/h on a gravel road?,” he said.
“Probably not, especially a gravel road, which has big red gums right on the edge of it and no guard rail. That’s the type of conversation we’ve got to have with people and see if we can try to stop the deaths.”