Cher Jimenez
Ninety police officers from across the Latrobe Valley recently received cultural awareness training to improve their engagement with Aboriginal people and the region’s multicultural communities.
Morwell Sergeant Ben McWilliam said the training sessions were held between June and July and educated police about cultural sensitivity when dealing with people of different cultural backgrounds.
He said participants learned about prejudice-motivated crime and issues which occurred when someone treated another person badly because of one’s cultural background, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and homelessness.
“Police need to identify when that’s the case and there’s certain procedures to follow,” Sergeant McWilliam said.
He said the participants, who included detectives and traffic police, heard from Victoria Police’s Aboriginal community liaison officer Laurie Marks who spoke about his own experience growing up in the Latrobe Valley as a Koorie man.
Sergeant McWilliam, who manages the station’s proactive policing unit, noted the importance of the police being culturally-sensitive as most of the force came from Melbourne and had little knowledge about Indigenous people.
“Because a lot of the police members who have been working here now come from Melbourne they haven’t got a great deal of exposure to Koorie people or Aboriginal culture. It was great that we got Laurie as a resource person who could deliver it firsthand and include his own experiences within that training program,” he said.
Sergeant McWilliam acknowledged the need for the police to engage with the Aboriginal community as their experience during the Stolen Generation period may still affect their dealings with men in uniform.
“The trauma associated with it is multi-generational so when a policeman turns up at a house to speak to an Aboriginal family or Koorie family, the response that he gets could well be as a result of the experiences that happened to his grandmother or mother ages ago,” he said.
The training also touched on a basic discussion of Islam with United Muslim Sisters of Latrobe Valley president Arfa Khan speaking about her experience settling in the area.
Sergeant McWilliam said community engagement was a huge part of police work and officers must be ready to respond to the multicultural needs of the Latrobe Valley.
“If you want to work within these communities you need to be able to do it in a culturally sensitive way – they’re more likely to embrace you and want to work with you,” he said.
The Latrobe Valley is home to almost 16,000 residents born overseas and almost 5000 speak a language other than English at home, according to the recent Gippsland Multicultural Strategic Plan.
