Justin Smith: The prosecutions unit seems to be that conduit doesn’t it, between Victoria Police and the court system. How does it work, how do you see it?
Senior Sergeant Jackie Urquhart: We are there are on behalf of Victoria Police to represent the community, and we basically present cases to the court.
Justin Smith: How many cases do the Unit handle a year?
Senior Sergeant Jackie Urquhart: We handle, prosecutions division in total throughout Victoria, would handle over 300,000 per year. Big numbers.
Justin Smith: That is a very big number.
Senior Sergeant Jackie Urquhart: Yeah. We have to get in contact with the police informants as well, who know more about the matter than we do at that point. So we rely on them for information. And then I guess we're sort of like the translators that communicate the message and give consideration to rules of evidence and things like that to the court.
So we certainly rely on our victims and witnesses in the community to be able to come to court and to be able to present their evidence to enable us to put the best case forward that we possibly can.
Justin Smith: What services are available for people?
Senior Sergeant Jackie Urquhart: There's a number of different options services and information that's available to make people feel more comfortable.
Maybe that some sort of screening is put up between the person that's giving evidence and the accused person.
And there's also things like remote witness facilities, whereby the victim or the witness won't actually be present in the courtroom so they'll be in another building.
And certainly we encourage if people want to get in touch with those services, the informant, who's details the person will have through reporting the matter, is the best contact to get in touch with and can work them through a number of different options. Because there's plenty of things we can do to support witnesses and victims throughout what can be quite a challenging time
The victims are the forefront of our minds, and we do at times feel that pressure on us, but when we're able to get a result that's a fair and good result, it's priceless, once you speak to people and hear what sort of effects that we've been able to have for them in moving on from incidents as well.
Updated