- Published:
- Tuesday 14 April 2026 at 12:00 pm
| Nick and Jo Parissis have been forces for good in Melbourne’s north for decades. |
To help keep the community safe, police need to both respond to crimes and prevent them.
Nick and Jo Parissis are officers who are renowned for the prevention side of policing.
They have devoted their long careers to developing life-changing relationships with disadvantaged kids, marginalised communities, the elderly and more.
They also happen to be married.
Nick, now an acting sergeant, started his policing career at Carlton Police Station in the early 1990s and was joined there by Jo, now a sergeant, in 1995.
They had worked together for five years before they started dating.
Jo remembers the turning point during one night shift.
“I reckon Nick got a taste of my cooking,” Jo said.
“We used to do night shift cookups at the station and I remember one time I was making soup or something on the stove and Nick said, ‘Maybe you can come and cook for me one day’.”
“Yeah I think I remember that,” Nick said.
“And it just sort of progressed from that.”
When asked how long they had been dating before getting married, Jo quickly chimed in with, “Too long”.
“Yeah, my bad,” Nick said.
“We had moved in together after three years but it wasn’t until after seven years that I finally proposed.”
Finding their niche
By that point, they were no longer working at the same station and had both begun to find their specific callings in their policing careers.
For Nick, he would spend a lot of his time breaking down barriers between migrant communities and the police, particularly in the Carlton housing estate.
“In the mid-90s, there was a big influx of people from the Horn of Africa moving into the housing estate,” he said.
“We noticed that when they'd see the police car, they'd go the other way, even if they hadn’t done anything wrong, and that was just because they had preconceived negative ideas of what the police were in their own country.”
Nick and a colleague worked with local schools to invite kids on police camps, where they would spend a weekend away and officers would introduce them to the role of police in Australia, as well as talking about safety issues around roads, bicycles, cyber safety and general responsibilities.
“In the first few years we really struggled to get the Horn of Africa kids coming along, because their parents were fearful about police taking their kids away,” Nick said.
“But slowly they started to see that they could trust us and then those camps were so popular that we would always be overbooked.
“I now sometimes get stopped in the street by people who say, ‘Oh Nick, you took me on a camp 20 years ago, thank you’.
“I had a lady come up to me last year who said that her son and his best friend came on one of the camps 15 or 20 years ago and they’re both now police officers, which is pretty special.”
For more than 20 years, Nick has also led the annual North Melbourne Police Toy and Food Drive, which collects new toys and non-perishable food to support families in need, particularly for sick children staying at the Ronald McDonald House in Parkville.
| Nick has run the annual North Melbourne Police Toy and Food Drive for more than 20 years. |
And it’s not just young people who Nick has a heart for.
"We had a little Italian lady called Anna who lived in the Carlton flats and who came to a seniors presentation we did once, and she rang me about an issue with her neighbour, so I went and saw her,” he said.
“She was in her probably late seventies by that point and she had no one, no kids, no other family and I ended up visiting her once a month to have a coffee and spend some time with her.
“It got to the point where she gave me this big clock.
“I don’t want to be rude, but it's a bizarre clock, the kind of thing you’d get in those old Copperart stores.
“But I’ve got it in my office and I put this little note next to it that says, ‘No, this is not my taste, but there is a story behind it’.
“After about five or six years of knowing and visiting her, Anna passed away and, at her funeral, there was me and a couple of housing estate workers, and the priest asked me to do the eulogy for her, which was really special for me.”
Changing young lives
Jo has had an incredibly fruitful focus on youth throughout her career, spending the majority of her time as a Youth Resource Officer in Melbourne’s north.
“It was originally a role where we would go into schools to educate kids on all kinds of things and then it changed to become more involved with engaging with specific, targeted families and kids to help them stay out of trouble and on to a better path in life,” Jo said.
“A lot of this has been with kids who are in out-of-home care, the residential units, and most of the time those kids were in the situation they were in because they felt they’d been let down by their own families.
“I just remember once sitting with one kid who had just stolen a car or something and I asked him, ‘What is it that you want?’ and he said, ‘I just want a family’.”
Like Nick, Jo’s heart goes out to the disadvantaged and she has started up and run various initiatives over the years, including a weekly boxing program at a school for disengaged students.
She has also been the heart and soul of the Blue Light Discos in Melbourne’s north for many years and served on the organisation’s state board for eight years.
| Jo (left) established the Preston Blue Light branch's successful boxing program. |
It was in the Blue Light Discos that long-time colleague and friend Superintendent Lorna McCarthy saw Jo shine.
“There's just so much trust from the community and young people with Jo,” Supt McCarthy said.
“She is known affectionately by all of them as ‘Copper Jo’ and she established some really good relationships with the kids and their families, to the extent that they would reach out to Jo after a disco when they had some issues with their children and she'd always follow up with them.
“There was one family I remember as being particularly challenging, but Jo always sees the best in people and she gave the kids various responsibilities at the discos.
“Jo ended up putting one of the boys in that family through the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and he is thriving now with his own business.
“Without Jo taking the time and effort to give him a chance, I think his life would have looked very different.”
Being known as Copper Jo meant that she has often been the go-to police officer for youths when they’re in trouble with the law.
“Often I’d have kids asking me if there were any arrest warrants out for them,” Jo said.
“I’d check and, if they did, I’d then work with them for a time where they’d come into the police station with me and I’d help them through that process.”
Supporting each other
Such level of engagement can be challenging, but being married to someone in the same job and with the same focus makes life outside the job easier.
| Nick and Jo holiday in Nick’s family homeland of Greece every year. |
But Nick and Jo have also had personal trauma of their own.
“We had a son that we lost,” Jo said.
“He was born at 24 weeks in 2008 and passed away after 15 days.”
Their journey after that involved many more attempts to fall pregnant, including using IVF, but unfortunately more miscarriages followed.
“I guess that's one of the reasons we do the stuff with Ronald McDonald house and the toy drive, because we’ve experienced difficult things like that ourselves,” Nick said.
“And even in working with at-risk kids, I think what we’ve been through has given us more resilience and bit more empathy as well.”
Supt McCarthy has often marveled at the work and devotion of both Nick and Jo.
So much so that she nominated them both for the prestigious Australian Policing Medal (APM), which recognises distinguished service from police officers.
The nominations were successful, with Jo being awarded the APM last year and Nick this year.
“It’s amazing to think about the number of lives and families they’ve changed over their decades of policing,” Supt McCarthy said.
“They are two very special police officers and two very special people.”
Editorial Jesse Wray-McCann
Photography Jesse Wray-McCann and supplied
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