The Experts podcast - Season 3 Episode 6: Sergeant says - transcript

There are few roles more critical to the day-to-day police response than the 251 sergeant.

These sergeants, like Dan Maffei and Dani Muntz, are responsible for the supervision and welfare of troops on patrol in their patch, and for keeping their community safe. It’s a sophisticated juggling act, but this dynamic duo has it all under control.

Listen to this episode and other episodes of Victoria Police's official podcast, Police Life: The Experts.

Transcript of Police Life: The Experts podcast, Season 3 Episode 6: Sergeant says

Voiceover: This podcast episode contains references to mental health issues and other potentially distressing content. Listener discretion is advised.

Sergeant Dani Muntz: I think this role's a real privilege. Not only do we get to be part of the best and worst days of people's, the community's lives, but as a sergeant, it's kind of a little bit like being a parent. You raise your troops, and you raise them up and you give them good skills and you teach them good lessons and then they go on and be amazing police officers themselves, which that's a real privilege I think.

[Dynamic music plays]

Voiceover: A sergeant in Victoria Police plays a critical role – in leadership, command, and control. They are the link between the members on the ground and the higher ranks.

While sergeants perform a variety of duties, the one most critical to the day-to-day police response is known as the 251 sergeant. ‘251’ is the call sign used on police radio to signify the patrol supervisor of a police service area for any given shift.

It sounds simple enough, but it’s one of the toughest gigs in modern day policing.

Police radio – Sergeant Dan Maffei: Mernda 251. I'm going to give you a search pattern and then I want you to come back to me with units that I've got available. I'll give you a search pattern now. Give me units when you've got them available. Received?

[Tense music plays]

Voiceover: The 251 is responsible for the supervision and welfare of troops on patrol in their patch. For deciding which police units go where, and when, and ultimately, for keeping their community safe.

It’s a role fundamental to the way Victoria Police functions every day. On the frontline, when decisions have to be made, it’s the 251 sergeant who everyone looks to.

Sgt Dani Muntz: My name is Dani Muntz. I'm a sergeant at Greensborough Uniform. I've been in the job since 2014. I started off as a PSO actually, a protective services officer. It was a quicker route to actually enter the force that way than it was to be a copper at the time, but this was always the end game.

Sgt Dan Maffei: I'm Dan Maffei. I'm a sergeant. I work at the Mernda Police Station. I've been in the force for 25 years.

You get a lot of successes in this job. Night shift’s a prime example, we catch a lot of crooks on night shift, and look, it's great fun, and it's a great reward when you get it. I've never played in a grand final, but I imagine it'd be something similar to that.

Voiceover: Dani and Dan are at different stages of their policing career, but both are rated by their bosses and colleagues in Melbourne’s north east as outstanding sergeants. But that doesn’t mean they’re cut from the same cloth.

Like all good supervisors, they each have their own style. While the 251 sergeant generally begins their shift behind a desk, it’s no secret that Dan is always itching to get out on the road.

[Sounds of boots on the ground and car doors closing play]

Sgt Dan Maffei: I do a morning tour. If I'm the morning 251, I get in the car after I've briefed everyone up, and I just drive, go around. You still find the shop window that's been broken that hasn't been reported. You still find the dumped stolen car in the back street that no one's rung up here about. And you say, I remember that car, I saw it the other day when I was just going for a drive. So you make a mental note of things that just look out of place. And that's an old school tool that was taught to me. And I still love doing it.

Sgt Dani Muntz: I'm probably less of the 251 that goes out on the road. Only because I like to be at the desk with the tools that we have at our disposal.

We had a job recently where I sent, the guys were going out to a gentleman, a guy, who was having a psych episode, that had only sort of marginally been reported here and there and so he didn't really flag on our system, but there was notes in what we call a dossier.

So, I was able to go into the dossier, which you can't sort of see on the road as easily and read the comments from previous officers that have put on notes that said, you know, “He suffers from these diagnoses, this is his usual MO”. I was able to ring the complainant and say, “What's actually going on tonight? Like, how are you? We can't get a unit there right now, but what's going on?”. And he was telling me, yeah that he'd smashed up the place, this sort of stuff, all this sort of information.

So I was to gather the information from the desk and then risk assess that and say to the troops, “I need someone to go there right now, but I want two units. I want someone with a taser because he's got a knife. He is having a psych episode; he has a bunch of diagnoses which will make him more resistant to us and very combative. So I don't want any arguments, just go in there, arrest him, and if you need to use your options, taser him, go for it. Use the less lethal option to effect the arrest”.

And speaking to the complainant, when I said to him, “He'll be arrested tonight, I just can't get a unit right there in the next five minutes, it will be in the next half an hour. Make sure you're safe, stand out the front”, which he did. But being able to manage that from the office, for me, I was able to keep it nice and calm, gather all the information, gather all the details that I needed to keep them safe, the victim safe, and the offender corralled into one area.

The guys moved in really quickly after that. They were there within 20 minutes. The victim was actually, the complainant was on the phone, and I said to him, “He'll be arrested tonight. He'll be taken away. We'll do an intervention order. He's not coming back to the house tonight”.

And he actually burst into tears on the phone and he said to me, “I'm OK, I can wait now for 20 minutes, I can, it's OK. Knowing that you guys are gonna take him away tonight and he's not coming back, he's my stepson, but he can't be here anymore, I can't deal with this family violence anymore”. So being able to be that removed, from the desk, have all that handled, and then I went out. And that was fine after that.

So I'm the family violence liaison officer at our station, so every station has one. It's that everyday trauma that people are going through with the family violence, and some of them are lesser than others, but there's some really decent family violence offenders in our area, and they're the ones that you worry about and go, “Is this gonna turn into a murder next shift?”.

So for me, I like to know who my family violence offenders are in my area. Probably for us in our area, that's the biggest problem. We're going to at least two or three jobs a shift with family violence.

Sgt Dan Maffei: So I work at Mernda, but it's the Whittlesea Police Service Area which encompasses Epping Police Station, Mill Park, ourselves, Mernda and Whittlesea. We get a lot of, we're high on the family violence as well but we get lot of property crime.

[Ominous music plays]

Sgt Dan Maffei: A lot of aggravated burglaries are starting to pop up a lot more, a lot of theft of motor cars. We've got a train line that runs right through the middle of our patch and we're a pretty good thoroughfare from the west coming into us. So we border with Craigieburn and Fawkner and Hume, and those sort of really busy areas.

Voiceover: On January 4^th 2024, Dan received a report of a man with a gun on the street. He was already on the road for another job, when this higher priority situation arose.

Police radio – Sgt Dan Maffei: 251, go ahead.

Police radio – radio controller: We’ve got a priority one firearm incident coming in at [BEEP]. The complainant says there’s a male outside his house with a firearm.

Police radio – Sgt Dan Maffei: Received that.

Voiceover: With this firearm incident unfolding, Dan switched his focus, leaving other units to pick up his original job.

Police radio – Sgt Dan Maffei: I receive that. Alright, we might have to abandon this job then. I'll let the QEs and Trinity units play around with this one. Ah, myself, Mill Park and Epping will clear and we'll head to that job. Please give us details if you can.

Police radio – radio controller: 251, it’s come through priority one. No shots fired. Two suss males outside. Got actually four males. The complainant says that they're there to extort her son. Not known to the complainant, one firearm sighted, no shots fired. She's still on the phone.

Police radio – Sgt Dan Maffei: Received that. At this stage will put the uniform units in the staging area close by, but out of sight. I'm happy to do a drive over myself just to see what the state of play is.

I’ll keep uniform units away at this stage, just until we get some eyeballs on the court itself and then I'll get everyone to come in.

Voiceover: By the time Dan arrived on the scene, the crooks were on the move so he and his offsider began to follow a black van.

Police radio – Sgt Dan Maffei: Mernda 251. I’ve just got that black van. It’s now heading eastbound on Findon Road. I’m tipping they might be our crooks. So I’m just going to follow from a distance. I’m about 200 metres behind them at this stage. Approaching a roundabout.

Police radio – radio controller: See you, gotcha.

Voiceover: Dan then turned to planning the operation, a mobile intercept which would likely involve the Dog Squad and the Critical Incident Response Team.

Police radio – Sgt Dan Maffei: 251. Just for notification at this stage for K9, if I’ve got one available, and CIRT please.

Voiceover: He then called for extra resources from detectives working nearby, using their radio call signs of ‘545’ and ‘555’.

Police radio – Sgt Dan Maffei: 251, I'll keep the other units going in that direction. How far off is 555? Or 545? I'm not keen on letting this van out of my sight.

Police radio – radio controller: North 545, 555?

Police radio – radio controller: 251, received. I think Epping is going to be the closest. Where did you want them?

Police radio – Sgt Dan Maffei: I’m trying to get a map up as I'm driving, so stand by.

Voiceover: While Dan was tailing the armed offenders, he remained the 251 sergeant, managing the police response to all the other jobs in his patch. It’s a precarious juggling act, and it’s not for the faint of heart.

Sgt Dan Maffei: Realistically you've got to manage the whole patch and if you start attending jobs yourself as a primary unit, you might be able to, you might throw away those other responsibilities you've got. So you really got to balance that. Like, “What am I getting myself into? Can I still manage the patch? Can I still put some work into this?”.

If I am going to do that, I'll always notify up and say, “Mate, I'm going to this job because it needs someone to go to it. Just so you know, boss, I'm out there, keep an ear on the radio in case I'm pretty busy”. And sometimes they’ll step in and say, “Yeah, OK, we'll do that for you,” or they’ll l get another sergeant to come in and cover you.

Voiceover: When a shift is extremely busy, a 251 sergeant may look to their counterpart back at the office, known as the section sergeant, for assistance.

The section sergeant's job is to supervise police in the station, and to oversee the custody and interview processes that happen there.

Sgt Dan Maffei: I know that if I'm sitting in the office and I'm a section sergeant and I’m not necessarily performing the 251 role, if I hear the 251's busy and he or she's at a job, I'll quite often volunteer and say, “Look, I'll come out and I'll take over your patch whilst you're dealing with that. When you're back and ready, you can have the patch back and I’ll go back to being the section sergeant”. I think we've got to work a little bit more logically and we probably got to face up to the fact that sometimes we've got a lot of work in our plate and we've gotta share it around a bit more.

[Tense music plays]

Police radio – Sgt Dan Maffei: Now I’m about to intercept this van. I am 100 metres south of Centenary Drive on Morang Drive. Received. I’m attempting to intercept.

Police radio – radio controller: Received that 251. Mill Park 311, copy.

Voiceover: There’s an art to running these operations from a moving police car.

Police radio – Sgt Dan Maffei: Vehicle pulling over. Standby. Standby. 251, evade! Evade! Evade!

Police radio – radio controller: Direction?

Police radio – Sgt Dan Maffei: Southbound, Morang Drive. In pursuit. In pursuit.

Voiceover: While Dan is busy making decisions on the move, a member at Mill Park Police Station comes up on air with more information about the job.

Police radio – Mill Park 950: Mill Park 950.

Police radio – radio controller: 950 go.

Police radio – Mill Park 950: The complainant, four males, three of them have possible handguns.

Police radio – Radio controller: Mernda, 251?

Police radio – Sgt Dan Maffei: Pindari, we’re heading eastbound in Pindari. Standby. Now southbound, Arthur Phillip Drive, southbound Arthur Phillip Drive. Received?

Voiceover: It was time for a change of tactics after Dan and his offsider lost sight of the black van.

Police radio – Sgt Dan Maffei: Uh, just any other units in the vicinity, if I can have them in here because I have lost them. For the purpose of the exercise, I will terminate the pursuit because I'm no longer in sight of them. Received, but let's flood the area if CIRT is monitoring and K9 is monitoring, can I have them in the area thanks.

[Dynamic music plays]

Voiceover: Not prepared to give up on the chance to catch some crooks, Dan created a dragnet around the offenders’ vehicle and, sooner or later, they would drive into it.

Police radio – K9: K9 203, we’ve searched the yards of 42 and 44, I think it is.

Voiceover: Forty minutes after it began, Dan’s pursuit was over. The offenders abandoned the car, but they couldn’t shake the canine units.

Police radio – Sgt Dan Maffei: We’ve got one under arrest at this stage, possibly another.

Sgt Dani Muntz: The first night shift that I was on when I came out to Greensborough, Dan was a 251 over in Darebin and he ran a pursuit and I was like mind-blown, yeah. Without sounding like a fangirl, I was, like, “I want to be him when I grow up,” because his radio comms were sharp and it was, you know, three words at a time, “Mernda 251. I will have these units to this spot”.

So everyone knew exactly what was going on. He didn't sound stressed at all. And as someone just sort of joining the party, I felt calm, even though I was the 251 of my patch, that he had it under control. Like he was 100 per cent in control, very calm in a very dynamic situation. He was managing it. He was the one in charge. And there was absolutely no doubt about that.

Police radio – Sgt Dan Maffei: Okay, I want the 311s. Three-up. Paying particular attention to concealment and cover. Approach the court on foot. On foot only. With a view to getting observations.

Sgt Dan Maffei: I'm very slow when I talk on the radio, I give directions which are clear. I don't give too much directions, I'm pretty short and sharp with what I want to say.

I get ridiculed quite a lot at work because I do do that. They find it quite funny, but there is method in my madness. I don't want to have to come up three or four times to say the same thing, so really, really important.

Voiceover: As a 251 sergeant, there is no typical shift - whether you are on day or night shift, it’s about being prepared for every outcome and knowing your patch – and your troops.

Sgt Dani Muntz: I've had the luxury of being in the division a little bit longer now. So, you tend to know most of the people that we're working with. So that's really helpful.

For me, knowing their personalities or knowing their backgrounds, you know, that person's got SES experience. So if I have something that's emergency management driven, that's not my wheelhouse, but I know it's his. So I'm going to ring that kid and go, “Hey, can you come into the office? Can you be my 251 driver for a little while and you're going to help me run this”.

Or knowing that that person's really good with psych patients or that person is really good with family violence.

If you've got a unit that is not necessarily tailored to that job, you're still gonna send them anyway because you may not have another unit, but if you've got a choice, sending someone who has a background in that particular area is really helpful.

I think this role's a real privilege. Not only do we get to be part of the best and worst days of people's, the community's lives, but as a sergeant, we also get to be there to support and educate and develop our staff, our troops.

It's kind of a little bit like being a parent. You raise your troops and you raise them up and you give them good skills and you teach them good lessons and then they go on and be amazing police officers themselves, which that's a real privilege I think.

Sgt Dan Maffei: You do protect the troops. You're that layer between the troops and the bosses. So the bosses will come and kick me in the bum and then I go and kick the troops in the bum. But the troops know it's coming from me and not higher up.

I used to make a joke of putting my arms out here and saying to the troops, “This is where you fit, you're under here. I'm going to take all the shit from upstairs, but you do what I say when I tell you to do it”.

I really like that because you're sort of seen as that middle management, but not only that, you're still on the frontline with the troops, you’re still going to the jobs with them, you’re still helping them out. So there's a lot of credibility in that.

Voiceover: At work, Dani is part of Victoria Police’s peer support program. She’s one of about 800 employees across the state who have undertaken special training to recognise signs and symptoms of stress in their colleagues. These ‘peers’ can provide a listening ear, and practical help, such as referrals to professional support services when required.

Outside work, Dani is studying part-time for a psychology degree, which has helped her manage the demands of her role.

Dani Muntz: I've always wanted to do a psych degree and I like understanding what makes people tick, so understanding the behaviour of an individual and what's behind that and how that I can use that knowledge I suppose to actually get a better result, whether that's with my staff or whether that’s with offenders or whether that’s with psych patients out in the community. Just having that little bit of extra knowledge and understanding, I feel like it helps me.

So understanding those signs that things are starting to crack a little bit, when to pull back. And I suppose, you know, at jobs to recognise those signs of stress. So, you know, the adrenaline, the fuzzy hearing, you know, that sick feeling in your gut or the jitteriness.

I think as a manager, to actually be able to recognise in the troops when they barrelling towards making bad decisions, I see that as my role as 251, to actually to be able to be that oversight and say, “Hey, I'm just gonna pull you back out of this one, let's get somebody else to step in”. Or be that calm presence, hopefully, over the radio, that anchors them into the moment. “Let's make these decisions. I need you to do this, this, this and this”.

Voiceover: The communication between the 251 sergeant and their troops does not end with operations on the road. The sergeant is often the first to notice when a member is struggling under the weight of their duties.

[Melancholic music plays]

Sgt Dani Muntz: So, we had a young fellow who'd suicided, and we had to, obviously, make those death notifications to the family. We'd attended the parents of the young guy, their address, their family home, and they weren't home. But the younger sibling of that deceased male was home. Obviously, we didn't want to tell a 16-year-old that her brother just died.

So, we sort of tiptoed around the, “Oh, where's mum, dad, rah, rah”. We ended up finding dad and delivering that death notice, but in the meantime, the mum had got wind of it, and they'd been searching for this kid for sort of the last 12 hours.

So, she knew something was wrong or had an inkling something was wrong and rang the local police station and was quite hysterical. You know, “Where is my son, is he okay? Is he okay? Is he okay?”. And one of the van members had to do the death notice over the phone and say to her, “Look, I'm terribly sorry, your son's passed away”. Which she was hysterical, obviously and it's not ideal. We don't like doing death notices over the phone for obvious reasons.

And we'd done the debrief and all that sort of stuff and it was a couple of months later that he came up and said, “Oh Dani, have you got a second?” and I said, “Yeah”. And he said, “I just want, do you remember that job where we had to do the death notice over the phone?”. I said “Yeah, yeah”, and he said “Look, I still hear her screaming every now and again”. And I said, “Oh my gosh, like that's, like are you okay?”.

So we sat down, we had a quick chat about it. He said, “Yeah”, he goes, “I might be driving to a job and I just get it, like it just comes back to me”. He said “Or I'll be home and I'll make a cup of tea and I'd just hear her screaming on the phone”. I said, “Yeah, look, that sounds like early PTSD signs, mate, so do you want some help with that? Can I get you hooked into services?”.

He wasn't in a position to make that phone call and didn't want to talk to his wife about it. He said “I don't want talk to anyone about this because I don't want to put it on anyone. It just kind of seems, it was months ago. But it just seems like I should be over this, but I just don't know why it’s happening”.

So, I made that phone call to welfare, put in that referral, they called him. He went and did one or two sessions with a psychologist who explained the reasoning and why his brain was processing it that way. And good as gold. Came to me a couple of months later and we checked in and I said, “Hey, how you going?”. And he said, “Yep, don't hear the screaming anymore. Psych really put it in perspective for me and now I can actually talk to my wife and say to her this is what I was going through”. He said, “But you know, that's, you know I feel like I've cleared that one out of my closet and it was all good”.

So yeah, that was a nice moment to know that a), that he could actually come and speak to me and just approach me about that. But b), I could actually connect him into services and get him the help.

Voiceover: Dan’s method as a 251 relies on preparation; knowing what troops he has on hand and their capabilities.

Sgt Dan Maffei: We're probably more scrutinised now than we ever have been. So when you're running your patch, you're trying to protect your members while still provide an excellent service to the community. You're trying to make sure that their adrenaline isn't getting the better of them, they're not taking any unnecessary risks, they’re responding to the jobs correctly when they're at the jobs, they’re doing the right thing.

You’re constantly getting phone calls. So, you're try and understand what it is that they're asking you and try and give them the right advice so that they are doing the right thing. So when they go into the domestic they might ask you, “Look, should we take out an intervention order about this one? Should we take a complaint or what's the right course of action?”.

You want to give them right advice and you want to stop them from maybe taking too many risks when they're getting involved with a car or maybe about to engage in a pursuit or maybe about to go and see the violent offender one-up, you know. What can we put in place to stop all that from happening? What level of service are you going to provide?

And I'm a fan of, if you go to a job, and then half an hour later that job pops up again, guess what? You're going back because you didn't solve it. I want it solved. Go back and see what else you can do. I'm not going to give that job to another unit to try and fix something that you may have or haven't looked at in the first instance and done right the first time.

So, if I get a second call to an address, I'm more inclined to attend that myself and just think, “What have we missed here? Why are we getting a second call? What's happened?” Or, could the members have done something a little bit differently that might have prevented that second call?.

A lot of the time you just want to find a unit to get to the job. And then you're trying to juggle, checking the job itself, you'll read it yourself and you'll say, “Oh, I really need someone to go to this, this is a pretty serious domestic and the bloke's still there, we need to go and talk to him”. But you might not have a unit, so you've got to juggle and try and figure out where am I going to get one from. Do I borrow from, do I ring Dani and say, “Can I have, can I have a van to come over here and do this?”. Or do I just pop it on hold for the next 10 minutes hoping that one of my vans will come free? Or do I stretch up north and ask the country station to come and give us a hand?

So it's a big juggling act. Then you've got in the back of the mind, how long can I hold it for here before it becomes a real, real issue. As time progresses, you might want to default to the senior sergeant and say, “Hey mate, I'm giving you a buzz because it looks like I've lost my units and I don't think I'm going to get another one back for three to four hours. Just letting you know, I'll pop the jobs on hold for as long as I can, but we might need to think about starting to look at other resources. Can we get people up from the city? Can we people out to do this?” You’ve just gotta try and juggle as much as you can.

[Dynamic music plays]

Voiceover. As a 251 sergeant, the nightmare scenario is to lose contact with members on the ground. Everyone must be accounted for at all times.

Sgt Dan Maffei: It is terrifying. If you have lost a member, your brain's going a hundred mile an hour thinking, “Where is he? What's happened? Is he in an alleyway somewhere? Has he been shot? Has he been killed? Is not coming up because he physically can't come up?”.

So that's all running through your head, and at the same time, you're still managing the job. You've still got to find him. And you've got everyone coming up on the air because everyone wants to help when you got a missing member.

So yeah, it's terrifying, but at the same time, that's when you're really working at 100 per cent and you're trying to calm everyone else down because your goal is to find the guy. We'll defrag later, but for now let's go 100 per cent, let's find him, let's find out what's happened, let’s rehabilitate the scene. But yeah, you're inside, you are really, really worried because that's a really, really bad day.

[Tense music plays]

Sgt Dan Maffei: There was an example I think I gave a while back. I was at Northcote as a sergeant. One of my units was engaging with a male who presented to be suicidal on the train track. They removed him from the train track. He armed himself, approached the members, the members challenged him. He dropped the fence post and then ran away.

There were two members on the unit. One was an experienced senior constable; one was a very junior constable. They got split up and we couldn't find the male for quite some time. I think it took us about half an hour in the end. That's probably as stressed as I get in this job, knowing that you've got a member missing and not knowing what's happened to him.

The other police officer didn't know the patch very well at all. She'd only just started. Couldn't find a street sign, came up the radio, was quite visibly distressed. The stress had gotten to her and couldn't form a sentence together at all.

Air Wing were out and about to give us a hand, but they didn't have a starting point really well because she didn't know what side of the track she was on. I was looking at the original job to try and piece it all together and then got on the road myself.

We finally did find him a long time later and he was a martial artist so when he engaged with this guy the second time he put him in a lock and a hold and held him down on a nature strip but just couldn't access his radio. He knew it was only a matter of time before we found him.

For him it wasn't a big deal, for me it was the biggest deal in the world because we had a potential member missing and when that happens every man and his dog wants to get on the radio and tell you what to do when really all you want to do is put a search in place and find him as quickly as you can. Yeah, it's something that I don't like. I don't like losing communications with members.

I'm not afraid now to say I've been involved in plenty of incidents that I look back on and go, “You know, wow”. I reckon if I think back, there's at least three occasions when I think I could have been killed in this job.

I remember doing a search warrant on a bloke that was dealing a lot of drugs. We didn't know it at the time but this drug dealer and his partner had been run through by other crooks and had their drugs stolen and got beaten up probably about a couple of weeks earlier.

I was the doorman, so I was qualified to kick the door in which I did that. Which meant that I was the last person through the door. So I'm opening the door for the rest of the detectives to go in. So I was last person though the door and everyone was chasing the guy down the main hallway. I saw a lady sitting on the couch and I thought, “Well I better go and arrest her because if I don't, if I follow suit, she's going to run away”.

She was sitting on the couch and she just moved her right arm down to the couch pulled up a firearm pointed it straight at me and started to squeeze the trigger and I said, “Oh fuck, I'm dead”. And it was only when I got closer and she saw the police sign that she actually dropped the firearm and said, “Oh shit, I'm sorry, I’m sorry, I didn't realise, you're the police”. I quickly handcuffed her and grabbed the firearm, pulled the magazine out, had a look, and there was one in the spout.

And in hindsight, I did 101 things wrong. I was just lucky to get away with it. Every now and then, I think about that. And I use that in context when I do search warrant briefings, I say to people, you just, you don't know what you're gonna walk into.

Sgt Dani Muntz: Being the fun police is not great, but if at the end of the day it keeps the troops and the community safe, then that's, I kind of think, our role. But yeah, people do get tunnel vision. You are full of adrenaline, full of the moment, really excited, ready to get out there and have a crack, but sometimes it's not the best decision to be made.

[Uplifting music plays]

Voiceover: Life experience is a big advantage for our two sergeants. Finding her destiny in Victoria Police came at a later age for Dani.

Sgt Dani Muntz: I think it is that experience, you know, I'm not 21, rushing in through life, thinking I'm invincible, bulletproof, ready to roll. I've been married and divorced, I’ve had a couple of kids, I’ve managed people outside of this environment, so I have those skills to actually bring to the plate and I think that with age comes a little bit of wisdom.

I worked in a private investigation firm for 12 years as a family business and also worked as a wedding reception venue manager. I think working at a wedding reception venue, you're dealing with bridezillas, so that probably prepared me for working with people who are a little bit highly strung. And I suppose that customer service basis as well helped. And working in private investigation for 12 years was really interesting.

We used to do a lot of pre-checks, sort of cold call work, and we didn't have the tools and the databases that are available to me, that are available to us now, I suppose, as a police officer. So that, I supposed, helped tweak my abilities to think outside the square and try and glean information legally in a roundabout way. So I've always ended up in management roles, whether that's just a natural bossiness maybe, but yeah, I like that leadership role.

Sgt Dan Maffei: I was in the army very early when I was 18 and one of the blokes I was in the army with had joined the police force and I actually picked up an application that sat on my desk at home for four years.

I'd filled it out, I just didn't hand it in. The first step back in those days was you had to go and see the local senior sergeant and you'd have a chat to him. And that first interview he would say, he'd put his opinion as to whether he thought you'd make a good police officer, that was the first step. And it was an easy step, I just never took it. I thought, “Oh, I'm not sure about the fire brigade or the police force, I’ll wait and see”. I'm glad that I went down this path.

I always wanted to be a detective. I thought I'd be a career detective. I did become a detective; I became a divisional detective. I would have been happy to retire as a detective to be honest, it was my detective sergeant who said to me, “You need to take the next step. Hurry up and move on, you've got a lot to give, I think you've given this enough, maybe you should try some upgrading,” and I was dead against it.

Voiceover: For Dan, upgrading meant returning to uniform and working as an acting sergeant in a suburban station.

Sgt Dan Maffei: After my first month of upgrading, I rang my boss and said, “Can I come back? This is not for me,” and he said, “I reckon it is for you, give it another two months and if you're still feeling the same way you're welcome back”. And after two months I rang him up and said, “No I want to stay longer. Can I keep going with the upgrading? Hey I've gotta lot to give here because these kids don't really know a lot about the investigative side of things, I could probably offer them a lot”. And my senior sergeant at the time was a great man, retired now, I still keep in contact with him, he said, “No, you're doing a really, really good job, you’re great with the troops, I want you here, I don’t want to you go back”. So just hearing those words, I thought, “Yeah, maybe I'll hang around”.

Voiceover: The success of a 251 sergeant is measured over time, not in a single shift. It’s a role that demands consistency in judgement and decision-making.

Sgt Dan Maffei: So, no matter how bad the last shift was, you hope you shred that from your brain and you just keep going and you turn up, give another briefing and you hope that you don't carry too much from the shift previous into your new shift.

Sometimes you'll get the re-attendance of the same job that you just want to solve. That's the best feeling. If you can actually go to a job and solve it so it doesn't become a problem for the next shift or the next day or three weeks down the track, that's great. Sometimes we do re-attend the same family violence incidents, the same domestics, the same issues and that becomes a problem and if we're not solving it in the first place they become more difficult to solve. And ideally, you'll want every reported crime that hits your desk to be solved so you're not re-attending.

[Pensive music plays]

Voiceover: At one time, Dan dreamed of finishing up as a detective sergeant in the Homicide Squad, now he plans to stay on the coalface as a uniform sergeant as long as he can.

Sgt Dan Maffei: I've got another 10 years, so hopefully I can do it till I'm 60. I think you grow up in this job, as you do with many jobs, so when I first joined – I would have hated to have managed me when I first joined the job because I was a little prick, I thought I knew everything.

I think I'm still providing value in the role that I'm in doing and I'm getting a lot of reward from doing it. I love being part of someone else's journey, I love training someone and then having them reflect on what I've taught them.

I walked in on a detective sergeant downstairs one day talking about me to one of the troops saying, “Dan took me on my first ever search warrant and we did this and we did that”. The connie said, “Oh well it doesn't sound like he's changed much, he's still the same as he was back then”. The detective sergeant was a constable when I first met him and it was nice to hear that he had a little story to tell about me and I look at that and think, well, hopefully I had some positive influence on his career, and that's what I'm trying to instil in some of the people.

I might not make it to detective senior sergeant at the Homicide Squad, but maybe some of people that I've helped in this journey might get there one day and might reflect and say, “Hey, that guy was a pretty big help to me and he was not a bad sergeant”.

Voiceover: While Dani’s career path is still unfolding, she says this frontline experience of managing staff, and running jobs is a challenging but highly rewarding experience.

Sgt Dani Muntz: There’s days where I go home and I say, “Yeah, the universe has put me in the right place”. I definitely feel this is my calling, yeah. It's when I suppose you, at the end of the shift and you go home and you question yourself and I'm an over-analyser, so I rethink things through 10 times and then one of the crew will come up to you and confide in you something or they're worried about something and they haven't gone to another sergeant, they've come to you to talk to that. That's a bit of validation, I think, for me to be able to go, “Yeah, I'm actually in the right place. I am helping my crew. I am helping the community”. Yeah, it's nice. It's a nice feeling.

Voiceover: Police Life: The Experts is a Victoria Police production.

Your host is Belinda Batty.

It was written by Adam Shand and Ros Jaguar.

It was produced by Adam Shand, Jesse Wray-McCann, Nadine Lyford, Cassandra Stanghi and Danielle Ford.

The senior producer was Ros Jaguar.

Audio production and original music by Mat Dwyer.

Theme song by Veaceslav Draganov.

Executive produced by Beck Angel.

This podcast was created by the Media, Communications and Engagement Department at Victoria Police.

To learn more about the work of Victoria Police, go to police.vic.gov.au.