Crime rates up at suburban stations as police pull security officers

Crime rates were climbing steeply at suburban train stations across Melbourne in the years before Victoria Police decided to strip them of security officers, new data reveals.

Protective services officers were stationed at the city’s 192 train stations between 6pm and the last train from 2010 but, in April, they were pulled from 119 stops and redeployed to the CBD and major suburban stations.

The force said the strategy would allow it to make best use of police resources.

However, data obtained by this masthead shows the number of offences increased by nearly 180 per cent over five years to March this year at the 119 stations that have since lost their nightly PSO presence.

Teams of roaming PSOs now cover several of these smaller stations, riding trains between them, rather than being based permanently on station platforms.

Crime Statistics Agency Victoria data suggests outer suburbs with growing populations face the largest increases in crime among those 119 stations , with Williams Landing station, on the Werribee train line, recording the highest number of offences in the past year.

There were 138 offences at the station in the year to March 2026, double the number the year before.

At Merinda Park station, on the Cranbourne line, there were fewer than three crimes in 2021, but 121 offences in the year to March 2026.

Almost 90 per cent of crimes recorded at train stations since 2021 are non-violent, such as car theft or drug possession.

Crime data released to this masthead does not cover the period after PSOs were redeployed in April. That period will be covered by the next month’s release of Victoria Police’s official annual crime statistics, though concerns have been flagged that crime reports at many stations will have plateaued because there is nobody to report it to, rather than a real reduction in incidents.

Superintendent Andrew Falconer, the architect of the new PSO system, said the redeployment was focused on using officers as effectively as possible to reduce crime.

He said crime rates at stations such as Williams Landing had been largely driven by property offences like car theft, carried out at times when PSOs weren’t at the station.

He said he had seen internal data showing no increase in offences across the network after the PSOs were removed.

“For vehicle theft, in particular, we’ve now got targeted operations on that, and we move between those areas of the high crime, and normally, once we’re able to arrest the primary offenders in the area, it significantly reduces it,” Falconer said.