Vince Hurley

Need a taser.

Is there a long baton in the car?

There are police in there now who have never experienced or lived through a Royal Commission.

So they have no fear of the consequences, some of them, of their actions.

They haven't lived through being scrutinised to the nth degree by the Royal Commission or the public about their behaviour.

This conversation includes content that may be sensitive for some listeners.

Please take care when listening.

Vince Hurley is here today.

For 29 years, Vince was an operational police officer working in the outer burbs, investigating domestic homicides, assaults, home invasions and drug trafficking.

In that time, Vince was shot at, stabbed in the hand and even pushed off a building.

But perhaps the most challenging and often rewarding work he did was as a hostage negotiator, trying to literally talk people off the ledge or from crossing some kind of awful, disastrous, violent threshold by trying to make a human connection without knowing anything about that person.

Today, Vince Hurley is an academic.

He teaches at Macquarie University's Department of Security Studies and Criminology, where he brings his real-world experience to the job.

And Vince is also a passionate advocate for policy reform on domestic violence.

And just a heads up, Vince's story will have a great many things in it that you might not want the kids to hear if they're in the car with you or in the house at the moment.

Hello, Vince.

Where did life begin for you?

Seriously, she had... Seriously, or are you joking?

Really?

I went to the public school.