Vince Hurley

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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.

I was terrified of the Catholic school kids.

Where I went to school, the Catholic school kids used to beat us up on the bus.

They were hard because they were all like you guys.

They were all used to fighting with their 14 brothers.

This is a different part of the world I'm talking about here, but nonetheless, it was pretty intense.