Acting Inspector Larissa Guthrie: Leadership Mentoring Program - increasing employee diversity at Victoria Police's tactical work units
Larissa participated in the 2024-25 Leadership Mentoring Program, Stream 2 under the mentorship of Central Melbourne member, Koren Harvey. Larissa’s project is outlined below and will be the subject of her presentation.
It is vitally important that Victoria Police employees represent the broad and diverse community we serve at every incident they attend. My initiative aims to support this by increasing employee diversity at Victoria Police's tactical work units.
Larissa is currently stationed at the Critical Incident Response Team (CIRT) as a substantive Senior Sergeant whilst also being upgraded as an Acting Inspector. She joined Victoria Police in 2011 and has 14 years of policing experience, predominantly in an operational background.
Having grown up in country Victoria and after graduating from the Academy Larissa was sent to a busy work unit in Frankston where she spent six years working General Duties on the van and did her first upgrading as a Sergeant. She was then promoted to the Public Order Response Team (PORT) where she policed at many demonstrations whilst also being deployed to numerous emergency management situations including the 2020 Mallacoota bushfires where she was in charge of the air evacuation of the town.
Whilst at PORT Larissa commenced upgrading to the Senior Sergeant and whilst Acting at this rank, had the responsibility of being the Tactical Commander for the PORT response to the large scale riots that took place in Melbourne’s CBD in September 2021. Later that year she was promoted to Senior Sergeant and Covid Quarantine Command where she had a brief role in the corporate space before moving across to CIRT after 6 months.
Larissa has been at CIRT since and for a period of time was the highest ranking female officer at a tactical work unit.