IT'S lunch hour on a Wednesday in the heart of Williamstown, and a driver is doing laps of a roundabout while talking on his mobile phone.
Two patrol cars cruise up behind him and flick the siren on.
He keeps talking.
Hello-o.
The message about not using a hand-held mobile phone while driving does not seem to be getting through.
Leading senior constables Steve Poole and Bob Pickering, of the Hobsons Bay traffic management unit, are helping drive the message home.
If a driver is so distracted he can't see two marked police cars, what hope does he have of seeing a child on the road, Leading Senior Constable Poole asks.
Between them, the two officers have been in the job for 43 years.
Leading Senior Constable Poole says his three children are never far from his mind when working.
"I've got twin boys that are 15 [on Thursday] and a daughter who's about to turn 18 in August, so she's on the road now.
"She passed me the other week when I was doing a breath-testing site. I just immediately felt old because I thought, my God, my daughter's driving.
"I've found the last few fatalities I've been to, I tend to ring my kids up as soon as I can ... even at the scene. You see how fragile life is.
"You tend to take a little bit of it home with you. Some of it strikes pretty deep."
Last Wednesday morning, our first stop is a light-industrial estate in Williamstown.
Police are responding to complaints, even from hardened truckies, about the level of hoon behaviour in the vicinity of Fink and Churchill streets.
"You'll see all the evidence on the road of the burnouts and the donuts," Leading Senior Constable Poole says.
"We've got the tyre suppliers around here that have fairly cheap re-treads. A lot of young guys are coming here to get the classic 'burnout' tyres for a cheap price.
"But we've had people's cars going into a mechanic's and all of a sudden it's doing burnouts and donuts and these poor [people] wouldn't know what's going on with their car when they drop it off.
"We've had fatals down here. A guy on a motorbike a few years ago was doing a 'mono' and somehow lost control at the very end of the street and hit himself against a piece of steel that had been sticking up out of the ground for years.
"The big stuff tends to happen on a Friday evening: everyone's knocking off and going home and might have a few sherbets in the factory at the end of the day, then they think, oh, I'll see if I can do a complete burnout around the block and make the two lines match up."
We are headed for Altona Gate shopping centre when a driver is spotted on his mobile phone in Blackshaws Road.
The 50-year-old Williamstown man is mortified when he learns the call has cost him $153 and three demerit points.
As police move on, the lights are flicked on before the patrol vehicle speeds up to 100kmh along Millers Road.
They are pursuing a car whose registered owner has come up as a suspended driver. The 24-year-old mother has her two small children in the car with her.
Leading Senior Constable Pickering learns the woman's licence has been suspended because she has accrued five demerit points as a P-plater.
"As a probationary, you've only got five points on your licence so all you need is two traffic infringement notices, like being caught on a camera, and your licence is suspended."
In effect, the young mother is stranded and has a date in court.
About 11.15am, the officers park at a bend near the West Gate Freeway interchange and out comes the laser gun.
It takes less than 15 minutes for someone to 'spike the laser' doing 115kmh in a small Mazda hatchback.
The 53-year-old Sandringham woman receives a $227 fine and three demerit points.
"A few weeks ago, I got a motorbike on the freeway doing 204kmh, which was a bit of a 'swagger moment' for me," Leading Senior Constable Poole says."That lasted about a week and then Bob got one at 212."
Then it's off to a known hoon hangout in Altona Meadows, but again police nab a non-hoon miscreant - yet another driver using a mobile phone behind the wheel. It turns out the Laverton woman, 27, has also failed to renew her licence.
Barely a block from her home, the woman receives fines totalling $437 and three demerit points.
On the up side, she hasn't got far to walk.
Returning to Williamstown station, the officers pull up at Truganina Explosives Reserve and turn their car into a breath-testing station.
Twenty motorists are tested along Queen Street and all return a zero blood-alcohol level.
Harder to quantify is the number of motorists deterred from drink-driving just by the sight of police.
As politicians call for a return to respect, Leading Senior Constable Poole says he has seen respect for elders completely eroded.
"Everybody I know in this job doesn't expect to have their feet kissed," he said. "It's just that commonsense ground rule that most of us grew up with: you respected your teachers, your parents, your police.
"I've just seen it erode away. It doesn't surprise me that we're not respected because the teachers and parents are in the same boat.
"It's just a sad reflection on the community."
Almost back at the Nelson Place cop shop, we come across a driver circling the cenotaph roundabout at Ferguson Street pier while talking on his mobile phone.
It turns out to be a costly call - the driver is fined $153 and cops three demerit points.
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