ACT chief police officer Ray Johnson said Canberra had seen less burglaries generally recently as opposed to the same period of time last year.

As more Canberrans work from home, household burglaries have fallen. Home burglary is a largely opportunistic crime with offenders "casing" homes to check for any activity then breaking and entering if the house appears unoccupied.

But with those options now greatly reduced, commercial premises become more exposed to break-in.

"As a relatively small jurisdiction, I'm reticent to call a trend too soon," he said.

"Commercial burglaries we are keen to keep a close eye on because one would expect that with businesses being closed for a long length of time, it would encourage [offenders] to break into them and steal things from them.

"Obviously ... we're going to double down on our property crime prevention work and we've got targeting teams working on strategies to think about how we are going to try and prevent that type of crime.

"I can't see I've seen a massive spike in that [type of crime] yet, though, so maybe we will see something and we were right to be focused on it."

Police officers across the ACT are already experiencing disruption to their usual shift scheduling and tasks.

The ACT's traditional police "beats" patrols, which had worked out of City Station on overnight shifts, walking the city streets and patrolling the once-busy nightclub district, to quell drunken and disruptive behaviour, are now all but gone.

Officers are now spread out more across their patrol districts and use vehicle-based patrolling more.

The ACT police approach to enforcing the COVID-19 health restrictions and breaches is noticeably less hard-line to that adopted in neighbouring NSW and in Victoria, where fines are climbing into their hundreds.

Assistant commissioner Johnson says that was a reflection of both the differences in the jurisdictions, the make up of the ACT population, and generally law-abiding nature of the Canberra public.

"We actually have a community with a really good relationship with police," he said.

"I don't mean to imply that it doesn't exist in other places but big jurisdictions such as NSW have different pockets of people who may not be so cooperative and they want to send a quite strong line to [those] people.

"The [ACT] population is really tuned into these [health protection] issues and are keen to do the right thing.

"We saw that in the bushfires; people were engaged, keen to understand what was going on and want to help. We have a population that is doing that."

He said he wanted to give people "as much opportunity to comply [with restrictions] as possible" before enforcement was necessary.

Police were called to several parties going on over last weekend but were not required to use their "move along" directions which can result in arrest if there is not compliance

In a few instances the number of people in the house met the health directions, but police still encouraged people to go home and "they quickly complied".

"These experiences are new for everyone, so it is fair and right that we continue to educate people and encourage compliance first before moving to warnings and fines," he said.

The new reporting regime announced on Wednesday by the ACT government takes the immediate pressure off the busy police Operations call centre.

Access Canberra's new "hotline", which runs from 8am to 8pm, is the new conduit for people reporting breaches of the health restrictions.

Where people reporting crime to the Crime Stoppers toll-free 1800 number remain anonymous should they wish, the new Access Canberra line is digitally traceable, and requires people to provide an extensive amount of personal information, such as their name, and where they live.

"It [the government hotline] wasn't designed to be a Crime Stoppers model," Assistant Commissioner Johnson said.

"If people ring [the police response line] 131 444, we'd ask all those questions of them.

"We want information from the community, of course, but what we're also trying to encourage people to do is to get to know your neighbours; maybe that might take some the stress out of not knowing what's going on next door.

"We want people to tell us about the things that are quite egregious, that are the worst of the failures to meet the intentions of the [health] directions and the hotline isn't designed to be a substitute for Crime Stoppers."

He said an example was if someone was to report a concern with a neighbour who they knew was under COVID-19 quarantine and they hadn't heard from for some time, then that report would go in the first instance to ACT Health's protection service.

ACT police is a contracted service paid for by the ACT government and provided by the Australian Federal Police. It is known internally as "outcome two". "Outcome one" is the much larger cohort of the federal police, with national and international policing responsibilities.

In extraordinary circumstances, such as if a number of "outcome two" officers contracted the virus and were forced to stand down, the ACT is able to call on the federal cohort to bolster numbers.

"We've already had those conversations [with the federal police]," he said.

"We've already identified the potential need and we've got processes in place to allow that to happen and the people identified to fill those gaps if we need to.

"We're also looking at potentially ex-ACT members, people who have recently returned [to the AFP national cohort], just have them ready to come back.

"That being said, we haven't seen a significant impact on our workforce [from the coronavirus]."

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