All Otago police stations and staff have had a new structure imposed by Police National Headquarters, after it was trialled in Counties Manukau.
The new structure, implemented nationwide, became effective throughout the Southern police district this month.
Many long-serving officers had had a hard time adjusting to changes, and there was widespread concern about the suitability of the new structure in South Island communities, Mr O'Connor said.
''Police have constantly gone through restructures, but this one's slightly different in that it's a bit of a one-size-fits-all model. It was implemented quite successfully in Counties Manukau because they had an injection of about 300 staff and it didn't put pressure on staffing, and that model has pretty much now become the model for the rest of the country,'' he said.
''Without the injection of extra staff elsewhere, it makes it more difficult to implement, and the jury is out as to whether it will work in the long term.''
Mr O'Connor said there were many senior officers in the South who had been in the job a long time and knew their communities well, and they were more sceptical about the new structure.
Officers feared it would adversely affect the service they could provide, he said.
''Change has come from the top. Local managers didn't get any say in it. What I'm hearing from police is `if it works, fine, but if it doesn't work then it's going to be very hard to rebuild'.''
Part of the worry resulted from losing non-sworn staff, who often went above and beyond what was in their job descriptions, Mr O'Connor said.
''There's no doubt about it, the restructure does have an impact on staff - particularly non-sworn staff - and a lot of the sworn colleagues are particularly upset by the fact that a lot of their non-sworn colleagues have been restructured out of a job or forced to more centralised locations. That's had quite a major impact.''
Police were not any more adverse to change than anyone else, and the nationwide drop in crime was mirrored throughout the Western world so was not necessarily attributable to structural changes, he said.
In the Southern police district, encompassing Otago and Southland, staff numbers have remained the same but many officers have had to adjust to new roles and a change in focus.
Staff have been grouped into three pillars of police work - prevention, investigation and response.
In Dunedin, five of the six senior sergeants have new roles as district shift commanders and the other has been promoted to an inspector level as the district deployment manager.
Acting Southern district commander Superintendent Richard Chambers said: ''There are also two new sergeant positions based in Dunedin, an officer in charge of the station and a new sergeant position within the prevention group.
''The work that staff are doing under these three new groupings is not significantly different from what they were doing previously. A community constable is still a community constable but now sits under the prevention pillar, and the number of general duties or response staff has not changed,'' he said.
A new senior sergeant at Balclutha has been given the role of rural response manager, and the former Mosgiel senior sergeant has been relocated to Dunedin, leaving a sergeant in charge of the Mosgiel station.
In Invercargill, the new station officer-in-charge role meant there was one fewer senior sergeant positions, but throughout most of rural Otago the configurations of rank ''essentially'' remained the same, Supt Chambers said.
The new nationwide prevention first policing strategy had a 4% shift towards crime prevention, which meant more foot patrols and hotel visits.
In the Southern police district, there were 558 constabulary staff and 79 other employees.
Dunedin's central station had 263 staff, North Dunedin 13 and South Dunedin 20.
