Two centimetres was all that spared the officer from death or serious injury, Police Association secretary Ron Iddles​ said.

The officers were from Flemington police station. The first constable had been in the force for 2½ years, and the other for three years.

But their relative inexperience had played no part in the incident, Detective Senior Sergeant Iddles said.

Detective Senior Sergeant Iddles spoke to the unharmed officer on Tuesday morning. He said that despite escaping physical injuries, the officer had been badly shaken by the ordeal and may required ongoing support.

"These two members are lucky to be alive. This could have been a double fatality.

"The member who was shot, we're only talking about two centimetres and it could have been a different result."

Detective Senior Sergeant Iddles said that routine intercepts were inherently dangerous, and that there was no obvious solution to better protect police.

The proliferation of firearms and ice, and the increasing threat of terror-related offences, had made intercepts even more dangerous, he said.

But he said penalties for attacks on officers were suitably harsh, and the use of measures such as automatic number plate recognition technology – which allows police to screen a vehicle using their database almost instantaneously – would be unlikely to assist in situations such as that encountered on Tuesday.