Page 2375 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 16 September 1992
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Mr Humphries said that he has seen nothing about increasing services to be delivered to the community. Tomorrow morning we will be launching the ACT police crime caravan. We will be setting up around regional shopping centres - we indicated this a week or so ago - a police presence by way of a mobile caravan, a sort of portable police station, with a view to getting the local shopkeepers in particular, but residents who visit the regional shopping centres as well, familiar with individual police officers.
We are developing a strategy whereby at the sergeant level a particular senior police officer will be responsible for a particular suburb. That is moving away from the old style of policing where you had mobile vehicular patrols covering a whole crime district - Canberra, of course, is divided into three crime districts; north, city and south - and, instead, directing individual officers to individual neighbourhoods and localities. The goal of that is to encourage residents and traders to have an individual relationship with that police officer. As I say, we will start to see that policy being implemented this very week. So we are directing our attention and our resources at the end of the crime problem where it should be directed - that is, in the streets, in the suburbs, in the shopping centres.
I was very pleased with the results of the latest version of the AFP community policing survey. I have asked the police force to provide copies with a briefing to all members, and that will no doubt occur at some stage during the coming break. Amongst the highlights of this community policing survey is the fact that we continue to have a 90 per cent approval rating for the service provided by the AFP. But most satisfying is the fact that the public's fear of crime is falling. I table an extract from this report. This report will, as I say, be circulated to all members in due course, but the highlight was that the fear of crime is falling. That is very important, because a safe community is one where people think they are free to get out and about - and they are in this community. Canberra crime rates remain well and truly below State capital averages.
The sort of approach that the Liberal Party encourages is to whip up fear and loathing. A pathetic pamphlet that was circulated nationally was clearly designed to instil in the elderly members of our community a perception that they are unsafe if they go out on the streets. It was clearly designed to intimidate the elderly people in our community, to isolate them, to have them housebound. It is a cheap and grubby political tactic by the Federal Liberal Party and one that, it appears, is not below our local branch of the Liberal Party.
In this propaganda fear campaign that was launched earlier this year, the lady from Hughes - one of the safest suburbs in the safest city in Australia - says, "Some of us are almost prisoners in our own home. We just want to be safe. Remember we used to be safe at night". Despite that, the most recent version of the AFP survey shows that the fear of crime indicator "staying at home alone at night" actually dropped in the period during which the Liberal Party was circulating this. It went down from seven to five. So the Liberal Party have been perhaps unsuccessful in the ACT at trying to whip up this hysteria. They may have been more successful in other cities where the basis for fear is higher; but this community, it seems, is more sophisticated and understands the situation.
Of course, all the good work that can be done by way of community policing, by way of locking the police into the community, by way of reassuring the community about what the realities are about their suburb and their environment, can be undone by politicians engaging in cheap politicking by way of kicking the crime can. It is unfortunate that that is a tactic that now seems to be
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .