Commsafe community safety officer, Mandy Merson, says the secret to reclaiming the streets is for neighbours to get to know one another.
A public meeting scheduled to discuss the rise of crime and antisocial behaviour at Te Kūiti next week will hear from a neighbouring local authority where neighbourhood support groups have impacted similar problems positively.
The meeting, to be held at the Les Munro Centre at 5.30pm on Tuesday, will hear from Commsafe community safety officer Mandy Merson.
Operating in Te Awamutu, Kihikihi, Ōhaupō, Pirongia and the rural Waipā District, Commsafe manages Neighbourhood Support, Community Patrols and monitoring of CCTV.
The meeting has been called by Te Kūiti resident, Grace Everitt, who said she had recently confronted youths involved in intimidating and violent behaviour at Te Kūiti and hence saw need to organise a local equivalent of Commsafe.
“It will be good to hear what Mandy has to say – I hope we can learn from it,” Grace said.
Mandy said her Commsafe group did not work outside of its area, but they were willing to share their experience. Initially it would be necessary to look for willing volunteers in Te Kūiti because that was how neighbourhood support worked.
“We can guide them from the point of view of the resources required and how to set things up, all that sort of scenario, because that was what Grace has asked us to do,” Mandy said.
“I know there have been discussions about community patrols, but until you get an effective community support established in the area, all of the rest of it is very hard to organise. You need to create a committee with a treasurer, patrol coordinator and all that sort of stuff before you can go down the pathway of having community patrols, a vehicle etc.
“Right now, my perception is that the neighbours do not know one other, or only a few know one another. What we need to do is get everyone talking to one another so that when they are dealing with this bad behaviour, the driving complaints and all that. You need members of the community to be on the same page in order to do something about it.
“There is no point in thinking that one neighbour is going to call it in to the police if the rest don’t. It needs to be a pro-active community response.”
For example, one call about a person doing burnouts in the early hours could be ignored by police, but it was much harder for them to ignore 15 such calls from members of a neighbourhood watch group.
“Right now, my understanding is that nobody [in Te Kūiti] is really going through the correct channels. Unless people keep telling the police, they will not act.
“We understand that a unit may not always be able to attend because there might be something more important to do at that time. But if they are not getting these jobs logged all the time, then the police will have no idea that there is an issue.
“What we are trying to do from a neighbourhood support perspective is to ensure people know one another well enough to share details and report what is happening.”
Mandy said a great thing about neighbourhood support groups was that there was no hard and fast rule for how they should operate.
“You need to make it so it suits your community. Every street is different; there might be 100 houses on one street versus 20 on another.
“There is no way that you are wanting to do a phone tree with 100 people on a main road, right.
“So, we must teach them how to break that down into smaller neighbourhood support groups and use things like social media chat groups to keep in touch with one another.
“It’s all about establishing the neighbourhood support platform and getting that education in place for them.
“People don’t realise that collectively they can make a difference. If they keep ignoring [the antisocial behaviour] or think somebody else is doing something about it, generally they are not. And it will just get worse in that case.
“Collectively we did some work with boy racers across Waipā District, and it got to the point where we took that as a submission to Waipā District Council to see what we could do.
“And now they are just about getting to the stage of amending the laws to prohibit light vehicles, from 5pm to 10 am, on the roads where we have the problems.
“That will give police more power because they will not be able to have the gathering of these boy racers because they are not going to be able to park up on the side of the road.
“And that’s a really good neighbourhood example of what they can achieve.
“We have fliers that people can distribute into letter boxes. These will say people are going to meet out on this street.
“And that has to be a convenient thing. People don’t even have to leave their street; they can have a street meeting right then and there on their road at any time of day they choose.
“They can swap ideas and contact one another when there is an issue.
“Imagine, for example, dirt bikes racing up and down your street, the police suddenly get 15 calls.
“Then we can show that we have a much more significant problem and have collected the statistics to provide it.
“So, the streets are organised and they continue to communicate from there. And if collectively there is anti-social activity happening in the street that is affecting not just one, but four streets, you can imagine the power behind them as the community goes back to owning their streets, right?
“Joe Bloggs who is doing the anti-social behaviour is soon going to pick up that they can’t go into that area and do those things anymore, because he is going to get reported.”
