Inspector Dean Clinton
Hume was selected as one of the pilot programs for Neighbourhood Policing.
Neighbourhood Policing is all about people, and by people I mean the community and the stakeholders and asking people and listening to what they want from police.
The community are our customers at the end of the day, and it’s about us finding out from them what they want, as opposed to us looking at statistics and saying: “This is what we think you want”.
In Craigieburn in particular, there was a number of issues with illegal dirt bikes riding around.
Now, we’re talking about dirt bikes in massive groups, running red lights, riding through active football and cricket games, and having families with their kids jumping out of the way for their lives.
Paul Dugo – President Craigieburn City Football Club
Some of the issues that we were having here at the club relates to hooning, drug use, there’s a lot of motorbikes, dirt bikes.
Something that happened to me personally was that I was getting out of a car.
Some sort of motorised bike happened to lose control and skid right past myself and my son, just on a normal training night.
No one wanted to park at all in that top car park.
Joanne Dugo – Treasurer Craigieburn City Football Club
People being scared to leave the premises, especially our senior women.
That got a bit ugly a few times.
Trying to run the club and have a safe environment for our members, but at the same time, we’re dealing with all the external things that are happening that we can’t control.
Inspector Dean Clinton
The danger that that was creating was actually moving people away from the club and making people feel unsafe and not wanting to come to the club, and I saw this as a big problem, and the community were able to show me plenty of videos of this happening.
It wasn’t always being reported, so we weren’t aware of, I guess, the extent of the problem.
What we did was we had lots of internal conversations.
We had conversations with the local parks, and we also had conversations with the sporting groups and also the council about what we can do from an infrastructure perspective to try and prevent access and make it safer for people at these locations.
We also then thought, well from an enforcement perspective, what intelligence do we have on the people that are riding the bikes?
How can we better engage with them?
And how can we start to hold them accountable for their behaviour?
All of those little things don’t just happen unless we’re speaking to the community, unless we’re speaking to the referral agencies and the stakeholders.
Joanne Dugo
Craigieburn Police came around a few times – stop in, drop in, have a coffee, show their presence which has been really good not only for the hooning, but also community engagement.
It’s been great to see police officers pop in and come on an unofficial, nice manner instead of everyone being scared that “Oh, the police are here” you know, which has been great.
Sam Misho – Councillor Hume City Council
What police have done, they’ve actually engaged very well with council and engaged very well with myself and other people that called out to them – that continuous collaboration.
Law enforcement is one thing, but community engagement is another.
Having police engagement and presence is extremely vital for having a healthy community and having a community that feels safe.
Constable Madeline Towers
It’s about getting down with the community and having open and transparent conversations about what’s going on, what we’re doing as frontline members to assist the community and be there for them and addressing their needs and concerns as they bring them up.
Once we started talking with them about how we were addressing the dirt bikes and what our goals were and going forward, the increase in calls coming in from the community in telling us: “Hey, I’ve just seen this dirt bike going down the street”, it just skyrocketed, and from there it just led to us being able to identify offenders quicker, and we were able to make those arrests and the seizures.
Previously we were getting the information and we weren’t as good at bringing that back around and letting them know what we were doing with that information and how we were tackling the issues in the community.
Whereas now, we’re getting that information, but we’re going back out there and saying: “This is the information you’ve given us and this is what we’re doing with that information” and they have been able to see we’re doing these patrols, we’re increasing our tasking and we’re actually finding these offenders.
We’re making the arrests and getting them of the street to make a safer community for everyone.
Joanne Dugo
It’s been great that we’ve actually had this opportunity, and with Sam Misho really helping, and the police, it’s been great.
It actually feels like: “Wow we’re getting somewhere”.
Inspector Dean Clinton
What I have seen over the last 12 months is that community sentiment has been changing and it has been getting more and more positive in response to us closing the loop.
By us addressing these issues with the council, with the club and actually coming up with joint solutions, I guess, to those problems, you know they’re seeing less damage overnight, they’re going to see less bikes riding through at the moment and hopefully through summer we don’t see any bikes riding through.
So that just means they’re safer, they’ve got more people coming to the club, they don’t feel unsafe with their kids wandering around.
Constable Madeline Towers
The community, they are being heard and their voices are valued by us, and as members of community ourselves, we want to be able to know that our community has that trust in us.
When they see us down the street and they can approach us and bring up issues that they have and that we’re going to listen to them and actually take that information further and be there for them and target the issues that they believe are the biggest concern in their community.
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