Senior Constable Deb Hann – On the Beat
I’m back at work this week and arrived to news of a great catch over the weekend. Last Friday, the team responded to a driving complaint. They successfully located the vehicle on Victoria Street. Due to an item observed in the car when stopped, the officers then searched the vehicle. As a result, a large sum of money, a quantity of methamphetamine, drug utensils, a firearm and BB gun were found. The male driver is appearing in court on several charges as a result. It was excellent work and, as always, good to have interrupted drug supply.
I also want to say a big thank you to everyone who came to our recent Coffee with a Cop event. It was a good chance to discuss local issues and provide some advice. Our Community Patrol was also represented and it was pleasing to see some interest from the public in joining their volunteer ranks. A big thank you also to Georjeana and her team for hosting the event.
We continue to hear frustrations around boy racer activity, especially rurally. We understand the annoyance and damage this behaviour causes but, In many cases, we aren’t getting calls to 111 at the time. To be able to take action against the individuals involved in this behaviour, we need evidence. The ideal is a video of burnouts in action, but I understand this is not always a safe option. Alternatively, we need people to be able to provide registrations and descriptions of the vehicles and drivers, and be willing to make a formal witness statement about what the observed. This may involve appearing in court if a charge is defended.
Even if all this is not possible however, phoning in details immediately it is occurring tells us there is a problem and enables us to both attend and target prevention activity in an intelligence led way. If we don’t know it is happening, we cannot respond.
In other rural news, at the series of recent rural crime prevention meetings I have attended in the last few months, CCTV is always a topic of discussion. When establishing CCTV, privacy is an issue to consider. For community funded cameras covering, for example a key road in an area, there need to be safeguards around who will have access to that footage, how long it is retained and on what basis. A good idea is to keep the number of persons who have access to replay footage very small and to agree to only review footage in the event of criminal offending which has been reported to Police. You do not want to risk breaching privacy through allowing access of day to day activity which could constitute surveillance of locals.
