Page 318 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 1 March 1994
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POLICING AND COMMUNITY SAFETY
Discussion of Matter of Public Importance
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Madam Speaker has received a letter from Mr Humphries proposing that a matter of public importance be submitted to the Assembly for discussion, namely:
The need to promote preventative policing and community safety through activities such as Canberra's Police and Citizens Youth Clubs.
MR HUMPHRIES (3.42): Mr Deputy Speaker, at various times we in this place choose to pay lip-service to a great many concepts - social justice, equal opportunity, level playing fields, preventative health care, multiculturalism. They are a few of the concepts we talk about in this place in favourable terms at various times. Occasionally, our rhetoric needs to be backed up with a positive decision, with some action, and I think that such is the case today.
I am sure that at various stages all have been heard to say that we believe that preventative policing is a positive and important strategy for lowering the levels of crime in our community. Preventative policing I would define as the strategies we pursue to head off criminal activity before it occurs, rather than responding retroactively to those incidents after they have taken place. A police force which merely hotfoots it to a crime scene to mop up the aftermath is a sad waste of a valuable opportunity and is also an expensive luxury. We have to think ahead. We have to think about ways in which we can prevent opportunities for crime occurring. We have to think out the pathways to crime and block them off. We have to think about designing out trouble spots, such as the one the Minister has often talked about at the Woden bus interchange - a very valuable initiative. We have to create incentives for socially responsible behaviour, and we have to make penalties for offences which might be committed realistic deterrents to crime. Perhaps most importantly of all, we need to integrate our policemen and policewomen into the community, to make them real parts of our community's operation, real partners with those people who are striving towards safer communities.
Particularly important, indeed an essential plank in that approach, has to be building bridges between our police force and those, in a sense, who are most at risk from the incidence of crime, particularly as committers of crime, that is the young in our community. In light of that important objective, one with which I think none of us would disagree, I view with great concern news of proposals by the ACT Government to pull out a number of uniform positions from Canberra's police and citizens youth clubs. Members will all be aware of the work those clubs do at the present time. I say "clubs", but in fact it is one club with three branches. Those three branches do a tremendously important job in our community, and if members have not been to see what they do they should take advantage of an opportunity to do so.
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