Crime prevention starts with pro-active action – Bedfordview resident

EDITOR – At the public meeting earlier this week (BCPF proposes safety measures), it was stressed how important pro-active action is in preventing crime.

Now we have another incident, involving military style firepower, indicating that these criminal elements are acting with impunity.

However let’s not beat about the bush. For there to be a material improvement in what is taking place, a number of things need to happen.

1. The whole community needs to realise and accept that we have problems of significant proportions that need to be addressed and which are not going to go away of their own accord.
2. They also need to accept that the government at national and local level is dysfunctional and is not prepared, or able to support institutional policing in terms of finance, manpower, education and equipment, to the extent needed.
3. They need to realise and accept communities are largely on their own and consequently, although neither right nor fair, will need to look after their own security and other interests, if they want acceptable levels of delivery to bring about a safe environment.
4. Last but not least, they have to realise provision of these services will be costly and there is absolutely nothing to be gained by diluting the significant sums of money already being spent privately, across multiple non coordinated service providers.

This just leads to finger pointing and a total lack of accountability by everyone concerned – citizens, service providers and officialdom alike.

Cutting to the chase, this means we have to raise sufficient funds as a community and concentrate our attention on finding and appointing a competent organisation that is able to identify possible security gaps in our suburbs with the objective of preventing crime before it happens.

Service providers need to be held to account and have the full support of a community, who is committed to a successful outcome.

This means active participation in the decision-making process by the community. This is not a matter of voting for political representation, but is a vote of confidence in a broadly supported plan of action, in which we all need to participate, not by attending interminable meetings, but by ensuring that we are all on the same page, using strategic meetings together with the use of the plethora of sophisticated communication tools we have at our disposal.

This can go as far as responding to urgent or important matters, by means of electronic communication and agreement, to which just about everyone has access, wherever in the world they happen to be.

Bedfordview has a high number of households able to contribute towards this becoming a reality.

The real question is – are we willing to act as a community and institute a programme to safeguard our families and assets, or are we content to waste resources on ineffective measures, which experience is showing us, is failing?

Basically Bedfordview can drive the planning process, with constructive and comprehensive support from us all, but there must be a willingness to provide the wherewithal to make it happen and that means financial commitment.

The choice is ours.

FRANK PAYNE,

BEDFORDVIEW.