FAQs

Crime prevention focuses on deterring criminal activity and reducing crime. It aims to eliminate factors that lead to crime occurring.

As a local government, the City is only one part of the broader social response to keeping our community safe and preventing crime. All communities and levels of government have their role in keeping residents safe. The City's role in this social response includes:

• Advocate: 
  • For safer roads by reporting traffic offences
  • For increased community awareness of theft
  • For accountability and management for efficient clean-up of graffiti
• Facilitate:
  • Increased community awareness to prevent stealing of motor vehicles
  • Promotional material and diversion programs for anti-drug messaging
• Fund:
  • Removal of graffiti in public places
  • Subsidies for home CCTV installation to deter and report robbery/burglary
  • Installation of CCTV in hot spot areas to deter and report disorderly conduct
• Partner:
  • To improve road safety via reporting traffic offences
  • To increase road safety messaging about traffic offences.

Organisationally, the City of Cockburn undertakes numerous community safety initiatives as business-as-usual processes. We contribute to this through the provision of the following services and initiatives: 

• CoSafe
• Technology and CCTV
• Youth and family services
• Youth XLR8 program
• Neighbourhood Watch
• Graffiti removal
• Community development
• Waste reduction
• Public safety education
• Events and community bookings criteria
• Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED)
• Collaboration with agencies

Additionally, the City's Safer Cities Service Unit coordinates and contributes to implementing various strategies, plans and initiatives to improve the ongoing safety of the community.

The City's Ranger Service operates seven days per week. Rangers provide peace of mind to residents through patrols and attending to complaints relating to animals, litter, parking and off-road vehicles. At times, the Rangers work to resolve neighbourhood disputes by acting as an intermediary.

The plan proposes four key objectives:

• Strengthen partnerships through collaboration and advocacy;
• Reducing the opportunity for crime through technology;
• Increase awareness of community safety and crime prevention;
• Early intervention to improve the well-being of our community. 

It is vital that people feel safe living in, working in and visiting Cockburn.

Feeling unsafe can lead to people avoiding certain places and discourage them from actively participating in their communities. Nationally, it is common for gaps between perceptions of crime in an area and the actual risk of experiencing crime.

While this is the case, community members have expressed concern and genuine fear of crime in Cockburn and their safety.

Informed by crime statistics, the draft plan aims to paint an accurate picture of crime in the City. Misconceptions about the actual crime risk can undermine perceptions of safety. the draft plan seeks to address these issues and improve how safe the community feels in the City of Cockburn.

Annexure 2 of the plan identifies additional municipal funding (outside of recurring funding). It does not include actions that fall part of commonly provided budgets.

Although the plan considers CoSafe to be recurring funding, the estimated financial cost of CoSafe is approximately $2.5m per year, including all internal charges. This equates to approximately $12.8m for the life of the plan.

With the increase in technology proposed within this Plan, there may be an opportunity to rationalise the CoSafe service in the future without impact to the core response role CoSafe plays within the community.

Where specific objectives have outlined external funding, the City will facilitate the funding arrangements. The intent is to seek funding through State and Federal grant programs or by direct contributions from government and non-government sources.

The City has reviewed its Community Safety and Ranger Services business unit as part of an organisational-wide restructure in 2021. As such, there is no immediate need to restructure this business unit to implement the plan.

The plan's objectives of improving the community through education and promotion have identified a shortfall in staff to deliver some of these actions and effectively handle the growing reliance our communities have on social media.

Accordingly, the City's officers will advocate creating an additional 0.5FTE into the City's Workforce plan throughout the plan's life. The 0.5FTE will further assist with public education and social media campaigns to reduce the fear of being impacted by crime by residents, visitors and businesses within Cockburn.

The City's Crime Prevention Reference Group will monitor the plan's rollout. This group comprises elected members, WA Police, State Agencies and key private/public education institutions and businesses.

You can view crime statistics in your area, by visiting the WA Police and entering your suburb.

LoRaWAN is a network that allows City devices to wirelessly connect and send data to each other over long distances. This enables the City to receive information about another location in real-time, allowing staff to respond more quickly to safety matters.

CCTV does not absolutely prevent crime or anti-social behaviour, but can reduce the incidence of opportunistic anti-social behaviour and may provide forensic evidence when such events occur.