Community Policing in South Wales (Australia) November 2014 Voiceover: Beat Intro 00:00 This is the Beat—a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest community policing topics facing our nation. Kimberly Brummett 00:08 Hello and welcome. My name is Kimberly Brummett, and on behalf of the COPS Office, I would like to introduce you to Superintendent Peter Lennon, commander of the Fairfield Local Area Command, New South Wales (Australia) Police Force. The New South Wales Police Force or NSWPF is a state police force within the boundaries of the country of Australia and comprises 18,000 police officers and has a strong focus on customer service, community engagement, and crime reduction. Fairfield Local Area Command is within the city of Sydney with a population of 200,000, 60 percent of whom do not speak English as their first language. Superintendent Lennon is here today to discuss how NSWPF implements community policing. Welcome superintendent. Superintendent Peter Lennon 00:57 Good morning, Kimberly how are you? Kimberly 00:59 Good, good. Superintendent, can you describe the community policing efforts your department is doing? Peter 01:05 Sure. Every single local-area command, and there are 80 of those in the state of New South Wales, has a very strong focus on community policing. We fully understand that we have to deal with our population as if they’re customers. We actually have a very strong focus on customer service. And we’ve actually got one of our most senior deputy commissioners, which is second in charge, who pushes customer service as one of her main agenda items. So it’s very, very important to all of the local-area commands. Not only are we working on crime reduction but we’re also dealing with the population as if they’re our customers. So there’s a lot of focus on call back the victims, follow up with victims, and just a lot of engaging with people as if they were your—a lot of the phrases we use is that you have to think you are dealing with your brother, your sister, your mother, your auntie, or your uncle. Deal with them as if they were a relative of yours, and that’s the way we should be dealing with our customers. Kimberly 02:07 Great. And you’ve kind of segued into the second question. How do you work with the community to build trust and respect? Peter 02:14 Well, in those ways that I just spoke about with a strong focus on customer service. But we also go out a lot to meet with our community groups. We spend a lot of time in our schools. We have the primary schools, which are like from 5 to 10 years old, and then our secondary schools, which are from 10 to 18. We spend a lot of time in our schools, every single local-area command. We’re expected to do that. There are officers who are school liaison officers or youth liaison officers who go out and spend a lot of time like that. And then we just go out there and basically say, “Look we are here to talk to you.” In Fairfield, the [slogan] that we use here is that “we are you,” that we work here, we live near here, we feel the good times, and we feel the bad times. So we go out and engage with our community in Fairfield, but, as I say, most other local-area commands do it as well. We’re out mixing with groups at community centers and hospitals, all sorts of groups, as many as we can mix with to go and get our message out there because bringing it back to Fairfield, with 60 percent who don’t speak English as their first language, we’ve got a major, major hurdle to get over. A lot of people who live in Fairfield come from the Middle East. Their past experience with the police could be very, very extreme where the police were a force of authority. And then within days, they’re living over here in Fairfield, and here I am putting out my hand to shake hands with them, and a week ago they were being pushed, shoved, treated harshly by the authority over there. So that is what we have to deal with here in Fairfield. Kimberly 04:04 You started holding Coffee with Cop sessions. Can you tell us a little bit about why you made that decision and how you hold the sessions? Peter 04:12 I heard about Coffee with a Cop from a visiting New York police officer who was over here talking about community engagement. And he started talking about Coffee with a Cop, and it just resonated with me on a number of levels. We’re always looking for community engagement activities here in Fairfield, and I’ve described why and some of the barriers that we’ve got. But I needed a way, just another little angle, to talk with our community. So I started looking into Coffee with a Cop. I had a look at your podcasts, and I had a look at a lot of the work at Hawthorne and all your other police forces you have over there, which is fantastic too. Well done, America. You’re doing a great job. So I just looked at that and thought, well, that’s just a really good way because over here in Fairfield, we have a lot of coffee lounges, we have a lot of outdoor areas where mainly the men sit down, get coffee, and solve the problems of the world, or so I think. Yes, so it was sort of a way for us to reach out in very much the same way you do in America where it’s not a stressful situation. You’re not being assertive because you’re not being a police officer being called to a job. It’s just a very, very friendly way to introduce yourself. We’ve had three so far Coffee with a Cop sessions. And the main topics we’ve been talking about was the World Cup Soccer, how nice the weather has been in Sydney for winter. The third topic was about good shops in Fairfield and where we should go to. And the fourth and most important topic was about teenagers who wouldn’t clean up their bedrooms. Kimberly 05:48 [Laughs] Sounds good! Peter 05:50 So we’ve just had very, very informal conversations about that, just as people do. You know you just basically take your uniform off, and you’re just talking with a friend. From that, they can see that we’re completely different from what they thought we were from the countries that they’ve come from, from the people that they’ve spoken to. We’re not highway patrol, pulling them over and pointing our finger at them because they’ve been speeding or they haven’t got their seat belt on. We’re not there because they had a domestic relationship argument, and they’ve been swearing at their wife, or they’ve been drinking too much, or they’ve been found in suspicious circumstances late at night. They’re not in a back alley or whatever the situation is where we come across people, and we’re forceful, and we’re authoritative, and we don’t smile, and we don’t show our human face. This is a complete reverse, which I just think has a lot of benefits to it. And they just lose a lot of their barriers, and people can just see the human side of the police over here. We don’t sit down with eight or 10 cops sitting in a row, waiting for people to come to us. That’s just not going to work. We actually just move from table to table. There’s probably four or five of us, and if there’s a spare chair, we’ll just come and sit down at the table, and say, “Hi, do you mind if I buy you a cup of coffee. I just want to have a chat about what’s going on. Is there anything we can help you with?” And that’s the way we introduce ourselves over here. There’s no point being in a row waiting for people to come here because they are just too scared of you. They don’t want to talk to you. They don’t know why you’re there. You’ve got to be very, very laid back about the way that you approach them. And then the second side of the whole thing is that my community being mainly Middle Eastern, the value of coffee is a cultural thing too. Actually offering to buy a cup of coffee with someone from a Middle Eastern culture means that you want to have a conversation with them. You want to actually engage in a trusted relationship. And that goes back hundreds and thousands of years. To offer a cup of coffee to someone from a Middle Eastern country is a very strong message of good will. So whilst Americans, you’re leading the push with Coffee with a Cop, it’s got a slightly different, stronger message with me because of the Middle Eastern cultures that we deal with over here. There’s always little connotations about having a cup of coffee with someone. If they turn around and say no, it means that there’s a serious barrier between you. If they say yes, it means they are completely open to having an exchange of views. Bearing in mind, that’s hundreds of thousand years old. It’s a strong message for us. Does that make sense? Kimberly 08:19 Yes, oh absolutely. Perfect. Yes. That’s fabulous. So part of community policing is building partnerships between the private and public sectors. Can you describe the partnerships in which your department engages? Peter 08:32 Sure. Well, most of the local-area commands have very good partnerships. We all have community safety meetings that we hold with the council; our local shopping centers; our local business chambers of commerce, which is like your shopkeepers and business leaders, real estate agents, those sorts of people. So we have a lot of meetings with those to talk through issues. We have a lot of meetings with the council on safety issues, where we should be doing more safety awareness. I’m talking about lighting or CCTV cameras (closed circuit television), where those sorts of things should be put into place, around the parklands or shopping malls, those areas where we have a lot of people. So we have a lot of partnerships on those sorts of things. And it’s a very tough relationship because a lot of those businesses can’t get things done without the police support. And a lot of the police can’t get things done without those businesses’ support. We all acknowledge the relationships, and we do a lot of work together. We do a lot of work with our church groups over here, and that’s just because it’s a Fairfield matter. We’ve got probably six or seven major religions over here. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of pressure currently going on in the Middle East, which it’s not coming up too much in the community over here, but they’re talking a lot about it over here because there are a lot of Middle Eastern cultures over here from Iraq and nearby countries that what’s happening over in the Middle East is getting spoken about here. So we have to spend a lot of time going out and talking to our communities. So we’ve been doing that in the various religious communities as well to make sure that they understand that the police are here, that, as I’ve said to you, our slogan is “We are you.” We go about and just push that, that we are part of a community. We want to know what’s going on, and we want to be on the front footing in solving problems with these community groups, religious groups, before they become issues. We don’t want protests to get out of hand and end up in violence and riots. We prefer to sit down, discuss things, and try to come up with an easier solution rather than have to go and use force. It comes back to—and I mentioned it to one of your other officers—Sir Robert Peel from the London Metropolitan Police, who started a thing called the Peelian Principles, if you want to look them up. And they talk about the police are the community, and the community are the police. If the police have to start using violence towards their community, then they’ve failed because it isn’t what their job is. So the measure of a good police force is the absence of violence or the absence of force in a police force. Kimberly 11:13 Great, thank you. Well thank you superintendent for your time today and all the information you’ve shared. I know all our police officers listening will truly enjoy it. I hope you have a great day. Voiceover: Beat Exit 11:24 The Beat was brought to you by the United States Department of Justice, COPS Office. The COPS Office helps to keep our nation’s communities safe by giving grants to law enforcement agencies, developing community policing publications, developing partnerships, and solving problems. Voiceover: Disclaimer 11:40 The opinions contained herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or polices of the U.S. Department of Justice. References to specific agencies, companies, products, or services should not be considered an endorsement by the authors or the U.S. Department of Justice. Rather, the references are illustrations to supplement discussion of the issues.