Website for central community crime
Knowing that five to 10 burglaries, thefts, and wilful damages happen in Central Taranaki each week may be frightening for some.
But Di Welch thinks keeping the community aware means keeping them safe.
Welch is the Stratford Community Safety Officer for Central Taranaki Safe Community Trust. She works from the Stratford Police Station and part of her job is creating a list of the previous week’s crimes and sharing them with the community, as well as sending out special police alerts when they’re needed.
The list is sent out to email subscribers, through a service called MailChimp, weekly and is accessible online at the Safe Watch website and the Central Taranaki Safe Community Trust Facebook page.
‘‘It does make people more aware,’’ Welch said.
‘‘Our big thing is trying to keep them safe, so I suppose the more you’re aware of stuff, the safer you can become.’’
Special police alerts are distributed to the community the same way and Welch said these were reports that were urgent.
‘‘If there’s something that needs to get out to the public straight away, the police will come to me and we’ll put out an alert,’’ she said.
‘‘It’s pretty much anything that can’t wait that whole week - like hoax emails, or ‘we need to find this person’, or ‘we have to let everyone know’.’’
Welch said she updated the list weekly and there was usually between five and 10 occurrences reported to police over that time.
She said there was usually one special police report sent a week too. The focus points are burglaries, thefts, and wilful damages because they involve the community.
Welch said sharing the information with the community had been beneficial.
‘‘We had one special police alert go out the other day and we had six calls within two hours and that was only to the people in MailChimp,’’ Welch said.
‘‘So it definitely works, which is absolutely awesome.’’
Welch said she could see so many benefits from the service, it just had to keep ‘‘snow balling’’.
The community is able to look at www.safewatch.org.nz or subscribe for free to the MailChimp service to receive the weekly emails.