Plea for aggressive begging to be stopped
Aggressive begging in the Christchurch suburb of Addington is making people fear for their safety, with residents having to change their routines and stop visiting public spaces to avoid confrontation.
This has intensified in the past few months, attracting more attention from community leaders who say urgent action is needed.
Callum Ward, chairperson of the local community board, says parents have told him they’re taking their children the long way to school – or dodging certain public spaces.
Incidents often happen in the early mornings or evenings when Lincoln Rd is at its busiest, while Church Square and Addington Park are generally being avoided because of drug use and other antisocial behaviour.
Ward and council staff members told The Press second-hand accounts of people being asked for money in such an intimidating way – sometimes right by an ATM – that Ward likened it to being “stood over”. Public intoxication was also “worse than it has ever been”. Residents wanted a more visible police presence in the area, but were reluctant to report incidents for fear of retaliation, he said.
The problem had attracted the attention of MP Megan Woods, who said “the hunch is that these are people that have been moved on from the CBD”.
She had been meeting community groups alongside Ward and city councillor Melanie Coker for several weeks to better understand the extent of the issue, and said she had a meeting coming up with police to dive deeper into it.
“Unless you do something to actually address the problem, then you’re just going to move them on from one place to somewhere else,” she said.
Gary Watson, the Christchurch City Council’s head of community partnerships and planning, agreed, saying “when you put pressure in one area, it can pop out in another one ... It’s a bit of a no-win sometimes”.
He and council staffer John Slaughter said while there were only a few aggressive beggars in the area, in some cases they were waiting outside shop entrances and following people to their cars while trying to convince them to cough up cash.
Slaughter warned that hot spots like Addington emerged because beggars were finding people to give them money and food, encouraging the behaviour.
“If you feel sorry for them, donate [money] to the City Mission or a social agency that’s working in that space.”
The council had been working on an innercity action plan with local businesses, social service providers and police for the best part of a year, with the goal of tackling anti-social behaviour in the CBD. It was something Slaughter hoped would be replicated in suburbs eventually.
The council recently approved $560,000 over three years to the Christchurch City Mission’s homeless outreach programme, to fund a second worker who could get on a first-name basis with people struggling to access housing.
The sole outreach worker, Josh Gardiner, told the council in December that he met a new homeless person every day. The recent funding boost would allow the programme to spread out into other suburbs, including Addington.
However, Christchurch City Missioner Corinne Haines – like every other person who spoke to The Press – said the most aggressive beggars were not homeless, even if they appeared to be.
Her team focused on people “genuinely homeless”, so was not involved in resolving aggressive begging, but they were aware of an upsurge in the behaviour in places like Addington and Stanmore Rd, she said.
Residents should report threatening behaviour to police, she said, but she was not sure if an increased police presence would solve the problem or just shift it elsewhere.
Ward said residents needed an urgent solution that would stick, and did not want beggars to be unilaterally rounded up and thrown in jail.
A police spokesperson said a report of aggressive begging in Addington was received on Saturday, but that was the only one made in the past month.
He said anyone who was threatened needed to report it by phoning 105, because police needed proof to justify diverting resources from other work across the city.