Foot Patrol

Senior Sergeant Gillian Smith is the Officer in charge of
Tennant Creek Police. She is an enthusiastic supporter of
policing with the community rather than against the community.
She explains the new foot patrol initiatives.
Acting Sergeant Mick Adams and Constable Steve Raper
got to have their say too
The Police Foot Patrol was an initiative that was brought into Tennant Creek about two months ago. The main focus is to concentrate on the main street, parks and the laneways adjacent to the main street - basically to try and clear public places of drunkenness and disorderly behaviour so that members of the public can go about their business without being harsassed by drunks.
Mick and Steve have been chosen to do the job for the time being. Mick is a resident here and has a lot of interest in the town and knows a lot of the locals.
It is important that the people who do the job know a lot about what is going on around the town and can focus on the drunks and who have a good way of talking to the public, whilst getting the job done without too much hassle. The idea is not to simply bring them straight into the cells but to take them to the sobering up shelter and also to include Julalikari Patrol in giving assistance where they can.
Basically it is to try and curb public drunkenness.

Mick Adams:
Foot patrols have not been used in the recent past to this extent. It has always been part of the patrol duties in the cars to watch for people drinking within the two kilometre law. That's where you can't drink within two kilometres of a licensed premises.
The town foot patrol purely concentrates on the anti-social behaviour. If someone gets their house broken into or something like that, the foot patrol doesn't do that job - it's the ordinary patrol on shift that will tend to that sort of job.
The town foot patrol purely does foot patrolling and moves around to the known drinking areas and keeps the anti-social behaviour off the street. If we find someone drunk on the streets we'll take them to the shelter or to the cells depending on whether the shelter is open or not.
The main areas of disorderly behaviour used to be directly opposite the Headframe Bottle shop at the school. They'd be kids coming out of school and there would be port bottles smashed around the place, drunks sitting on the footpaths waiting for people from the Headframe to come across with grog and then they'd sit there and drink their grog.
The foot patrol now can be constantly on these problems areas. We can tell the drinkers to move on, to take their grog home. Drinking is for drinking at home, not around the streets and that's basically what we've been emphasising and it has been having a good effect around the town.

Steve Raper:
We've found that there aren't as many people just hanging around, humbugging and asking for money. A lot of the drinkers are taking their grog back to their camps and there aren't as many drunks hanging around the streets. I think a lot of the townsfolk have got a lot more confidence in the police because we're out there and people are seeing us actually talking to those people who are drunk in public.
They can see that we're trying to get them back to the camps and home and out of the way so that hopefully the town's got more confidence in us - that we're doing the job properly.

Mick Adams:
The main anti-social time period is between 11:00 am, which is when it starts and then it goes through to around 7:00 or 8:00 o'clock at night. We still do foot patrols of all the pubs and clubs when we're doing the normal town patrol, we just walk in and do a licence check. But when those places actually close, it's up to the ordinary patrols to look after that area.
It all boils down to education, we're trying to educate people that drinking is for doing at home, it's the sort of thing that you don't do around the streets and you don't harass people when they're going to get their shopping.

Gillian Smith:
In Alice Springs they are thinking about introducing horse patrols, but that hasn't been something that we'd think of implementing here. I don't know what their focus is, it might be in those more inaccessible areas, for instance in the Todd River where you just can't drive in. So they've got different logistical concerns down there to what we have here.

Mick Adams:
Our foot patrol seems to cater well without the needs for more extreme measures. I mean if you look at Alice and Darwin, the do have horse patrols in Darwin because it's such a big area and they have a lot of problems in that wide area so it is easier for them to do it on horses.
Monday, Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Friday and Saturdays are the main days that we concentrate on. We don't foot patrol on Thursday with it being a grog free day as such, so that frees us up to do other things. On Sundays it's generally fairly quiet anyway, although we still patrol in the vehicle. There's only one town foot patrol on at all times and then depending on the roster period, there is aways another patrol in the vehicle doing the town area.

Gillian Smith:
It depends on effective rostering too and what's happening here is that the troops are really being very flexible with the way that they're prepared to work longer hours so that we can cover trouble times. The town patrol can be on from 10:00am to 6:00pm or from 12:00 to 8:00pm and each week we're looking at how effective those times are and we might change them occasionally to focus on trouble spots. So we're actually overstrengthed at the moment and we're doing really well with that. We're really lucky and the Commissioner has assured us that our strength will be maintained and while we're in that very fortunate position then we can make really good use of our resources through flexible rostering.