Tokai watch needs help to keep eyes on crime

A network of cameras in Tokai is helping to keep crime levels in check, but some of them could be decommissioned if neighbourhood watch subscriptions stay stagnant, says watch boss Ed Bain.

Mr Bain, the chairman of the Tokai Neighbourhood Crime Watch, told the organisation’s annual general meeting, held at Tokai Community Church on Wednesday March 29, that the cameras had reduced night-time crime alerts and aided the police with arrests, but crime was still climbing, and the camera system needed community support to maintain it.

He encouraged residents to get connected to their street’s WhatsApp groups, to become patrollers or support their neighbourhood watch.

According to Mr Bain, three types of cameras are in use across the suburb: licence plate recognition (LPR) cameras check vehicle registrations; human-analytics cameras flag human movement at unexpected times or locations; and privately owned cameras share footage with the watch.

However, the maintenance of all cameras comes out of the watch’s subscriptions and without more of those, the watch plans to decommission certain cameras.

“One of the drivers is going to be to reduce the costs of the LPR cameras, which takes over 75% of our budget as well maintenance and funds which we have to set aside for this over the years, so we definitely need to look at membership and subscriptions as we move forward,” Mr Bain said.

Meanwhile, Graham Tait, the watch’s incident manager said, “Tokai is not the sleepy hollow we once thought it was.”

Year-on-year crime statistics reported to the watch had shown “incidents” climbing from 67 in 2021 to 100 last year, he said.

“So we have gone up significantly in the past year.”

Burglaries and common thefts at homes were the most common crimes, according to the watch’s statistics’, with more than 20 of them reported last year, he said. Other crimes included assault, attempted burglary, harassment, malicious damage to property, mugging, robbery, trespassing and vandalism.

According to Mr Tait, some of the crime trends residents should be on the lookout for are a thief stealing power tools near Vans Road and Moorland Crescent, an early morning trespasser, the gardener next door who asks to enter your premises to reach shrubbery for trimming on your side of a boundary, a thief stealing sensor and solar light bulbs, and car jamming near the Dennedal West entrance of Tokai Park.

“I think we just need to be mindful that crime has been slowly going up, and we need to get more patrollers out. This is just a list of the things that are really working in our area at the moment. And we have been encouraging WhatsApp groups at street level… and this level of communication is really working well. We get a lot of information from there about things that are going down in the area, and likewise we communicate back to the community on these groups. So if you know of your street group and you are not on it, you must try and get on it.”

Kirstenhof police spokeswoman Sergeant Deidre Solomon said they had received useful video footage and information from the watch that had aided arrests. She added that most of the crimes reported in the area were residential burglaries.