Kate Hawkesby: Making our streets feel safer might not be that hard

It’s a funny thing being away and suddenly seeing stuff without the blinkers on - and we are blinkered here. We’ve been cloistered in a sheltered environment with shut borders for so long that we’ve maybe lost sight of how much the rest of the world has moved on. And they have moved on. But I tell you what struck me the most, how safe I felt in cities like London and New York, compared to New Zealand. I know, weird eh. When you think of New York you think crime and mayhem, but in fact, there are just so many cops, that it feels safe. And not only are there lots of them, they’re armed and look like the sort of people you don’t mess with. They walk round in minimum of doubles, but usually groups of them. They clamp down on any whiff of action and if something does fire up – they’re on the scene shutting it down within seconds. The sirens of the NYPD are a constant - there are cops everywhere, active and omnipresent, and that’s before we get to all the security guards stationed outside shops, malls and doorways too. Likewise the public don’t suffer fools in New York. We saw an out of it homeless man being a menace to people just outside Central Park and locals just tackled him to the ground and lay on top of him until NYPD arrived about 30 seconds later. So trouble gets cleaned up real quick. Likewise, in London. It feels the safest of all to be honest. Although a mate of mine who lives in London but travels frequently to New York for work said ironically he feels safer there. But in London cops are omnipresent too. They walk the beat in doubles, gigantic handcuffs dangling out of their pockets, some are armed, and they look serious enough to be a deterrent. And they are. They’re also extremely approachable. They’re helping tourists with directions, they’re sorting out traffic issues, they’re genuinely useful to their communities, many are well known, liked and kids look up to them. So a lot different to here. And there are lessons there for our Police Minister and Commissioner. To make people feel safe, as they often say they want to, you have to actually be proactive in creating a safe environment. You can’t do that in a vacuum. We often hear this Government talking about crime numbers coming down – yet we know that’s not true because we know it’s more about how it gets reported, or in many cases not reported.  If you don’t classify breaking into a shop’s front door with a car as a ram raid, then it’s not a ram raid stat is it? But we have to be less blinkered. For all the people who go on about how ‘safe’ New Zealand is, is it really? Or is that just a story we keep telling ourselves? A person I know currently here from London said she cannot believe how unsafe she feels in NZ these days, she can’t wait to get back to London. I know of another who said they’d travelled all over the world, and the place they felt least safe was the Auckland CBD on a Saturday night. Some will argue, well at least we don’t have guns like America and that's true, and for that I'm grateful, but we had a gun pulled on a member of the public in Auckland just last week, so there is an issue with gangs and guns. But when I think about how safe I felt elsewhere, in vastly bigger cities, I think the key to it is not that hard, it could actually just be as simple as more cops on the beat in our communities.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.