Last-minute reversal clears way for City of Melville residents to be paid for installing CCTV

A plan to improve community safety in the City of Melville was implemented after a total of 2.5 hours of debate, including a dissenting vote against the mayor.

City council members were asked at their March 17 meeting to support a $2.6 million security plan under which private homes and small businesses could connect their cameras to a city-run network.

The network will alert people wandering at night or early in the morning to the nearest community safety patrol car in real time.

Property owners who install a suitable CCTV system and participate in the pilot program will receive a $500 discount, while those who did not participate in the pilot program will receive $200.

The city’s mobile CCTV fleet will be expanded by approximately 10 units, and fixed CCTV will be expanded to approximately 20 public locations.

After a two-hour debate, including two five-minute adjournments, an unsuccessful opposition motion against mayor Katy Mair and a 30-minute debate on how to hold the vote, councilors initially voted 7-6 to postpone the decision until May.

This vote remained tied until Ms. Mair, as mayor, cast a second vote to support the postponement.

But an hour later, during urgent business at the end of the meeting, the council voted 7-5 in favor of a cancellation request from Cr Nicole Robins, who wanted a decision to be taken that night, leading to another half-hour of debate.

“I think the community would prefer us to make a decision tonight rather than delay it because there has been some confusion and it takes a while to get there,” Cr Robins said.

The votes on the reductions and capping the city’s spending on the program at $1.06 million were tied 6-6 until Ms. Mair cast her second vote in their favor again.

Alternative proposals were presented by Crs Scott Green, Glynis Barber and Jennifer Spanbroek before the meeting started, a harbinger of discussions to come.

The council voted 8-4 to approve Cr Robins’ amendment to cap the city’s spending at $1.06 million, including a $700,000 Commonwealth grant, and a new camera location.

Deputy mayor Matthew Woodall then wanted to change the city’s spending limit to the Commonwealth grant only, but Cr Robins asked why this was considered when the change should have been submitted the previous morning.

After a five-minute break, Ms Mair said Cr Woodall’s offer could not be accepted.

Cr Woodall called for a vote to oppose Ms Mair’s decision but the vote was lost 5-7.

Cr Robins said the council did not want to delay community safety if it did not receive any funding.

“The community is very clear that safety is a big priority for them. In both 2023 and 2025, safety and crime prevention are among the top three areas where residents want the city to improve,” he said.

“Four years ago, 92 per cent of residents agreed they felt safe in Melville, and last year this dropped to 67 per cent.

“I think these statistics send a clear message that our community wants us to do more and they expect leadership on safety.

“Yes, it will cost us some money, but I think it’s a sensible investment and worth much more than the other things we spend money on.”

He said it was also an opportunity to show the city was listening, after PerthNow reported that residents in the city’s southern suburbs felt they were missing out on city spending.

Cr Barber said he did not believe the discount was justified as it was not a service the city needed to invest in and could not be made available to enough people.

“125 out of 44,000 households can benefit from the discount. I am a person who believes in justice and equity, and I do not think this is a very fair program,” he said.

“If we are going to have a discount, everyone should be able to benefit from it.

“I would encourage homeowners to purchase CCTV. I don’t think it’s something we as a city should be paying for.”

Ms Mair asked Cr Crawford Yorke not to be negative about the council after he said residents and businesses “knew better than the council how to spend their money”.

“The council does a lot of good things better than the community at times, and it can also work the other way around,” Ms Mair said.

Cr Yorke said the city should just spend the Federal grant as there was no good data to suggest the program would work.

‘It is inappropriate for the council to increase the value of private properties by offering discounts to people who want to install CCTV on their private properties,’ he said.

“The best thing to do is to keep rates low, keep the council out of the private property business and those who want to install CCTV on their properties will have lower rates and money in their pockets.”

The debate also included a 20-minute delegation from former councilor Tomas Fitzgerald; He said that while the safety of the community is important, there are better ways to do it.

He said the best-case scenario from fixed CCTV was a 20 per cent reduction in crime.

“Whether this is drug dealing in the park, child perpetration or vandalism, there is virtually no evidence that fixed CCTV is an effective way of tackling these crimes,” Dr Fitzgerald said.

“Sometimes it is very difficult to show that there is any reduction even though crime is being pushed to other areas.

“If there are a lot of local authority areas around you that don’t have CCTV, maybe you could say ‘we’ll make it their problem’, but that’s probably not what the community has in mind when considering this investment in security.

“This council is already making an excellent investment in the community and young people and this investment is having a real and significant impact on the amount of crime in Melville.”

He also raised fears about the footage being used to track what everyone is doing.

“When we think of CCTV we probably think, if you grew up with it like I did, of the grainy images on an old cathode ray tube TV, one of those big boxy ones, maybe a big serial and someone sitting around watching the grainy feed of live television,” Dr Fitzgerald said.

“If that’s the picture you have in mind of what CCTV is all about, the depressing truth is that things are very different these days and the capacity to do very strange things with CCTV that we can’t predict is no longer science fiction.

“This is just the reality we live with.”