Keeping communities safe

Patrol worker Heather Rosas (right) with supporter Anne Dikenson. Photo: Barry Nattrass, the Tennant Creek and District Times.

Concerned communities around Australia have formed patrols to make their streets safer at night and keep locals out of jail.

More than 70 of Australia’s night patrols are in the Northern Territory, and it was in the territory town of Tennant Creek that community patrols began.

Warumungu elders in Tennant Creek got together in 1970 to talk about alcohol abuse and make their community safer. They started foot patrols with elders walking the streets every night, helping people back to community living areas.

Ten years later, the Julalikari Council Aboriginal Corporation, which now runs the patrol, provided a 12-seater bus. Some government and mining company support followed for a second vehicle with a radio telephone, and wages to employ a coordinator.

“At the beginning, the elders walked around all night. They didn’t have boots or torches,” senior supervisor Heather Rosas says.

“After years of people volunteering, the Julalikari community night patrol has now grown to eleven staff working on rosters helping people back home to community living or to the sobering-up shelter or police cells.”

Rosas, whose father drove the first night patrol bus, started as a patrol volunteer 18 years ago.

“We were concerned about a lot of our young and old people drinking too much, and wanted to show that Warumungu people can stand up and do things for our own people,” she says.

“That’s why we have changed the name of the patrol to Ankinyi Wirranjiki in our language, meaning ‘ours to watch and protect’.”

The success of the Julalikari patrol was highlighted by the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, which recommended the introduction of “similar schemes into Aboriginal communities that are willing to operate them because they have the potential to…substantially lower crime rates”.

Jarrod Williams, a former Northern Territory Young Australian of the Year, volunteered for the Julalikari patrol when he was still at school. He became one of the patrol’s coordinators at just 17, and went on to become an Aboriginal community police recruit at just 19.

He is now based in the Katherine police station region, where he uses his experience to help the night patrollers deal with the young people they bring in to the station.