By Tanya Steele
CCTV networks once seen as a vital part of crime prevention in Belgrave and Upwey are now facing significant challenges due to outdated equipment and the escalating costs of maintenance.
As Star Mail’s CCTV campaign continues, journalists spoke with traders and township group members in the towns about the ongoing issues with the network and hopes for it in the future.
Shared concerns for costs and who should be accountable, the township group members and the traders spoke about the pros and cons of handling the network and some of its history.
President of the Belgrave Traders Josh said at the moment the CCTV is really a bit of a hot potato about whose responsibility it is to maintain the cameras.
“Police have told us that they don’t have any responsibility to maintain the network of cameras, but they do have the ability to view the footage in real time on monitors,” he said.
“It would be beneficial, because we have a lot of nightlife in Belgrave.”
Jacqui, current President of the Upwey Township group, said it had once been a fantastic program.
“The current issue, though, is that we really need to be able to upgrade the equipment and the connectivity of the live feed so that it can actually be utilized in real time by the police,” she said.
Jacqui said that in Upwey they are seeing more people with antisocial behaviour coming into the area and in the last few years the group have tried things like installing extra lighting to deter behaviour.
“CCTV would really help with identifying particular perpetrators,” she said.
Belgrave has similar issues and Josh said that some areas of the town have very low lighting.
“Blacksmith’s Laneway is quite dark at night time – it is a bit of a risky sort of area,” said Josh.
“I think most Traders would feel more comfortable on the street to know that there is CCTV footage that covers potentially the back and front sides of the street, for their own businesses sake,” he said.
Former president of the Upwey township group Andrew Fullagar said he started on the journey for CCTV along with former Crime Prevention Officer Leading Senior Constable Linda Hancock around 2013.
“We were removing graffiti in Upwey from about 2009 or 2010 on and she was in the Kilsyth Action Group at that stage herself,” he said.
The duo met through the Yarra Ranges township group network, and Mr Fullagar said they were of a like mind and wanted to reduce the amount of graffiti in their areas.
“I was always pushing really hard because of the amount of graffiti in Upwey and antisocial behavior generally – so that was the thrust of what we were trying to do,” he said.
“I think CCTV is a really good, really good thing – although some people don’t like it because of having the cameras around,” he said.
Mr Fullagar said a positive note was that originally the Yarra Ranges Safety Camera network was an incorporated organisation independent of the township group network, and independent of every single township group.
“Having that was beneficial, in one sense, that it was independent, it did its own thing,” he said.
However, the network also suffered from some foundational issues, and Mr Fullagar said that as time moved forward, some people didn’t even know it existed, or what the structure of it was, with the community raising the question of why they should be contributing towards it.
Township and Traders groups tend to change over the years, and keeping track of the ins and outs of the systems was challenging for both towns.
Mr Fullagar said that originally the grants were for the installation of the cameras, and the township groups generally, or the traders group, depending on what was around, were to pay the insurance.
“There was a little bit of money left over for maintenance, but not really enough,” he said.
“There certainly wasn’t any money for upgrades or technology advances.”
The former president said in hindsight, the network seemed a little bit doomed to fail.
“Township groups, as you probably know, have very few sources of income,” he said.
“To expect the township group to fund for the insurance… it was a bit of a big ask, a bit of a leap of faith.”
Although some townships got on board and managed to fund that money, Mr Fullagar said that it’s a difficult space and when they ran out of funding, effectively, the systems gradually fell over.
Both town main areas have had ongoing issues with graffiti and crime over the years, and Josh said that when there’s been property damage in the streets of Belgrave recently, the police have reached out to businesses for help to get footage of the crimes.
Jacqui said that personal business CCTV has been helpful to track crime in Upwey.
“Some individual businesses in their shops in the main street have helped,” she said.
Josh said he would also like to see the police more out and about in the local community.
“Community policing is pretty important,” he said.
Looking forward, the township members and traders agree that it would require a lot of work to overhaul the current system and ensure that the CCTV will work the way it was supposed to originally.
Josh said he thinks the logical solution would be to pay a CCTV contractor to basically assess the network, figure out what’s broken and re-implement the whole system again.
“That takes money and the Belgrave Traders are not funded by Council at all – it’s completely self-generated,” he said.
Jacqui said that it would be great to see these systems actually be at a higher functioning level, so they can be utilized.
“It’s one of those situations where it was best of intentions with funding, then, of course, that funding ends,” she said.
“There’s a lot of shared responsibility, but with no funding to be able to update, upgrade and maintain the equipment.”
Mr Fullagar said he thinks they will have to revisit the whole structure again.
“We need to upgrade all the cameras, because most of them are now older, so that’s going to cost a lot of money,” he said.
“Get the systems in place so that VicPol are intentionally involved, and we need to know where the information is and ensure we’ve got direct access.”
Everything that the CCTV covers is public property and Josh said that if it’s all covering Council things, public and community concern should be a factor,
“It should also be coming from local council or police, but I don’t understand why it would ever have been in the hands of the traders,” he said.
