Hornby Community Patrol

The recent Hornby Community Patrol AGM was an opportunity to introduce our new patron, Hilary Muir, present life membership certificates and CPNZ service badges.

The Patrol is very fortunate that one of our own patrollers is a graphic designer and created the life membership certificates.

One of our life memberships dated back to 2010 and it gave us the opportunity to reflect on how far we have grown as a patrol in terms of our standard CPNZ livery, uniforms, training and police vetting.

It was also an opportunity to think about what we record, how we record it and how we patrol. In earlier years we would roam the streets without much thought to a burglar’s pattern of offending, or asking ourselves how effective we are if we spend most of the shift driving.

The introduction of social media for the patrol via our webpage and Facebook page has meant we are now alerted to suspicious behaviour or areas of concern from local residents. Within our patrol area we maintain close relationships with schools, CCC, sponsors and businesses.

Our patrols are focused around responding to local requests from the public and taskings from Police. This is achieved by an individualised set of instructions for each patrol. This does take time but it means that we are responding to requests in a timely and structured fashion.

What does this mean for the community? Hopefully it will give an increased public reassurance as we are being seen more frequently in the areas in which we need to be. Another recent change is the introduction of day time patrols and our reports being recorded on an iPad. We are proud that all patrollers use the iPad, as it means that they are readable for our statistician and the person forwarding anything that is relevant to police intelligence.

It is important to not only record what we see, but to also pass the information on. We will never know if the information sent in is useful, but it may one day end up being the missing piece of the puzzle.

We aren’t out daily but do we have greater flexibility with the times we patrol. This isn’t solely due to a large number of retirees, but also to having younger patrollers that are on shift work.

We are always in recruitment mode, so check us out on either our webpage or Facebook site.