Foley’s Five’s Richard Foley has announced he would endorse a policy to install CCTV across Wagga in an attempt to identify criminals. Photo: Jarryd Rowley.
Following daylight robberies and stabbings in Wagga’s main street, Wagga Wagga City Council candidate Richard Foley has announced a plan to fight crime in the city that he seeks to put forward if he’s reelected in the upcoming local government election.
The leader of the Foley’s Five team running in the 14 September election announced this week that he would be seeking to have CCTV installed around the city’s busiest areas to support police in catching criminals.
“I also want a community pool of CCTV across the city, not facial recognition software for those harbouring those privacy concerns, but to enable the police do a better, more thorough job to catch people committing crime during the city’s wee hours,” Cr Foley said.
“There have been a couple of instances of crime happening in broad daylight in the city recently, so we’re working on a policy in those guidelines to assist police to do it, to do their job a bit easier. They’re under the pump.”
Cr Foley has been working with fellow candidate and state president of NSW Neighbourhood Watch Wayne Deaner to put together policies that best support the local police.
“We need to know where they’ve gone, what they look like, and exactly how we ID them,” Cr Foley said.
“I think we as a community have to start working together and be more vigilant using technology.
“I’ve identified 317 major entry and exit points across the city. If they fitted with community cameras on homes near those intersections, we would stand to have a whole grid network of the city that we could then centralise in a cloud system with police, provided we’ve got the right privacy situations put in place so we can have a very effective ground fighting network.”
Another major issue Cr Foley and his ticket will look to address is the number of riders on unregistered motorbikes using laneways for “smash and grab raids”.
“They’re getting through drainage areas and through certain pockets around the suburbs,” Cr Foley said.
“These areas need to be either fenced or gated off so that people can still access them on foot or with prams, but they need to be actually made near impossible to access by a motorcycle.
“These motorcyclists are not just ripping around the suburbs. They are also doing smash and grab raids on houses, and they’re also delivering drugs. We need to put a really big, serious dent in that.
“We’re not going to completely stop it, but I think we can make it very, very hard for them. And if that’s linked up to CCTV, we’ll know how to do that.”
Cr Foley said funding for these initiatives should not just come from the pockets of ratepayers, identifying several funding avenues from the State and Federal governments.
“I believe there’s money on the table from governments for this, and I think even the community, to some degree, could help on that basis. This has to be a community-wide effort. It’s a community-wide issue.”
The local government elections will be held on 14 September with pre-polling beginning on 7 September.
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