Police alone can’t fix city crime – they need back up | David Penberthy

If we do not have enough police in the city blame for that lies not on Angas St but North Tce, writes David Penberthy.

The area around Parliament and Adelaide Railway Station is ground zero for anti-social behaviour, city workers say. Picture: Brenton Edwards

The starting point for addressing the crime problem plaguing the CBD is to admit without equivocation that it’s a problem.

There should be no tip-toeing around it by SAPOL or the two tiers of government, the State Government and the Adelaide City Council, for what has become a genuine quagmire.

The arguments around statistics that played out in parliamentary estimates the other day between the Acting Police Commissioner Linda Williams and a handful of Opposition and Independent MPs have no bearing on the day-to-day reality for people working in and commuting through town. It doesn’t matter if crime is “normalising” to pre-Covid levels. What matters is that people who use this part of town no longer feel safe, and can’t recall feeling unsafer.

A friend of mine has worked in a pub in the CBD for the past 23 years. She says she has never seen things this bad.

Their week starts with a visit from the Department of Human Services to see how much trouble unfolded over the weekend. In the past few weeks she has seen fellow staff members threatened with a needle, and in another case, two drunk patrons were in the bottle shop, one of whom passed out on the ground, her male companion using her collapse as a distraction to rob bottles off the shelves and flee.
READ MORE: ‘Probably not coming back’: Top firm shuns our dangerous CBD

This is the real world, away from the cloistered environment of parliamentary estimates. Stories like these have been replicated over and over in this newspaper, with the customers and owners of coffee shops, convenience stores, and city office workers who use the train and tram all recounting similar tales of mayhem on and around the North Terrace strip.

I have seen it myself, as at least once a week I have to work commitments outside of radio hours in town, and usually park in that laneway carpark on Blyth St tucked in behind the Strathmore Hotel.

When you walk out through the arcade in that daggy old Transport Department building on the corner of Bank St and North Terrace, you are entering the dishevelled epicentre of Adelaide, on what should be one of our premier avenues, in front of that beautiful old railway station which many people now regard as a no-go zone.

The impact all this is having on private businesses and the attractiveness of the city is immense.

Anti-social behaviour at a bus stop on North Terrace, snapped by a staffer from a Parliament House window.

Not only does it risk driving people away (which costs business money) but businesses themselves are paying out of their own pocket to provide services the state should provide. The Strathmore Hotel has doubled its security just to make sure its patrons feel safe and welcome.

The pub has done that on top of the cost of its fantastic upgrade during Covid, with that great new restaurant and wine room on the second floor promoting our state’s best vinos.

It’s the place I booked for lunch last year during the Adelaide Test so that mates and I could have steaks and a couple of pints before the day-night cricket got underway.

It is totally unacceptable that a great business such as this one must soldier on unaided when it comes to safety, but pay twice what it should for its own protection.

There is a depressing and provocative book entitled San Fransicko which looks at how the once-great city of San Francisco has been ruined by a warm-hearted liberal approach to problems of drug and alcohol addiction which intersect with mental health, homelessness and poverty.

It makes a compelling argument that one of the key mistakes San Francisco has made is to “manage” rather than challenge the fact that so many people are wiping themselves out on drugs and booze, and treating all the consequent behaviour such as robberies, assaults and public defecation as the unavoidable by-products of a crisis of addiction.

All that adds up to is a recipe for doing nothing.

I think you can see elements of this in the situation on North Terrace.

There’s a squeamishness about addressing the problem because many of these offenders are Indigenous; equally, plenty of them aren’t, but the social justice vibe is that everyone who’s on meth is somehow more a victim in this than the person they’ve just robbed or spat on or screamed at.

The Strathmore on North Terrace. Picture: Dean Martin

The fact that Human Services holds regular meetings with businesses about the chaos of the past weekend suggests an approach where problems are being managed and noted rather than challenged.

And as with San Francisco, we are seeing that a shortfall of police (or a liberal reluctance to employ them effectively) means that a pub such as The Strath must fork out at twice the rate it should to keep its customers safe.

It’s like the privatisation of security.

SAPOL has been accused of being too slow to respond in a logistic sense to the current wave. The criticism may well be justified. I would temper my criticisms of police with two important caveats. The first is to wonder out loud what kind of back-up they would get from the judiciary if they arrested every one of these offenders tomorrow.

The second is to point the finger more forcefully at the state government.

Premier Peter Malinauskas. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Naomi Jellicoe

If we do not have enough police in the city - and it feels like we don’t - blame for that lies not on Angas St but North Tce. The Premier needs to lift on this.

Then there’s the City Council, absent in playing any leadership role as it preoccupies itself with bourgeois heritage concerns.

The ACC is more worried about the possible location of police horses on Sir Lewis Cohen Drive than the urgent need for the location of policemen and policewomen outside the railway station.

And when we hear the Lord Mayor or others bemoaning the appalling state of some of our key boulevards, be it King William St or North Terrace, the simple rejoinder to that is: isn’t it your job to look after them?

And also to wonder how whacking every restaurant and wine bar with huge new tax hikes will make Adelaide more vibrant and elegant, or make it a great place to open a convenience store.

The exact kind of convenience store where two women brawled Thursday, one of them stabbed with a broken beer bottle, demonstrating the opening assertion that this most unequivocally is a very real problem.