Having a chat: Sergeant Paul Nicoll spent Monday morning having coffee with locals as they discussed concerns around the community.
Photo by
Shannon Colee
The Echuca Police are excited to be back out in the community and continue their Coffee with a Cop initiative.
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On Monday morning they met dozens of locals outside Beechworth Bakery to discuss any issues or concerns that people were worried about.
Echuca Sergeant Karyn Murtagh said it was an important initiative to make sure that people in the community could engage with the police force.
“The great part of doing this is it’s just a very informal and relaxed way of engaging with the community. A lot of people don’t want to come to the police station or won’t come to the police station.”
She said a lot of people didn’t think their concerns were “important enough” to go to the station.
Meet and greet: Jo Mason from Echuca Regional Health and Echuca's Youth Specialist Officer Shane Roberts met up at the Coffee with a Cop session.
Photo by
Shannon Colee
“We’ve found if we bring it out to them and encourage them out on the street then they will come and have a chat with us about issues that are going on in the community,” Sgt Murtagh said.
“It gives us the information we need to target what it is that the community actually wants with our response to our policing.”
Sgt Murtagh said it was important to go out to the community rather than just “rely on them coming to us.”
“We see a lot of the same people a lot of the time and we know there are lots of people in the community that don’t have regular engagement with the police so this just sort of opens this pathways so they feel like they can approach us,” she said.
Not only are more people sharing their concerns during these Coffee with a Cop sessions, Sgt Murtagh also hoped that it would make people more comfortable if they needed to come to the station in the future.
“Some of the people that I speak to today will hopefully leave feeling a bit more connected to us and with their local police,” Sgt Murtagh said.
“Maybe they can now put some names to faces so if they ring the station for something I can give them my name and they’ll know who I am.“
Sgt Murtagh said they hoped to have these gatherings every few months so they could hear from the public more regularly.
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