Some residents of Wyndham are turning to private security to keep their streets safe at night. Jaidyn Kennedy accompanies YPG RISK owner Grant Burton on night patrol.
Melissa Smiley and many of her neighbours fear for their safety, so much so that they have enlisted a private security company to patrol their streets at night.
“It’s terrible here, I won’t walk out of my house when it gets dark to even put my bins out or to go to my letterbox,” Melissa said.
“I would say to people looking for a place to move to don’t come and live here.”
Melissa doesn’t live in Los Angeles’s Skid Row or a gated community in Cape Town, she lives in Manor Lakes.
Since early April, more than 370 residents of the suburb have signed on to a private security trial run by Grant Burton’s company YPG RISK.
However, this isn’t Grant or his team’s first rodeo in the 3024 postcode – the company operates permanent patrols Wyndham Vale’s Jubilee Estate and in parts of Mambourin.
Grant said his company was approached by Neighbourhood Watch in Manor Lakes.
“They asked if we would consider coming to a non-owners corporation estate to run our model through the area,” he said.
Melissa said herself and other residents have chosen private security because they feel Manor Lakes is getting more dangerous and police are taking longer to respond.
Recently, she said people have ripped out her letterbox, several drug-afflicted people have attempted to open her front and car doors, and that someone slashed her neighbour’s seatbelt while she was still in her car before stealing the vehicle.
I joined Grant on patrol at 9.50pm on a Monday night.
The first thing you might notice about the patrol car when first jumping for a ride-along, an experience open to any resident if they sign a waiver, is the Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) system.
Through a mounted camera, the system scans registration plates and will light up and start beeping if it detects a car has been reported as stolen or if the registration is invalid.
If Grant gets out of the vehicle, then the ALPR system will switch to his body camera and keep operating.
Every guard Grant deploys is equipped with a bulletproof vest, a batten and handcuffs.
Admittedly, while I feel pretty safe in the patrol car, I can’t help but think of the death of Natan Mwanza in Wyndham Vale a couple of months ago.
We enter Lakeside, where the initial demand for the patrol came.
“Initially the demand was for Lakeside only, they wanted a car to patrol this eight to 10 street precinct alone,” Grant said.
“We get a lot of activity around here mainly due to the parks and playgrounds, but two of the houses on this street have had attempted home invasions since we started.”
Some of the housekeeping tasks the patrol units will perform are making sure all garages are closed and scanning to see if individuals or groups are loitering.
Across the night, Grant will focus on streets where subscribers live, activity centres like Wyndham Vale station and respond to any concerns raised in the subscriber WhatsApp group.
A voice starts speaking through Grant’s radio, but it’s no cause for alarm, just a routine welfare check from headquarters.
Depending on the uptake from residents, there are plans to increase to six patrols across Wyndham Vale, Mambourin and Manor Lakes by July.
“The plan for Manor Lakes is to increase to two or three cars here over the next couple of years, if the program takes off, “ Grant said.
I finally ask perhaps the most obvious question: Where does the authority of a private security guard end?
“That’s a grey area, we obviously have a line that we can’t cross,” Grant said.
“What we can’t do is enter people’s homes, we have no search powers, we have no ability to request identification.
“We won’t overstep our mark and we have a great relationship with the police in Werribee, so we don’t want to fracture or jeopardise that at any point.
They have the power to perform a citizen’s arrest – and will do so.
“If we find someone on the street breaking into a car, we’re not going to let them go and tell them to piss off and don’t come back,” Grant said.
“We’ll execute that every time we can.”
Grant stresses that the operation is not all muscle.
“Mental health is a real part of a role here as well, we come across a lot of people at night who are just not having a good time sitting in cars on their own,” he said.
“Well try and talk to them and engage them and see if we can get them help.
“My team is not just here to be the governors of the area, laying the law down for our clients.”
At about 10.15pm, we come across a parked car with a single male occupant.
Turns out it is just a guy smoking after a fight with his girlfriend, something Grant doesn’t bother to interfere with as he might deal with four or five innocent loiterers a night.
We creep past a construction zone, where Grant checks that no one is looting.
I ask him about the large sandbags covering pits in the ground, and to which I’m told copper wire is still a blue-chip asset.
We also come across a dark grey Audi with no plates on it parked at Manor Lakes Reserve.
The male and female in the car aren’t willing to talk, so Grant gives the police a heads up.
The weekends are where the real action happens, Grant told me.
“You come here on a Friday or Saturday night [AND] we are constantly monitoring groups of up to six to eight people walking the street,” he said.
But on that Monday night, we counted more kangaroos than pedestrians or cars.
“The families are not out on the streets here – which is surprising for us because in other areas we patrol, the playgrounds and barbeque areas are busy until at least 9pm,” Grant said.
“In Manor Lakes we don’t see that– recently, we’ve had people say to us ‘Nah, we’re inside by 7.30pm mate and we’re happy being in there’.”
“It’s a dead zone.”
As a developing suburb, Manor Lakes has plenty of houses that neighbour empty blocks, something the patrollers pay particular attention to.
“We’ve had a few back fences where they’ve [alleged criminals] parked behind the house to jump over the fence – and not many people would have thought of that in the past,” Grant said.
“But these blocks of land that are empty allow criminals to come in … come in through the back doors.”
My two-hour stint on night patrol is over, but the discussion on the role of private security patrols in Wyndham- and who should fund them- is just getting started.
