The City of North Battleford’s community safety co-ordinator was before the Prairie North Health Region board Wednesday afternoon to talk about the results and recommendations from the recently-completed community safety audit.
Herb Sutton outlined some of the findings to the board, whose regular meeting took place this month at Battlefords Union Hospital.
The results of the audit were of importance to Prairie North, as the audit was conducted in the immediate vicinity of the hospital area May 21-23.
The reason the hospital area had been targeted for the audit, Sutton explained, was the area has one of the highest calls for service to the RCMP in the city, along with a triangle in the downtown core area.
So a three-block radius around the area was chosen and about 15 people were involved in completing the audit over the three days.
The findings have been released and have been presented to city council. Many of the concepts Sutton presented to the Prairie North board were familiar ones, such as the need for good lighting and the need for “eyes that care,” where there are people or neighbours looking out for suspicious activity.
But Sutton also was able to relay some recommendations that were directly relevant to the hospital itself.
One of the recommendations was the need for image and maintenance. To that end, Sutton showed a picture of a couch in an alley outside the hospital.
“It tends to give people that are coming by the impression, or the image, that people don’t really care,” said Sutton.
He noted that sort of image attracts criminal behavior because “they assume the people in those areas won’t care about their surroundings, so they’re not going to care if there’s people in the area who maybe shouldn’t be there. They’re just going to carry on with their lives.”
He also spoke of broken window syndrome, the idea that if windows aren’t replaced in a timely manner, then “more windows tend to get broken, other things tend to get wrecked because people just assume that nobody cares.”
Signage was also important, he said, because clear directions “give a mindset that we’re really organized and we expect people who are coming in here to be organized and well behaved as well.”
If signs are unclear, and people are confused, then “what tends to happen is they just ignore all the signs.”
Related to that, Sutton also talked about the concept of “territoriality” and gave an example of the area of the hospital where parking was clearly reserved for hospital staff. It was about “establishing your control over the certain area of your hospital.”
In relation to that parking lot, Sutton observed there were no clear indication which entrance is supposed to be used, and nothing to indicate people aren’t supposed to walk across there.
“That might be something for you to think about as we move forward with this,” said Sutton.
