Announcing his appointment, Mayor Louise Crawford said, “Ian Gray AM is known as a reformer, bringing in major changes during his 11 years as Victorian Chief Magistrate and three years as State Coroner. He is also a long-term St Kilda resident.”
The council has also announced that the community safety roundtable will happen in mid-March.
The purpose of the community safety roundtable is to:
• review best-practice community outreach models from other jurisdictions and explore opportunities to strengthen community safety in the City of Port Phillip
• examine the role of local laws in protecting public spaces and consider police protocols and operations—such as those implemented by the City of Melbourne—and their relevance to Port Phillip
• assess the feasibility of establishing an ongoing alliance to continue this work over the next four years
• provide short- and long-term recommendations to the council to improve safety and public amenity.
Watch this space, as they say.
Welcome aboard, Mr. Gray
It’s exciting to have such a skilled legal mind and committed reformer taking the lead in this important community safety roundtable.
At TWiSK, we are also buoyed by your past inclination to open up the bureaucratic processes to public view, such as the introduction of live filming in court cases.
The community has yet to be informed about who will sit around the roundtable, except to say they won’t be represented or invited, as it is for experts only.
Now that you are chair, maybe you could consider how to involve these communities in the roundtable decisions:
The community, including traders, but especially those people who have experienced crime and feel unsafe;
The politicians who ultimately make the funding decisions;
The media who will need to communicate about the roundtable.
After all, it is a community safety roundtable.
