Hume and Whittlesea have seen a significant decline in crime rates with both municipalities recording a 22 per cent decrease.
Data gathered by the Crime Statistics Agency found criminal incidents in the Hume area dropped from 16,154 in 2020 to 12,588 in 2021.
Whittlesea saw a similar trend with criminal activity decreasing from 12,137 in 2020 to 9,384 for the year ending 2021.
Whittlesea Inspector Chris Allen said the decrease in crime was “pleasing.”
“Any scenario where crime drops means we have less people that are victims of crime and less trauma in the community,” he said.
Last year’s COVID lockdowns played an integral role in the statistical changes, Inspector Allen said.
“We didn’t have the amount of public out and about with the lockdowns, some businesses were closed, licensed premises were shut for some parts of the year. This affects how many people and businesses can be targeted for crime,” he said.
However, Whittlesea did see an increase in criminal damage, it jumped from 753 to 783 in the span of a year.
Inspector Allen puts this down to the rapid population growth happening in the municipality.
“While the number of reports are up slightly, I anticipate the per capita offence rate in line with criminal damage will have decreased with the population growth,” he said.
Despite COVID demands, Inspector Allen said police officers were still able to do the most important part of their job, responding to public calls of help.
“We still focussed on patrolling the streets, road trauma enforcement and proactive operations to target people intent on causing harm and we still made sure our police stations were open for the community to come to if they needed assistance.”
Hume also followed a similar trend to that of Whittlesea with overall crime declining.
Broadmeadows Senior Sergeant Darren Paterson said it was good to see the crime statistics being driven down.
Theft from a motor vehicle as well as theft from driveways/carports were the only crimes that saw an increase in the municipality.
Senior Sergeant Paterson believes COVID was of assistance to the crime statistics in that regard but more work is being done to combat that issue.
“We’re doing intelligence led policing, we’re making sure we’re putting our resources when we know that high peak crime times and locations are actually occurring. Also, with the lower numbers of crimes that are actually occurring, we can actually utilise our resources to actually focus more on the incidents that are occurring and so reducing the capacity for offenders to keep offending,” he said.
