Central Hunter police are overstretched and it’s going to get a whole lot worse when the maximum security expansion at Cessnock jail is complete, according to a Hunter MP.
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Cessnock MP Clayton Barr said the government needed to acknowledge that the 1000 extra beds earmarked for Cessnock jail was going to have an effect on policing numbers right across Maitland and the Lower Hunter.
He was dubious about a claim from Corrective Services NSW that there was “no evidence that the prison expansion will lead to rising crime rates, inmates' families moving to the area or inmates staying in town after their release.”
This followed a review of the Mid-North Coast Correctional Centre at Kempsey which found crime rates had remained stable or declined in most areas in the three years after the prison opened.
Mr Barr claimed that families were more likely to move to a new area if their relatives were behind bars for long term sentences.
He also said police were regularly called to the jail to deal with new crime such as contraband and assaults, as well as ongoing investigations with inmates. Mr Barr said both of those issues would only increase with more prisoners.
“If you double the size, you’ll more than double the amount of times police are called up there,” he said.
Mr Barr said this would mean the already overstretched police force would not be on the streets to protect the regular community.
In light of this, the MP believed the government needed to reevaluate how police numbers were allocated to each command.
He said numbers were decided based on population, rather than crime rates.
“They need to support areas where workload and crime rates require additional police,” he said.
He said a model based on demand would result in a huge numbers boost to the Central Hunter, which was in the top three commands in NSW in terms of work load.
“They’re doing more, carrying more, responding more and achieving more than almost all other commands across the state,” he said.
A NSW Police spokesperson said the NSW Police Force used a number of human resource analysis methods to determine the local levels of work force supply.
“These take into account workload, coverage and risk of the local commands,” the spokesperson said.