Senior sergeant Jeff Dooley, who works west of Brisbane in Queensland’s Toowoomba district, says his officers see the benefits of their CCTV project – dubbed City Safe – every day.

It was launched in the Toowoomba CBD in 1995 with 13 cameras for $280,000, including monitoring costs, but in 2008, the success of the program has led to its expansion to 47 cameras.

City Safe cameras are monitored around the clock on weekends by an operator who concentrates monitoring on pubs, clubs, ATMs, traffic intersections, taxi ranks and on-foot traffic between venues.

“It started as a joint partnership between council and police and council have been so willing to fund this … the underlying key performance indicator is that people feel safe. They tell us they feel safe going out for coffee, theatre shows and walking to cab ranks. How do you put a price on that?” senior sergeant Dooley said.

“All the locals know City Safe is always watching. There will always be blues but, by and large, they know anti-social behaviour won’t be tolerated. We find it of great benefit to us. If we have officers about to walk into a large brawl, we can ask City Safe to monitor that area before we go in so we have all the evidence we need if it goes to court.”

The evidence captured by City Safe has increased guilty pleas and saved costly court cases, senior sergeant Dooley said.

“Detections of incidents have gone up but once the offenders find out we have the evidence of their act on camera, they are most likely to plead guilty rather than trying to defend their actions,” he said.

“We have had a big reduction in assaults in and around licensed premises in the last few months but we can’t attribute that completely to City Safe because it’s been around for so long. However, the immediate response by police and very low tolerance has certainly helped.”