City of Casey: Perceptions of Safety

The Project

Conversation Co was engaged to deliver a sector-leading engagement and research program to inform Council’s actions around community safety. The aim of the program was to explore the community’s perceptions of safety and compare this to reported crime levels. We wanted to understand: risk factors; protective factors; locations of concern; and potential actions for Council.

For this project, we worked with ASDF Research to implement a mixed-methodology approach to collect a mix of:

• Quantitative data through a statistically significant telephone survey with a representative sample of residents.

• Qualitative data through community pop-ups to explore the story behind the data.

Challenges

• Engaging younger people was difficult due to the timing of our pop-up events and the requirements of our client through the child disclosure process.

• Missing an opportunity to position one of our community pop-up at a busier site with more foot traffic.

Keys to Success

• Nearly all our pop-ups were linked with existing events, this was a great way to ensure an audience. We had access to a large number of community members.

• Attending the Casey Rainbow Picnic- this was a wonderful opportunity to engage with LGBTIQA+ community and it was fabulous to hear this voice so strongly through the reporting.

Outcomes

• We heard from over 1,929 people about safety in Casey:

  • Representative Survey: 1,462 people from a randomly selected subset of 10,000 Casey households completed a survey.  Participants represent the ages, genders, diversity and locations of people in Casey.

  • General Access Survey: 266 additional people (not-representative) completed the survey.

  • Community Pop-up: 201 people chatted with us at our community pop-ups.

• Most people in Casey feel safe or very safe (62% of representative survey).

• The reasons that help people feel safe include: Neighbours that look after each other; police presence; well-lit public areas; and embracing diversity.

• To address concerns, participants suggested that Council should prioritise: increasing security, police presence and CCTV;  improving roads and footpaths; increasing community connection and events; increasing lighting;  cleaning/improving public spaces; providing safety education; and creating safe spaces for LGBTIQA+.

Reflections or Learnings

• Utilising a mix of qualitative and quantitative data made for a strong persuasive presentation that was very well received.

Use of children in these images have been approved by the child’s parent or guardian for Conversation Co’s marketing purposes as per our Image Consent policy and ChildSafe Policy.