Covid-19 Omicron outbreak: James Doolan - rolling in tourists to fight crime in our depleted city centres

Opinion

OPINION

Many years ago, I asked an experienced Australian property developer why he wanted to build a luxury hotel and residential apartment tower across the road from a notorious Melbourne strip club.

Wasn't this part of town a little ... dodgy?

In his reply, he told me about the "surveillance effect".

It used to be that Aussie and Kiwi cities emptied out after 5pm, when office workers and the retailers who served them would depart en masse to their suburban homes. But in the past 25 years, Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland have seen dramatic increases in the number of city-centre apartments and hotels.

New Zealand is finally catching up with the best and most exciting European and North American cities that are activated and open 24 hours a day.

Residential apartments and hotels now overlook many city centre streets. Instead of just deserted office spaces, there are thousands of hotel rooms and apartments, each containing overnight occupants with high-definition cameras on their cellphones.

If you do something crazy, aggressive, or intimidating on a city-centre street in 2022, there's a decent chance that someone will film you for Instagram (and the police).

This is the surveillance effect, and it tells us that crime and anti-social behaviour decreases when the likelihood of being observed is high. Just like toddlers, we're more likely to behave ourselves when we're being watched.

So how do tourists and hotels turbo-charge the surveillance effect?

The surveillance effect is a different way of saying "there's safety in numbers".

Large, international-standard hotels are concentrated in our city centres near public transport networks, conference facilities, and office towers. Travellers come and go at all hours of the day, so hotels remain open 24/7, often brightly lit and with staff at the door or front desk.

Unlike locked office towers, hotels are hives of late-night activity. They are beacons of safety for anyone in need of refuge after dark.

Higher numbers of tourists and residents also affect the mix of retail premises in a city centre, which reinforces the surveillance effect. Tourists are, by definition curious, free-spending, and open to new experiences. They eat out lots, so food and beverage outlets thrive.

Tourism-connected businesses keep longer hours than those only serving the office crowd. Open-late supermarkets and convenience stores emerge to sell groceries and cans of drink – not everyone pays those hotel mini bar prices.

Since borders closed in March 2020, Auckland and Rotorua are two perfect examples of what happens when a vibrant destination loses its international tourists.

Restaurants, bars and coffee shops lost that incremental portion of revenue that once made them profitable, meaning many had to shut permanently. Hotels became Covid quarantine and isolation facilities, closed to the public and hidden behind intimidating fences and netting.

Without footfall, retailers floundered.

You're right to feel a little less safe in central Auckland or Rotorua these days. Don't let data manipulators tell you that crime levels are constant. With the clearing out of office workers and tourists after Covid, crime levels should have dramatically fallen in line with the decreased number of daily visitors.

But that hasn't happened.

James Doolan. Photo / Supplied

Anti-social behaviour has obviously increased on a per capita basis.

There are fewer people around, so the surveillance effect is no longer working.

It's become fashionable in recent times to criticise the tourism industry, which is said to have lost its "social licence" to operate in Aotearoa. Politicians jumped on that bandwagon too, often arbitrarily claiming that pre-Covid visitation levels were unsustainable, or that tourism does not pay its way, despite being this country's largest export earner and generating more than $3.8 billion in GST alone in the year before Covid struck.

What Auckland and Rotorua have shown is how tourism benefits all Kiwis, not just those working directly in the industry itself.

If you're looking forward to feeling safe in our cities and towns again, if you miss the cultural heartbeat of a vibrant city-centre, then you should warmly welcome the reopening of our borders to tourists.

It's time to fling open restaurant front doors, let cruise ships dock again and spruce up the souvenir shops. When tourists return, the surveillance effect will kick in again, making our towns and cities much safer for all.

Tourists and the surveillance effect – back soon to fight crime in a town near you.

• James Doolan is the strategic director of Hotel Council Aotearoa.