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Hamilton schools are adding police officers to their staff to not only combat bullying, truancy and tagging but to identify and help youngsters who are likely to become career criminals.
Police officers based permanently at Hamilton Girls', Melville and Fraser High Schools, and Fairfield Intermediate as part of a joint Police and Education Ministry Campus Cops scheme began their stints this week.
The programme, which is already in place throughout Counties Manukau and in schools in the Far North, is aimed at improving student behaviour and relations between police and the community.
Fraser High School principal Martin Elliott said a police constable would work fulltime with its chaplain, kaumatua, two part-time doctors, nurse and counsellors to ensure the well-being of its 1800 students.
The constable has a wide brief which includes walking the beat at school grounds during morning interval and at lunchtimes, keeping an eye on student behaviour and being called upon to visit students' families in stress.
"There will of course be issues around violence, truancy, bullying and drugs - the whole gambit of social ills which unfortunately are in every community in New Zealand," said Mr Elliott.
"But it's a return to the days where things are done at the grass-roots level and you are trying to be preventative and proactive rather than waiting for the gang violence to occur in the weekends or at night or waiting for things to go pear-shaped later in life," he said.
Youth and community services manager, senior sergeant Lance Tebbutt, said the likely benefits were improved behaviour, better attendance rates and less bullying.
He said the level of youth offending had remained about the same for years with children as young as seven displaying anti-social tendencies.
"The idea is we will be the fence at the top of the cliff for these kids," he said. "If they are displaying behaviour that would indicate their risk of offending we should get in there as early as we can."
Mr Tebbutt said offenders at schools would be treated the same as they are at present.
"But if the incident is serious enough for police action then that will be taken," he said.
Further north, the Campus Cops scheme is slowly making inroads into juvenile crime with senior sergeant Mike Fulcher of Counties Manukau police reporting a steady progress at all of the 10 South Auckland schools the programme was introduced to last year.
Senior Sergeant Fulcher said although it was difficult to statistically measure the success of the programme at least three more schools in the region were looking to implement the scheme.
"In the long term you're seeking more of a respect for the community out of all this and I think we're slowly getting there," he said.
