Our daily news feed provides us rarely with a friendly face of our Police Services: either it is a violent crime or, worse an over eager reporter shows video of alleged Police brutality. So it comes as a refreshing change to meet three Police Officers with big, hearty smiles: they are from the Gold Coast District Cross Cultural Liaison Unit. Deliberately meant to be "cross cultural", the ethnic origin of the members are telling: whilst Sgt Lyndon O'Neill (centre) is obviously Caucasian, Officer Jasylyah Kadir (second from right) is from Singapore and Officer Saga (pron 'Sanga') Selesby (on right) is Samoan.Lyndon had a well prepared PowerPoint presentation to outline his unit's work and purpose (you can download the full PPSX in the Download section on the top right). The unit has 5 key areas of focus:
- Safety Presentations for newly arrived migrants, students and visitors,
- Increase Media Engagement,
- Develop and Implement Policing Education
- Improve Client Satisfaction and confidence in Police, and
- Increase the knowledge and skills of QPS employees.
Lyndon presented an interesting outline of Gold Coast Diversity: did you know that close to 1/3rd (27.9 %) of the population was born overseas? 50,640 people speak a language other than English at home? (and before you go off your rocker: no, the major portion is not Arabic or Chinese, it is Japanese (1%, 4,727 people). We also have 3 major Universities plus 20 Language Schools and 200 Registered Training Organizations catering for some 24,000 students from 130 countries. And they ARE important: it is estimated that for every overseas student, about $100,000 is contributed to the local economy. And on top of all the students we have annually about 847,000 visitors from overseas!