Media Release on Community Safety

“Community Safety works because everyday people stay alert to tell-tale signs of harmful criminality, militant activism, and random acts of extremist violence.”

Dr. Geoff Dean – CEO

The Safety Alert Volunteer Enterprise (SAVE) is a community-based Network of trained volunteers dedicated to keeping their local community safe from social harms caused by criminality, militancy, extremism and terrorism.

The organisation of the SAVE Network is run by a team of volunteers with expertise and experience in criminology, policing, security, intelligence, forensics, computer science, risk management, and countering terrorism/violent extremism.

The SAVE Network provides specialised training in Safety Alertness.  Each course is tailored to fit the needs of a sponsoring agency for its staff and local community groups.

The following TESTIMONIAL from the Surfers Paradise Alliance is an example of this agency’s endorsement of the ‘Safety Alertness Training’ course run by the SAVE Team.    Surfers Paradise Alliance staff comments on the Safety Alertness Training course included:

“An excellent day – very informative; thoroughly good examples; very practical for our everyday work; engaging, interesting; great presentation; more of the community needs to take this; the practical exercise out of the classroom was a good way to experience what had previously been discussed; to tie this in with the written scenarios was very clever; I liked how we got involved as a team and going out to practice what we learnt; learning ‘alert cues’ that previously I wouldn’t have considered; the stories and real cases where small details came together to solve a larger problem; the wide range of experience and knowledge of trainers; no boring bits; was great to have a vast array of experience in the room; the storytelling was insightful.”

Aim of Training

The one-day Safety Alertness Training course is designed to instil in participants a mind of active watchfulness, prepared and focused by relevant, up-to-date knowledge of ‘alert cues’ (tell-tale signs) of everyday ‘anomalies’ (irregularities/inconsistencies consistent with suspicious behaviours) of potential social harms to personal and community safety such as regular criminality, militant activism, and random, extremist violence.

Objectives of Training

Participants are taught to be alert to and curious about (but not alarmed by) any anomalies, they may notice as they go about their everyday lives in the community.  Specifically, you learn:

• To watch for ‘anomalies’ (suspicious behaviours) in your everyday environment.
• To make sense of the ‘alert cues’ you have noticed about possible anomalies.
• To decide on what is the appropriate level of action to take on various anomalies, by practicing the three R’s system^© process of ‘Respond-Record-Report’ during course.

Course Information

For further details on course design, availability and fees, please contact Dr. Geoff Dean via SAVE website (gdean@savenetwork.org) or consultancy email (profgdean@gmail.com) on mobile +61 (0) 407 176 494