How $550 helped Stephanie feel safe in her home again

Canberrans might love their puffer jackets, but what you don’t expect to see is someone wearing a black one in the heat of the day in November.

Stephanie Munk was working from her Warramanga home when she looked out the window to see a man walking up her driveway in just such attire. Something was off.

“Why has that dude got a black puffer jacket on in the middle of summer? That is so weird,” she says.

Initially, Ms Munk figured he was making letterbox drops and turned away from hers when he saw the “No Junk Mail” sign, but as she kept watching, he walked right past the next two houses and up the driveway of the house directly opposite hers.

“The garage door was open and he was standing inside, browsing the shelves like it were a supermarket,” she says.

“Super Steph” mode engaged, she rushed across the road to demand what he was doing. In between the incoherent mumbles, he admitted it “wasn’t his home” and started retracing his steps back down the cul-de-sac, hands suspiciously clutched beneath his jacket.

On the phone to the police by this stage, Ms Munk followed him to the end of the street only to find he had mysteriously vanished around the corner.

“I looked up and I went, ‘Where the hell is he?'”

Panicked, she raced back to her house to find the black puffer jacket abandoned in her backyard.

She’d left the house completely unlocked in her haste to save her neighbour’s garage, so you can imagine the relief that upon returning inside with her heart thumping, she noticed him from her front window, continuing down the street.

“He could have been anywhere – in my garden, my garage, even my house!”

A resident of the same house for 26 years, this was Ms Munk’s first brush with opportunistic crime, and it left her rattled.

“For quite a while there, I was not feeling safe in my own home, and that was a really weird feeling to have for the first time.”

Today, Ms Munk’s house is more like Fort Knox. There’s a camera on every corner. Crimsafe on all the doors. A padlock on the gate. Her neighbours even know her as the “street captain” for her hawkish abilities to detect suspicious behaviour.

Some of this came courtesy of SupportLink, which provides home-security assessments and referral services for victims of crime.

“I already had some good security measures, but they suggested I try some other little things like ‘Beware the dog’ signs, moving a few garden rocks to make it harder to jump the fence, and putting a padlock on my side gate and meter box.”

But Ms Munk was also one of 92 ACT recipients of a pilot program run by Neighbourhood Watch Australasia last year called ‘Target Hardening’, which offered a $550 rebate to victims of burglary.

“It’s about making homes more secure and less of an easy target for opportunistic crime,” CEO Maria Bennett says.

“It can be really simple, like removing letters from your letterbox and leaving shoes on your doorstep so the place doesn’t look empty to putting a piece of dowel behind your sliding windows and sliding doors to stop easy entry, and more expensive things like cameras, security lights and security screens.”

Toowoomba in Queensland and Gosnells in Perth were chosen alongside Canberra, all based on their crime statistics.

“Canberra does have a few little idiosyncrasies that other places don’t have, like the law that means you’re not allowed a front fence, so there were a few security measures we couldn’t promote,” Ms Bennett says.

An applicant had to be an owner-occupier, a recent victim of burglary in the last two years, and have a police incident number.

All up, Neighbourhood Watch received 623 applications across the three locations, 471 of which were deemed eligible.

“We worked with the University of Queensland to do a survey of participants and the feedback was fantastic,” she says.

Up to 60 per cent of participants said the rebate “positively influenced their decision to install security upgrades”, while 70 per cent reported “feeling safer following the installation of security measures”.

Ms Munk received the full $550 rebate to install battery-powered cameras at her front door and garage.

“So far, it’s picked up a cat and a possum, but it also helps me keep track of what the household members are doing,” she says

“I feel so much more relieved.”