Tim
Thanks for responding to my earlier comments. I think that crime and anti-social behaviour (either when it actually happens or people's fears of it) could really damage what the SydSoc is trying to achieve - after all what is the benefit of (for example) campaigning for children's play equipment in local parks if it promptly gets vandalised or people are too scared to allow their children to go there?
As you noted, this is not an easy problem to solve. But I think that there might be some sort of role for the SydSoc in terms of feeding in local people's concerns and thoughts to the right people through the right channels and providing some sort of external pressure onto the police and the council (and others where applicable) to deliver, rather than in replicating existing public sector activity on a voluntary basis. But these are only my first thoughts so I'd be interested to hear the conclusions you reach.
And of course as you say, these things do need to be put into perspective - it's not all doom and gloom out there.