TIME FOR ANSWERS
HOW WE COULD SOLVE ESCALATING JUVENILE CRIME PROBLEM:
BOOT camps and after-dark sports, reinstating breach of bail laws, CCTV and letting police chase down stolen cars have been proposed as potential fixes to the city’s spiralling youth crime.
Civic leaders from across the political spectrum agree action must be taken to reel in rampant property crime committed by Cairns youths seemingly undaunted by judicial retribution.
Everybody wants a silver bullet, but no one solution will work on its own.
WILD GOOSE CHASE
FEDERAL Leichhardt MP Warren Entsch has slammed the Queensland Government’s no-pursuit policy, saying car thieves were exploiting the fact police could not put up a chase.
“I’ve never seen so many trashed cars with police tape wrapped around them on the side of the road,” he said.
Member for Cairns Michael Healy was more circumspect. He said pursuits were permitted if officers believed a vehicle’s occupants had committed an indictable offence – murder, rape, robbery, assault or break-and-enter – or posed an imminent threat to human life.
He stressed the policy was an operational matter for the police commissioner.
“Prior to the current policy, police pursuits were associated with the deaths of 19 people and the injury of 737 people between 2000 and 2011,” he said.
“There have been no deaths officially attributed to police pursuits since 2009, compared with the period between 2006 and 2009, when there were 11 deaths.”
EYES ON CRIME
CAIRNS Regional Council wants to work with police to identify key problem areas to expand CCTV surveillance outside the city centre.
The council set aside $2.5 million for CCTV upgrades and expansion in its 2017-18 budget, and $2 million to boost general security.
That stretch into the suburbs has not yet happened.
Mayor Bob Manning said security ran a tight ship in the CBD but outlying areas needed help.
“It needs to be done in conjunction with police, so we understand where the cameras are best placed,” he said.
“There’s a place for CCTV in all of this, but it has to go back to a central control room, and you need people on the beat that can go to an area straight away.”
CHANGES AT HOME
YOUNG thieves targeted Barron River MP Craig Crawford’s street last year, forcing neighbours’ doors and taking anything within arm’s reach.
He reviewed footage from security cameras posted around his home and realised someone had watched him and his wife through a window, waiting for them to go to sleep.
“Luckily we were still awake,” he said.
Mr Crawford has changed his usual practices at home.
“We sat down and looked at what we do – simple things like locking the door when we’re in the backyard or in the pool,” he said. “That’s not to say it’s OK for people to break into your house, but it’s just a change people need to make.”
BEATING BREACHES
THE Palaszczuk government scrapped the LNP’s breach of bail laws for youth offences in 2015.
Mr Entsch wants them reinstated as a matter of urgency, alongside a scheme to force parents to pay for damage caused by their brood.
“These little grubs are hiding behind their age,” he said.
“The parents need to be held accountable and, wherever possible, be expected to pay some form of retribution.
“If it means having to sell their motor car or taking away their games or TV, so be it.”
SOCIAL SOLUTION
CAIRNS Basketball has been promised state and federal funding to relaunch Midnight Basketball for six months once upgrades to the Aumuller St facility are completed.
The organisation’s general manager Mike Scott said ongoing funding was needed to keep the youth after-dark sports program running. “It’s an expensive program to run and Cairns Basketball doesn’t have the resources to do it themselves,” he said.
PUT THE BOOT IN
THE return of boot camps is also on the agenda, at least for Mr Entsch.
He wants the State Government to look at youth worker Geoff Guest’s Petford Training Farm model, a camp teaching wayward youths outdoors skills to avoid incarceration. The farm was closed after recommendations made by the Commission of Inquiry into Abuse of Children in Queensland Institutions, but Mr Entsch claims it was because “the bureaucracy didn’t like what he was doing”.
“He gave them a little bit of firm love, but I tell you what, the kids lined up to sit in his wife Norma’s kitchen,” he said.
“Basically, he treated it like breaking in a young horse.”