GROUNDHOG DAY ON STRIP

IT must feel like groundhog day to South Eastern Police Regional Crime Coordinator Brendan Smith.

The veteran detective superintendent cast a quietly seething figure in the small hours of Thursday morning at the Surfers Paradise police headquarters.

It was just hours after his staff had descended on the scene of the latest Surfers Paradise stabbing fatality, the entertainment and tourism precinct’s third in under a year.

He remarked that but for a centimetre here or a millimetre there in other knife crime incidents across the Gold Coast in which the targets had not died it could easily be a much higher number.

Whilst the circumstances of the latest incident – which has claimed the life of a young father, 27-year-old Raymond Harris, will no doubt emerge in the fullness of time, a real conundrum exists around how to arrest an increase in knife crime in the city.

Knife crime numbers are up based on the statistics and as Det. Supt Smith pointed out in frustration, the consequences in some cases are severe.

He is open to ideas. Since the stabbing death of young Gold Coaster Jack Beasley outside an IGA on Surfers Paradise Boulevard in front of shocked diners in December, police have stepped up ‘magic wanding’ in the precinct to try and detect knives and trouble before it rears up.

The parents of Jack Beasley are on a mission to honour his memory by imploring and educating young people about the dangers and harrowing consequences of knife crime, which they painfully know too well.

Det. Supt. Smith suggests influencers and young peers of those most likely to carry out knife crime – more than 50 per cent of it is people aged under 25 — need to be increasingly deployed to sheet home the messaging. He notes youth don’t tend to listen to old people. Something must be done as lives continue to be lost.