‘Tsunami of youth offenders’: AFP boss says police should work to ‘keep kids out of court’
The Australian federal police commissioner has warned of “a tsunami of youth offenders” coming through the criminal justice system and has backed calls for a serious national debate about keeping children out of jail.
Amid growing calls for governments across the nation to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 14, Reece Kershaw said he and fellow police commissioners were “always up for a conversation” about keeping young people out of the criminal justice system.
Recent figures show 499 children aged 1o to 13 were in detention in the 2019/20 financial year. Indigenous Australians were massively overrepresented, comprising two-thirds of that number.
Cheryl Axleby, a co-chair of the group Change the Record, has called for attorneys general to commit to reform, saying they were “condemning a generation of our children to a lifetime behind bars” because “10-year-old children who get trapped in the criminal justice system don’t come out”.
Kershaw, the AFP commissioner, expressed some support for the position of campaigners when he addressed the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday.
Drawing on his experience from the Northern Territory, where he previously served as police commissioner, Kershaw said officers needed to be trained to “connect with those young people”. He said police “would rather keep kids out of court and provide them that safe environment”.
“Sadly, my experience in the NT showed that it’s just a tsunami of youth offenders who are coming through the system and often it starts at home,” Kershaw said. “I am always up for a conversation as to how could we do better within the system and what sort of approaches [we should take].”
The Australian Capital Territory is the first jurisdiction in Australia to promise to raise the age of criminal responsibility.
Kershaw said police, health and other agencies needed to work more closely together to “problem solve” individual situations, but he argued there were “barriers everywhere in the system” that prevented the sharing of information.
“I have a long history in really being committed to making life better for our young ones, but it is incredibly difficult in the system that we currently have,” he said.
Kershaw also made the case for new surveillance laws that would enable the AFP and and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission to “identify and disrupt” communication networks.
The federal government’s bill – which has yet to pass the parliament – would allow the cyber spy agency, the Australian Signals Directorate, to provide specialised technical assistance to investigators.
Kershaw said the bill would help the AFP to “start delivering some offshore punches” to criminal networks and syndicates.
While the government has promoted the powers as a way to pursue alleged paedophiles and terrorists, Kershaw conceded the laws could be used to target a much broader pool of people. The threshold will be offences that carry a maximum jail term of three or more years.
“Three years is a serious offence,” he said.
Kershaw dismissed a proposal to add “public interest monitors” to the warrant process, an additional safeguard suggested by parliament’s human rights committee. He said the AFP preferred “streamlined processes”.
“If we had to go quickly on a terrorism matter or a child that needed to be rescued, we would not want to have anything in there that would slow us down,” he said. “My own experience is some of those processes, whilst they are well intended, they may end up causing more harm or risk to victims of crime.”
In other remarks, Kershaw said decriminalising drug use would “not stop organised crime” because the revenue stream from the trade would continue to fund criminal activities.
Kershaw argued Australia had “made great strides in healthier living – more exercise, drinking less, being sun smart and giving up tobacco – yet too many are ignoring the damage that illicit drugs do to our bodies and our minds”.
“Making these drugs lawful will not stop organised crime – it will likely embolden them, make them richer and enable them to buy more guns and pay for more murders.”
The commissioner noted that a kilogram of methamphetamine was bought for about $1,800 in Myanmar and sold wholesale in Australia for between $63,000 and $150,000, while a kilogram of cocaine cost about $2,300 in Colombia and was sold domestically for between $220,000 and $450,000.
The police commissioner’s address focused on organised crime and future options for combatting transnational serious organised crime in the wake of Operation Ironside.
Kershaw provided new figures showing that Operation Ironside had so far charged 289 offenders with 724 charges – the majority relating to drug crime. Police had also seized 138 firearms and weapons, including militarygrade automatic firearms and power gel explosives.
Kershaw said he could also reveal that 29 “trusted insiders” had been arrested under Operation Ironside, with at least 20 of those having previously held an aviation or maritime security identification card.
To achieve the arrests in Australia and globally, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the AFP used an encrypted messaging service to monitor the communication of organised criminals.
In the wake of Operation Ironside, a former AFP commissioner, Mick Palmer, noted global police stings were important but were unlikely to lead to significant declines in drug use.
Palmer told the Australian earlier this month: “The end result is, you’re no doubt aware, demand hasn’t gone down, price has hardly moved. Despite saying we’ve completely disrupted and corrupted the heroin market in Australia, I don’t think the signs are that we have.”
As well as law enforcement, it was important to focus on rehabilitation and harm minimisation strategies. Palmer said that if conventional, tough-on-crime approaches were not turning the tide, “why don’t we try something else that might”.
But Kershaw argued on Wednesday the illicit drug trade created a revenue stream for criminals and caused harm to people and to the environment.