NO PAIN, SAME GAME
A STABLE HOME LIFE, WITH GOOD ROLE MODELS AND MATES, IS THE ONLY WAY TO SAVE THIS GENERATION OF KIDS. BUT UNLESS THERE ARE CONSEQUENCES FOR THE CRIMES THEY ARE PERPETRATING EACH NIGHT, NOTHING WILL CHANGE
THEY say the devil finds work for idle hands and that may just be the key to cracking Townsville’s youth crime crisis. Police sources tell us crime statistics often peak around Christmas and this may coincide with young people across the city being on school holidays.
Of course that is no excuse but boredom and showing off for friends is clearly one of the key motivators for the mindless twits who think breaking into people’s homes, stealing cars and, lately ramming police cars is a fun night out.
We’ve seen a pretty serious escalation in violence and shamelessness of these young crooks as they terrorise our neighbourhoods in recent weeks.
The incident at the Frosty Mango snapped a lot of people to attention, with three Ingham residents on their way to Townsville for a medical appointment run off the road by hoons in stolen cars.
How nobody was killed is nothing but a miracle.
It makes me wonder whether it will take a fatality before something serious is done to address this problem plaguing our city.
Will we be waiting for the enactment of “Timmy’s Law” – the result of a tragic death – before police or judicial powers are changed to curb these incidents?
There is a petition circulating at the moment calling for “breach of bail” to be reinstated as an offence.
At the moment, a kid crim on bail waiting to be sentenced for a crime can skip out on their bail conditions and the police are powerless to do anything but send them home.
Reinstating breach of bail as an offence may not be the best option either, as of course it would require more jail cells, but the issue needs to be considered.
Police are certainly sick of picking up the same kids night after night without being able to impose anything in the way of consequences.
And that’s at the heart of Townsville’s crisis – consequences.
The Bulletin will this week look into arrest stats but I’m tipping they will show most of our young crims come from terrible home lives.
We’ve reported in the past that for many of these kids, youth detention is a break from their sad lives, with the idea of three square meals, a warm bed and clean clothes a welcome relief.
That’s why it’s no mystery most of us were able to make it through the Christmas holidays in our youth without bashing someone, stealing a car or hitting the streets looking for coppers to goad into a chase.
A stable home life, with good role models and mates, is the only way to save this generation of kids.
But unless there are consequences for the crimes they are perpetrating each night, nothing will change and it will in fact get a lot worse.
We’ve seen at least one case in which kids stole a car and performed burnouts outside Cleveland Youth Detention Centre because their mates were inside and they hadn’t been sent there with them.
It’s amazing to think this is the world we live in, where police are so disrespected and our justice system treated as such a joke.
For what it’s worth, I think it’s time to make the parents of these out- of- control kids accountable for their little ferals.
There is simply no good reason other than the obvious for gangs of teenagers to be roaming the streets at all hours of the night.
Our local pollies will meet with the Premier before Parliament returns to discuss Townsville’s crime crisis and it’s not too bold a claim to say this wouldn’t have happened had this newspaper not taken them to task last week.
To their credit, they’ve responded in the way the community wants them to, by acknowledging their concerns and taking them to the top.
It’s taken nearly two years but we appear to have forced the transition from “don’t talk about it” to “what crisis” to “let’s sort this out” on our crime problem and it is welcomed.
The Townsville community is crying out for a real solution to this problem and there’s no time to waste.
Residents should not accept that this is the reality of life in a city such as ours because it doesn’t have to be.