Community fears for Yarrabah youth
A RECENT spike in juvenile crime at Yarrabah has community leaders concerned about the future of the town.
Yarrabah Mayor Ross Andrews said the increase was first noticed during the recent school holidays.
“We have identified in the past couple of weeks an increase in juvenile crime and the community are very worried about it,” he said.
“There have been break and enters at some of the local businesses and some of the service providers were vandalised, including the pharmacy, shopping centre, bakery and the post office centre.
“The greatest worry for many of us in the community is kids are continuing to enter and re-enter the justice system and the penalty can just be a bit of a slap on the wrist.
“We need to work with the court on how do we prevent kids from doing these things and also what is a deterrent.”
Mr Andrews said the council and various service providers often ran programs for local youth in an attempt to avoid such issues.
“We can run programs but if we can find a way of working with the kids, the courts, police and families, we can get somewhere towards minimising this,” he said.
“The service providers are doing their best with programs ... but I think some of it was down to parental responsibility as well as the families having a greater say in the responsibility of their kids.
“We can only do so much as service providers.”