Prevention the way forward

More prevention measures are needed to tackle youth crime in Invercargill, but serial offenders should be wearing ankle bracelets so they can always be monitored, a co-organiser of a public meeting on youth crime believes.

About 140 people attended the meeting in the city on Saturday night, with many victims expressing their frustrations and telling their stories.

The meeting’s participants also discussed youth development opportunities, proactive measures being taken in the community that could be built on, and the need for more resourcing to support youth.

Invercargill mayor Nobby Clark and councillor Barry Stewart called the meeting, saying the city had experienced an inappropriate level of youth crime, including property crime, stolen vehicles and assaults.

Yesterday, Stewart said people spoke about being victims of youth crime and retailers spoke about how youths brazenly walked out of their stores with stolen goods.

The council was spending $2.2 million on crime prevention cameras in the city which should be installed by December, and they had number plate recognition which may help catch young car thieves, he said.

Speakers at the meeting had talked about programmes already in place to help prevent youth crime, including the Man Up programme and XO Church programme.

“The more of those sorts of programmes we get going the better,” Stewart said.

A lot of the young offenders had no father figure in their homes, and a small percentage of youths did most of the crime in the city. Stewart said he believed these “hardened criminals” should be forced to wear ankle bracelets at all times, so police always knew where they were.

Speaking yesterday, Labour MP Ingrid Leary, who also attended the meeting, disagreed.

“If putting ankle bracelets on young offenders worked it would have been introduced a long time ago. There’s no evidence that works.”

Leary, the MP for Taieri who has been acting as a buddy-MP for Invercargill since MP Liz Craig’s defeat last election, said youth offenders often came from violent homes, so she believed more resources needed to go into resolving family violence issues.

And cost of living solutions were needed, as it was difficult for parents to be present with their children when working multiple jobs to make ends meet, she said.

There was disagreement at the meeting on what the consequences should be for the youth offenders, but a consensus that prevention measures were the way forward.

“There was a lot of discussion about needing resources for prevention, particularly in south Invercargill ... where some of the needs are highest.”

Paige Devlin, a 23-year-old Invercargill woman who worked in social services, was also at the meeting.

Yesterday, she said many youth criminals were in poverty and in “survival mode”, so committed crime; their brains weren’t fully developed and they had histories of trauma.

More resourcing was needed to support them, she believed.

Stewart said he was hoping for a follow-up meeting.