a day ago
Rising youth crime allowed to fester on Labor's watch
'We cannot arrest our way out of this. It's that simple … The whole arrest, charge, bail, remand, court system, justice system, youth detention, can't be just the answer.'
When Victoria Police's Sergeant Tem Hawkes said these words to The Age two years ago, rising youth crime was already a long-standing problem. As we reported in our youth crime investigation in 2023, adolescents and early teenagers (aged 10-14) were the fastest-growing cohort of youth offenders involved in violent crime.
At Werribee Police Station, Hawkes and his fellow officers were part of the Embedded Youth Outreach Program (EYOP), in which youth workers accompanied police on patrols to try to give young people a pathway out of crime.
The program was not born out of woolly idealism but out of a hard-headed assessment by all involved that traditional law-and-order responses weren't working, and could in fact be making things worse. Its interventions with young people reduced their reoffending, even as rates of offending beyond the program continued to rise, according to a Swinburne University evaluation that forecast 1000 fewer offences on an annual basis as a result.
This week's news that youth crime is reaching record levels comes against a very different backdrop. The state government, struggling with budgetary woes in other areas, has cut back funding to EYOP and the Youth Support and Advocacy Service, which provides the program with social workers, and returned to pouring money into prisons.
All the while there is real community concern about rising crime rates, especially youth crime, with neighbourhoods increasingly turning to private security and home-surveillance devices.
From Labor promising to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14 – a first step to dealing with the youngest offenders outside the setting of jail, which is proven to turn many of them into adult criminals – we now have Attorney-General Sonya Kilkenny measuring success by the doubling of young people on remand since last year.
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From its reversal on changing the age of criminal responsibility to the about-face on bail laws to the recent hop, skip and jump to a machete ban after the Northland shopping centre brawl, the Allan government gives the impression of making up its responses on the run, after scanning the headlines and considering only the political optics.
