Ms CARNEY - 2007-10-09
Last night, on the Channel 9 news, a resident of Wanguri said that the youths who terrorised residents on the weekend did ‘the same thing over and over again’. She also said that the area in which she lives used to be a peaceful community and a peaceful suburb. Now, she said houses are being sold. Chief Minister, you are the boss, you are also minister for Police. Every time we ask you about rising crime figures, you say, in essence, that you are working on it. Will you concede that your attempts so far have failed and do you acknowledge that the people particularly affected by what happened on the weekend do not feel safe? What are you going to do about it?
ANSWER
Madam Speaker, the disturbances, the threats, the yelling, the breaking of car windows that happened in the member for Wanguri’s electorate on Friday and Saturday nights is totally unacceptable. It has to stop. My heart goes out to those residents who had to put up with a group of about 20 young people who rampaged through their streets and suburb. We are not going to put up with it.
Over 50% of crimes committed by youth are committed by about 16% of the whole group, so you have a small group of young people who are disproportionately represented in the crime figures.
What we have to do is target those young people. Police are putting an operation together, starting immediately, to lift their effort in targeting those young people to ensure that we can stop their behaviour, stop what was obviously the terrorising, I think terrorising is not too strong a word, of the residents of Wanguri. We are very sorry that that happened, but we are going to get police with a renewed focus on targeting those young people who are disproportionately causing that kind of disturbance in our community. That operation starts immediately. As Acting Police Commissioner Bruce Wernham said this morning to the media, that strong focus will continue until the problem goes away.
There are some things that we as government have to do in conjunction with that. We have to look at the problem of repeat offenders. There has been some significant work done by the Attorney-General and his department looking at how we can strengthen the hand of the courts in dealing with repeat offenders. A lot of that work has been done and we will be talking about it publicly within the next few weeks. We have to ensure the police have the resources. They have anti-gang legislation, which is a real strength. They can use that, but we also have to ensure that those repeat offenders do not come back on to the streets, that we do have appropriate intervention.
There is no doubt that work needs to be done. We need to have police focused on this problem. It is not acceptable that young people can cause such a disturbance as they did on Friday and Saturday nights. I also appeal to our community that if there are small disturbances, report them. Police need to have this information. They need to be able to see where young people, if that is the problem, are causing problems on the street so that they can react as soon as possible. So we need a community effort on this. We need the police to be doing their important part. We need legislation, if we have to amend that to support them, but we also need the community to identify where these problems might be emerging so there can be a level of police monitoring and intervention.
A final point, an important part of this, is parents. When you are dealing with juveniles, parents must be taking more responsibility for what their children are doing overnight, so I appeal to parents in Darwin to take responsibility for your kids; do not let them out on the streets. We have to stop this problem from recurring and we will use all the resources we have to ensure that we can.
ANSWER
Madam Speaker, the disturbances, the threats, the yelling, the breaking of car windows that happened in the member for Wanguri’s electorate on Friday and Saturday nights is totally unacceptable. It has to stop. My heart goes out to those residents who had to put up with a group of about 20 young people who rampaged through their streets and suburb. We are not going to put up with it.
Over 50% of crimes committed by youth are committed by about 16% of the whole group, so you have a small group of young people who are disproportionately represented in the crime figures.
What we have to do is target those young people. Police are putting an operation together, starting immediately, to lift their effort in targeting those young people to ensure that we can stop their behaviour, stop what was obviously the terrorising, I think terrorising is not too strong a word, of the residents of Wanguri. We are very sorry that that happened, but we are going to get police with a renewed focus on targeting those young people who are disproportionately causing that kind of disturbance in our community. That operation starts immediately. As Acting Police Commissioner Bruce Wernham said this morning to the media, that strong focus will continue until the problem goes away.
There are some things that we as government have to do in conjunction with that. We have to look at the problem of repeat offenders. There has been some significant work done by the Attorney-General and his department looking at how we can strengthen the hand of the courts in dealing with repeat offenders. A lot of that work has been done and we will be talking about it publicly within the next few weeks. We have to ensure the police have the resources. They have anti-gang legislation, which is a real strength. They can use that, but we also have to ensure that those repeat offenders do not come back on to the streets, that we do have appropriate intervention.
There is no doubt that work needs to be done. We need to have police focused on this problem. It is not acceptable that young people can cause such a disturbance as they did on Friday and Saturday nights. I also appeal to our community that if there are small disturbances, report them. Police need to have this information. They need to be able to see where young people, if that is the problem, are causing problems on the street so that they can react as soon as possible. So we need a community effort on this. We need the police to be doing their important part. We need legislation, if we have to amend that to support them, but we also need the community to identify where these problems might be emerging so there can be a level of police monitoring and intervention.
A final point, an important part of this, is parents. When you are dealing with juveniles, parents must be taking more responsibility for what their children are doing overnight, so I appeal to parents in Darwin to take responsibility for your kids; do not let them out on the streets. We have to stop this problem from recurring and we will use all the resources we have to ensure that we can.
Last updated: 09 Aug 2016