Many plaudits are attributed to the crime solution proposed by the new bail laws. Herald Sun 20th March 2025.
Although the changes are welcome and will have a positive impact, they are highly unlikely to be the ‘silver bullet’ hoped for. Short-term reprieve for victims is welcome, but long-term gains will still be challenging.
The Bail law changes are akin to taking to a massive pile of ‘record crime’ with a teaspoon rather than a decent frontend loader. The pile will grow quicker than the solutions applied.
What is misleading is the role of Bail or Remand; they are ostensibly mechanisms to ensure a person charged with a crime appears in court to answer the charges.
What was lacking was the consideration of community safety. It was a disappointing omission, but how the judiciary interprets these changes will be interesting to watch.
That a perpetrator has a propensity to continue offending after being granted bail makes the continuation of bail unacceptable. Therefore, the perpetrator must be remanded in custody, no ifs, buts or excuses.
Being held in custody preceding a court appearance to answer the charges is not a punishment for a crime; punishment is the judiciary’s role when the case is determined.
The problem we are facing, which needs urgent remedial attention, is the length of time juveniles, or, for that matter, anybody is held in custody without being convicted of the charges they face.
There is no doubt that for very serious capital crimes, the period in detention would vary dramatically for a juvenile charged with lesser offences.
The solution to this problem lies with the courts, which seem very inefficient. They spend most of their time remanding or considering applications for bail and procedural matters rather than getting on with hearing cases.
By the time a juvenile gets to have their case heard; the time on remand is predominantly deducted as part of the penalty, meaning that after the finding of guilt, there is generally little in the way of punishment that the judiciary applies.
This again sends the wrong message to the youths; they can claim they didn’t get a penalty for their indiscretion, and it then gives them bragging rights.
This issue must be resolved before we achieve meaningful inroads into reining in juvenile crime. And that is before long-term strategies that address anti-social behaviour before it develops.
Changes the CAA propose will further strengthen the process and reduce even further the likelihood of an innocent youth being incarcerated for a lengthy period and negate the much-argued proposition that putting juveniles in jail will make them worse.
Any harm done will be minimised if the remand periods are much shorter, providing less opportunity for youths to learn from other detainees. Careful management of these facilities will further reduce adverse impacts on those on remand.
Remand periods must be reduced to days or weeks, not months; whatever needs to be done to achieve this must be done immediately – no excuses.
The CAA has a strong record of accurately predicting future developments, like the current youth crime tsunami, years before it blossomed to its current levels. However, the impending disaster brewing causes the CAA members to lose sleep.
Daily, in all media, there is an indisputable increase in people, professionals, and concerned citizens, from parents to shopkeepers, speaking out like never before about the criminal behaviour of our youth and the visceral behaviour of young people.
One of the most plausible reasons for this negative growth of criminal and anti-social behaviour amongst youth was identified by Psychologist Maria Ruberto, reported in the Herald Sun on 23rd of March 2023.
Roberto identifies a failure in resilience at the core of many issues facing young people. The inability to make rational or informed decisions or any decision at all, including saying no, provides the environment for young people to be swept up in anti-social and criminal behaviours, which groups predominantly undertake.
As she points out, the parents have a lot to answer for in over-protecting young people, avoiding the necessity for them to develop reliance.
However, it is not just the parents to blame because much of this lack of resilience has been planted in their parents by the mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, where the government took away the ability of all citizens to make their own decisions.
Rather than being informers, providing guidance and combating resources, the Government made decisions for everybody and enforced them with the Police.
The real impact of this incompetent management of the Pandemic is only starting to be felt; there is more to come, a lot more.
Identifying the issue is only the start; dealing with it is the real challenge.
Unfortunately, it seems that those with influence see only one solution, as detailed recently by the Youth Commissioner,
“Instead of sweeping laws to toughen bail tests, we want to see investment in assessments, interventions and supports that will tackle the drivers of each child’s offending and effectively support rehabilitation.”
The Commissioner is not alone; she has supporters of this hollow mantra, predominantly academics by profession and performance, claiming that her approach is the way to solve the problem.
The problems with this approach are that there are never any practical programs to deliver, an approach that has failed us for two decades and that the words never contain purpose, direction or action. This approach is an academic fantasy wish list that nobody will ever implement because the proponents are not actually or morally accountable, and there is no evidence that this approach will even work.
Pontification of itself is never a solution.
At best, we can, with care, devise strategies that will slowly change the prevailing youth behavioural demise. We cannot wait longer; the longer we wait, the more entrenched this behaviour becomes.
The CAA is exploring the establishment of a Youth Justice Advisory Panel consisting of pragmatic solution-orientated community leaders who together can design a plan to address the problem. Developing solutions that are pragmatic, effective and affordable to implement.
Holistically approaching the issue and providing consistency in the delivery of a program across a swathe of youth ages will be the key; the message must be consistent from preschool to secondary and beyond, with community initiatives developed to help guide children to adulthood.
The real challenge will be in developing new and innovative ways to deliver the required services and harvesting the positive aspects of all the current players in this space.
Parallel to this approach, strategies must be developed to equip parents to understand better their child’s development needs and coping strategies to assist them.
As important as a focus should be on children, the focus must be equally shared with parents and those in our community charged with interacting with children, whether in law enforcement, education or social development.
The proposed Panel could provide input to the Government, which is ultimately responsible for this issue and must act irrespective of ideological views; we cannot afford the luxury of those views hindering outcomes of value.
We envisage the Panel not being numerically large, quality rather than quantity, and representatives with a high profile from a broad cross-section of the community.
Established and operated by people who care.
The CAA would like anyone interested in participating as a Panel member to lodge their details and a summary of their credentials at ceo@caainc.org.au.
As predictable as night follows day, all the pundits have raised their heads in condemning locking serious juvenile offenders up on remand to ensure they face court for their alleged crimes while preventing the commission of further crimes.
Be under no illusion the chances of a 10-year-old being held on remand is next to zero, as is any child. A child will have to do more than commit just one offence before the new bail laws take effect, remembering that the vast majority of young people coming before a court have already received multiple formal cautions by Police under the police diversion strategy before Police charge them and take them to court for repeated offences.
Although they may have committed more than one offence and received multiple cautions, they come before the Court as a first offender, and the cautions are not used against them.
A proper reform would be for the Police Cautions to be included in the matters put before the judiciary when deciding penalties or applications for bail – the judiciary should be fully informed.
It is not the locking up that is the problem per se; it is what is done in the management of juveniles in detention, and that needs a considerable shakeup or perhaps the complete removal of current practices on the basis they have and will continue to fail.
It is often said that to lock up a child will make them worse, but worse than what?
If they come out of detention worse, there is only one culprit: poor management of the child while detained.
The pundits reported on in The Age, March 16, are the Australian Medical Association, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, the Australian Human Rights Commissioner, Victoria‘s Principal Commissioner for Children and Young People, Liana Buchanan, and the Commissioner for Aboriginal Children and Young People, Meena Sing. If they round out the people the government relies on for advice, it is no wonder we are in despair with the youths.
There would be grave doubt that any of these people had ever dealt with recidivists, so their opinion is purely academic and void of pragmatism because they don’t know.
However, the real standout was Victoria‘s Principal Commissioner for Children and Young People, Liana Buchanan, and Commissioner for Aboriginal Children and Young People, Meena Sing, who were motivated to issue a joint statement.
“We understand that Victorians want to feel safe and that particular cases profiled in the media have impacted that sense of safety,” they said. “However, we are concerned the bail reforms proposed by the Victorian government will radically increase the number of children remanded in custody and will not make the community safer.
This may also indicate where the problems are for young people.
These two allegedly esteemed bureaucrats took the tried and tested method of deflecting responsibility by blaming the media,
‘…the particular cases profiled in the media have impacted that sense of safety’, they said, referring to the community angst.
Sorry, but it is not the media causing the mayhem; it is those children supposedly represented but government agencies who cause the lack of safety in the community.
The alternate view of these laws reeks of defending failed functions.
Followed by
“Instead of sweeping laws to toughen bail tests, we want to see investment in assessments, interventions and supports that will tackle the drivers of each child’s offending and effectively support rehabilitation.”
Sadly, those quoted and like thinkers have followed this path for a decade or more, and where that has got us? Because of this fanciful failed approach, hundreds, if not thousands, of children, have lives ruined and the lives of many other citizens because pragmatic and effective strategies have not been employed.
There is an urgent need to improve the standard of care while children are in detention to make the experience of value to them so that they may see the error of their ways. That does not mean enjoyable.
The discipline they need to make their way in society must be foremost in their learning.
Above all else, understand the Bail Laws are not talking about a sentence where the child must stand to account for their misdeeds, but Remand, is a process to ensure they attend Court for their hearing and lose the right to bail because of their continued offending creating the need to protect the community.
It was also reported that for
“Jacinta Allan, Police Minister Anthony Carbines, Attorney-General Sonya Kilkenny, Department of Justice Secretary Kate Houghton and a dozen or so ministerial and departmental advisers, it was a long weekend of a very different kind.
All day Saturday, Sunday, Labour Day Monday and right up until midday on Tuesday when Cabinet was due to meet to consider proposed changes to Victoria’s bail laws, this working group was sweating over the final shape and details of the reforms”.
The Ministers could have saved the sweat by getting a new lot of advisers, as this current lot were not helpful.
It was also reported that,
“A current Senate inquiry into youth justice cites Victoria as an exemplar jurisdiction because it incarcerates children at a lower rate than any other state in Australia. The inquiry heard evidence that on any given night, there were on average 88 children in detention in Victoria, compared to 240 in NSW and 317 in Queensland”. – The Age
This is the problem exposed. Not only is it a fallacy to assume that there is less of a crime problem in Victoria, we know there is not; however, a more useful statistic would be the number of children on remand and their recidivism rate after their legal matters are resolved.
It would be helpful to know how effectively we manage these youths and provide the opportunity to improve the process dramatically. The current regimes are failing, encouraging the judiciary not to use the process, an easy out.
This is either plain old, everyday incompetent groupthink, or worse, telling the government what they think they want to hear.
Either way, if this is the quality of the advice the government relies on, then no wonder where we are where we are with Youth Crime.
Each of these people or organisations identified should hang their collective heads in shame for getting our miscreant youth where they are.
Unfortunately, until some accountability for performance is introduced to this process, nothing will change – contributors and decision-makers are never responsible for the outcomes they promulgate.
The CAA applauds the belated ban on edged weapons (Machetes) and, like every other Victorian, demands that the ban be immediate.
There is no plausible excuse for a delay.
That a ban was not in place a long time ago beggars’ belief; however, the belated action that will take nine months before coming into effect is absolutely ridiculous; just what are the government planners thinking?
Haven’t they worked it out? It is not the weapon that is the problem. It is the idiot holding onto it.
If they seriously think that the perpetrators who use these weapons are going to show good community responsibility and put their prized weapons and symbols of power into a bin, the government planners are delusional.
For goodness’ sake, these weapons are status symbols that will disappear under their bed, not in a government bin.
And they will be replaced by Mum’s stainless-steel carver.
The Government needs to realise that banning the products altogether will only develop black market trading in the items, playing into the current black market (organised crime) marketing strategy – identify what the market wants, and if it is illegal, go for it.
This strategy works for the crooks, creating unintended consequences, as happened with tobacco. The weapons will probably be sold under the counter from the same shops.
The solution is banning the carrying of edged weapons of every description and giving the Police additional powers to search and seize, supported by mandated penalties to force the anthropomorphic magistracy, where coincidently many of our society ills are created because of their ineptitude, to undertake their role to keep us safe.
It’s not the weapon but the environment where it is located.
Mum’s stainless-steel carver could be the weapon a person is charged with possessing.
At 2.00 am, with a group of mates, the carver is as lethal as a machete and attracts the same status.
If care is not taken, the kitchen arsenal will replace the machete, and we will be no better off. The blades may be shorter, but the victim is just as dead.
It is not anti-social to own an edged weapon, but as soon as it is carried in a public place, the rules change; it’s not the weapon; it is the intended use, intimidation, attack or defence that is the issue.
When the planners grasp that concept, then they might come up with an effective solution like reviewing current legislation and, where necessary, tweaking it to provide the Police with the capacity to properly address the issue rather than being hamstrung by nice restrictive policies sponsored by the socialist elite.
Starting to think of the Police operational necessities (where the rubber hits the road) may go a long way to solving this issue.
Viewing this matter through a political prism will be the downfall of any efforts to curb unnecessary deaths and intimidation.
The vastly belated announcement by Victoria’s Labor Government of strengthened bail laws is welcomed. The Community Advocacy Alliance Inc. (CAA) warned ten years ago that Victoria would face a juvenile crime tsunami. We were ignored. Consequently, the number of victims of crime, and particularly of crimes of violence by juveniles has reached totally unacceptable levels.
The changes to bail laws and reintroduction of offences for criminal acts committed while on bail is a necessary move.
These steps are a government reaction to community pressure.
However, the real solution to juvenile crime can only come from the immediate introduction of proactive measures.
Every school must be required to immediately introduce a code of conduct for students. The standards of behaviour required must be clearly articulated and enforced.
A primary function of the school curriculum must be teaching the basics of good citizenship.
The CAA can provide the structure of a program, based on ten themes, which would make a real and lasting difference to the future behaviour of most students. This program should be delivered by police in schools. This format was very successful in Victoria from 1989 to 2006 as evidenced by a study by Monash University released in 2004.
We call on the Government to immediately take the next essential proactive step and reintroduce the Police in Schools Program. The CAA is willing to assist.
Victoria’s newly minted Opposition leader has wasted no time wading into the youth debate. His enthusiasm is palpable and very welcome, and clearly, he is a conviction politician who, in a leadership role, augers well for Victoria’s future.
His vision for improving the management of youthful offenders has a lot going for it, but he has missed a couple of keys that have got us to where we are today and must be addressed first.
The reality of the current situation in juvenile management is that we have seen the failure of overly punitive approaches of years past as we have seen the obverse where the perpetrators avoid accountability; both options are failures, so we need to look at why.
A significant factor is the inability of the ‘judiciary’ and ‘the system’ to recognise that they are dealing with children who have a totally different ethos from the youth justice system leaders and policymakers.
A key factor in the make-up of the youth psyche is the ‘here and now’ syndrome, where they live in the moment and do not overthink further than what they are engaged in. That only comes with maturity.
What this does is wind the clock, to time differently to adults. What may be a relatively short time for an adult can be an eternity for a child. To see how this works, offer a child a meal at McDonald’s in about 15 minutes. You can then observe their reaction as their time ticks by, as opposed to yours.
This time phenomenon must be used in the Judicial management of Juvenile perpetrators.
The other critical issue is accountability. Young people must be taught that any action that is not acceptable must have consequences if they breach community norms. Whether criminal or otherwise, if their behaviour is not corrected, then escalation is inevitable.
Most responsible parents will correct children’s behaviour from a very young age. Whether it is the parent’s fear of averting the child from danger or simply convenience, the parental approach must always include a consequence. Parents quickly learn that without a consequence, whatever that may be, the child’s behaviour will not alter.
The alternative ‘rational’ approach of some parents is where they think their young child will respond and understand a lecture on behaviour. Lecturing 3-4-year-olds in the centre of a Supermarket aisle is a classic that shows the parent’s ignorance and explains the child’s misbehaviour. Expecting a young child to rationalise like an adult is a major mistake.
The CAA agrees with the concept of diversion for young people but insists that there must be a backup plan to ensure the ‘consequences’ are applied to gain compliance. It is up to the child whether they are prepared to comply.
In Mr Battin’s approach, we are concerned about an eagerness to look overseas to seek a remedy. That will only provide an excuse for all and sundry within the Government to exploit the junkets rather than deal with the issue by applying lateral thinking.
The overseas experiences can be researched online without incurring the cost of being spent on a ‘solution finding tour’. Moreover, the experiences overseas were homegrown, which should also be our solution. The tendency to look elsewhere ignores the issue of cultural variations and, therefore, is unlikely capable of just being lifted and applied here and expecting a positive outcome.
The secret to success is to provide a plan that is simple, straightforward, and easy to implement in a cost-effective way that can be easily measured and easily modified to make inevitable necessary improvements measured against the pre-determined matrixes.
Using current government resources to avoid additional costs, the CAA proposal must be seriously considered.
Police Deputy Commissioner Neil Paterson has conceded that the Police are frustrated by the leniency of the Victorian Bail Laws at a Stonington Police forum, as reported in the Herald Sun on the 7th of February 2025.
The Commissioner said that Victoria Police was advocating for change in the Court System.
It was reported that in a shocking admission by Deputy Paterson, “the force had never arrested more people for serious crimes than we have in at last 12 months.”
Nice of the Deputy to instil more fear into the community.
This admission, of course, did little to allay the community’s fears, but what is most alarming, according to the report, is that the only strategy presented to the community was the standard police line given to every such challenge of their performance.
“The policing panel announced increased foot and bicycle patrols to monitor areas including Chapel St in addition to existing initiatives to tackle crime.”
It takes a bit more than monitoring a crime hotspot, and the Zero Tolerance with the Broken Window Police strategy applied to these areas would be the most effective response.
Although a relatively short-term strategy, usually 6 months or so, the other areas of policing not reported as being discussed are proactive initiatives. The monitoring patrols, although proactive, are very limited without a broader application of proactive strategies that have a longer-term impact.
There is a major flaw in this announcement, as we have several CAA members facing similar concerns in their community and have been given the same hollow assurances. Patrols for a very limited period who do nothing more than monitor activity without enforcement, which is a ludicrous approach the community is heartily sick of.
Within a short time of these inevitably hollow assurances, the patrols diminish, while the problems persist, the police disappear completely, leaving the residents with no discernible difference in their ‘air of menace’, as one resident described the situation.
It is incredibly disappointing that the police command cannot come up with any new approaches and blaming the Courts and Bail Laws while admitting there are multiple parts to the Justice system and trying to shift all the blame on to the Justice system is disingenuous when police are clearly failing in their primary function. Preventing Crime.
If we are accused of banging on about the role of Police and schools, we plead guilty as charged.
The reason is two irrefutable facts.
Firstly, all, and we mean every one of the juvenile miscreants who are terrorising our community, go through the education/schools system.
Non-attendance is the first indicator of those children who need special attention.
So it is without apology that we push for that being the place to start, ground zero of criminality, and the Police must play a critical role in this.
After much criticism of VicPol by us and others of the lack of a Police in Schools Program (PSIP), a quasi-Police Schools program was introduced. This role was added to the commitments of police, who were already overloaded. And it is the next best thing to useless in this fight. It is unfair to the members and has extremely low effectiveness in the crime fight.
The reason this pretend program won’t work is that by its nature, it is spasmodic, and children only respond to regular commitments and will only develop meaningful relationships with the Police member as a person if the relationship is stable. It is precisely the same as teaching children about mathematics learning by rote and consistency. It is also the same dynamic that builds effective families- consistency.
It should also be accepted that a contributing factor in the attrition rate of Police is the lack of proactive work being undertaken. The Police members see the impact of juvenile crime and the lack of diversion available to them to steer young people away from crime, leading to their frustration with the policing role’s effectiveness.
There can be no better example of frustration leading to the loss of a very competent Police officer than the Opposition leader, Brad Battin, who was heavily involved in Operation New Start, a police volunteer organisation partnered by teachers and Service Club Members who worked together to ensure young people got to and stayed at school.
VicPol allegedly cancelled the program on the basis that it was too labour-intensive. That the program worked very well was not a consideration. The program was scuttled. Brad had had enough and resigned from the Force.
Now mature adults who went through the original Police In Schools Program can still and often do quote the name of the Police member who helped guide them many years ago, which is an accurate measure of the effectiveness of that program.
Being at the school on the same day at the same time to deliver a structured curriculum is the key, and anything less is of seriously questionable effectiveness and rates in the category of spin, something to distract critics.
The Government, Police or even, to a lesser extent, the schools tend to overlook the inescapable reality that amid those students walking through the door for their first day of school are the future juvenile offenders who will end up wreaking havoc in our community.
The community is getting sick and tired of bureaucratic buck-passing and inaction as those responsible seemingly take no action to stem the tide.
We cannot point to one initiative the government has introduced that stems this problem.
On the contrary, the government has introduced initiatives that feed into the juvenile cohort and are irresponsible.
The raising of the age of criminal responsibility allows those children who start their life of crime at a young age to escape any sanction to modify their behaviour until they are sometimes three to four years older. By then, they are well entrenched in the criminal sphere – too late to berate or lecture because it won’t work.
Softening Bail and custodial sentences to the point of abolishing them also feeds into the rise of juvenile crime, as there are no consequences for their behaviour. Moreover, criminal enterprises, whether local or large ones, can entice young people to commit crimes on the basis that nothing will happen if they are caught.
The second irrefutable fact is the solutions are in front of them.
Having programs to ensure school attendance and building relationships between the children and the Police as the symbol of authority in the classroom and socially at Blue Light Disco’s will work.
The highly successful Police In Schools program, Operation New Start, a program that got kids to school, and Blue Light are three initiatives that need to be urgently reintroduced to arrest the rot, devastating the future of too many of our children.
It is sad that Blue Light, which started in Victoria, is thriving in every other state and territory, with many Blue Lights operating in other countries but very few operating in Victoria.
These programs fed off each other and were highly successful when they were introduced.
The Force continues to promote the notion that they are understaffed, and to a degree, this may be true. However, staffing is all about priorities and stopping crime before it happens must be rated as the primary use of resources.
Any run-of-the-mill manager can achieve more productivity with more or unlimited staff; whether they are effective is moot; it takes a leader to prioritise the way out of the imbroglio of juvenile crime.
Crowing about arrests, as is often the case, as the police executive bustle to promote their performance; sadly, catching crooks is a higher priority than stopping crime in the first place. Task Forces are prolific, but not one is dedicated to stopping crime before it happens. They are all reactive, responding to demands that have occurred.
The frontline Police know what must be done; only the Executive seem to have their heads in the sand, hoping the problem will go away instead of making the hard decisions to change the course of criminality and Force priorities.
VicPol may even slow the exodus of police from their careers if members realise that they can become involved in meaningful programs that make a difference. Simply taking the miscreants to court to be continually bailed and then at court hearing all the excuses as to why the perpetrator should not be locked up to protect the offender from themselves and the broader community is extremely frustrating for police who know that there are better ways.
Often, understated is the financial impact on all victims as they open their annual insurance bills to see substantial increases and no matter how those increases are subject to spin, the reality is that insurance companies do not lose money as they adjust their premiums to the claims. With out-of-control crime, those premiums are skyrocketing.
Crime prevention is just as, or even more critical than, arresting criminals; just ask the victims.
A headline in the Herald Sun on the 21st of January 2024 stated that reported crime at schools is at a 10-year high, with classroom crimes hitting 120 times a week.
While a percentage of offences have been after hours, with schools needing to suspend 90 students daily, a real problem of discipline is exposed.
Further, if anybody does not see the correlation between crime in our schools and the upsurge in juvenile crime, more generally, they have their head in the sand.
These problems can’t be reasonably palmed off as crimes by others outside school hours; there is an inescapable nexus between the school environment and after-hours crime, for the most part.
Nothing in the statistics would indicate that the students are not responsible for much of the after-hours of crime.
Schools should be a place of learning, and learning to be a criminal is not one of the skills we would embrace.
It was reported that schools can exercise discretion as to whether to report an incident to the police, and this is part of the problem leading to inconsistencies in crime responses.
Police are the only ones with the legislative power of discretion, and when a crime comes to the notice of a school, it must be reported to the police; if not a legal obligation, the school has a moral one to the whole school and general community, to which it is responsible. Protecting a student from an investigation is not the school’s role, as the investigation is how the truth will be determined; schools are not equipped to perform this function.
That this problem has reached this stage indicates that Victoria Police have had their priorities wrong and have had them wrong for nearly 15 years.
Interestingly, the CAA was established 10 years ago this year to address the issue of the Police’s failure to manage youth crime adequately.
Central to the management of youth crime is the reintroduction of the Police in Schools Program (PSIP)
The current schools program Victoria Police currently operates, is a shadow of the real program and probably no more effective than no program. You can’t expect positive results from a spasmodic ‘half-hearted’ approach. The ‘when we have time to do it’ approach will not work.
The CAA tried to establish a Police Veterans in Schools Program, and despite the best adverse efforts by the then Chief Commissioner Ashton to stymie the program, it was thwarted in the end by COVID-19. The first Police Veteran to enter a school under this program coincided with the introduction of COVID restrictions.
We recruited the first 12 schools we approached, and recruited a number of Police veterans to service them following the PSIP curriculum model.
Unfortunately, we are not well enough resourced to try it again. Still, there is no reason that VicPol could not recruit retired members to fulfil the Police in Schools Officer role, reducing the impact on other operational needs.
The argument proffered is that VicPol’s resources cannot support such a program. Still, Policing is about priorities, and when the Force has a reactive corporate mindset, proactive work to prevent crime pays the priority price.
Ironically, the Chief Commissioners in recent history who have achieved outstanding results each had the balance between proactive and reactive about right, and crime was managed. We also had a much safer State and a Police Force that was highly respected and engaged.
These shocking statistics are the responsibility of the current Chief Commissioner and the Police Executive, nobody else, and it is within their remit to resolve the matters.
The place to start is the schools. Don’t blame the parents, the legislators, or the courts, although they play a part in it. The blame is sheeted directly to the Force management. Excuses are a sign of inept managers. It is no doubt they will argue they haven’t got the resources, but they haven’t got the resources not to do it either.
We understand there is currently an internal management review in place, which would provide the opportunity for a good look at the Force’s priorities and effective management of resources.
This review must go beyond just ‘shuffling the deck chairs’ to make it look like the Force is doing something, but experience tells us unless the review addresses all the causes, nothing much will change.
One area that needs serious re-evaluation and de-prioritising is the task force groups; historically, they have been the easy go-to tool of police management, but the impact on the ability of the Force to provide adequate policing overall is adversely impacted and rarely a consideration, generally leading to more crime than the Task Forces are set to address.
There will always be a need for some Task Forces, but their establishment must be carefully managed as once established, it is very hard to invoke a sunset clause to their operation as the participants quickly gain a comfort factor in the privilege of working on a Task Force, being able to ditch their uniform in favour of a US Special Forces style dress up, generally avoiding shift work and gaining their rest days predominately on weekends, a cherished part of work-life balance not shared by Police working on stations, the real front line.
These task forces aggravate the operations of VicPol because the best and brightest, hardest workers are usually selected for these roles seen as prestigious, leaving stations void of experienced police.
It is too easy a solution to any crime outbreak to establish a task force or a targeted group by any other name. These groups are often given other titles to avoid the perception of the incorrect weighting of this type of policing.
As an example of the types of inefficiencies, a drug dealer moved into our local area and openly traded his wares predominantly on a Thursday. Lines of cars would enter the street with a line of people all carrying similar $2 candy-stripped carrier bags, obviously containing ill-gotten gains to trade for drugs.
The community reported the matter with an offer of an observation post in the house directly opposite, which was readily accepted by the Police.
This criminal activity was blatant to the degree that the transactions could be seen clearly from the observation point.
The community expected the matter to be resolved within a couple of weeks, maybe, but the activity continued for over three months, with the Police observing and the crook expanding his business to a nearby rented factory, so prolific was the activity.
A properly planned and orchestrated police operation could have netted numerous thieves and drug users on many occasions, including the primary offender, and the result would have been no less effective than dragging it out for over three months; after all, the penalty is the prerogative of the courts and all this extra work, we would argue, would not add to the severity of the sentence once the primary perpetrator was eventually arrested. However, the delay would adversely contribute to the crime statistics.
One thing is for sure: the responsible citizen who tolerated the disruption to their family by Police sitting in their front room for months on end, 24/7 will not offer that privilege to the Police again. Particularly, when technology could have achieved better quality evidence.
Alienating the citizens who hitherto supported police is not good policing by any measure.
A pragmatic measurement of this operation would demonstrate that when all matters are taken into consideration, it was inefficient and poorly managed.
The question, therefore, arises of how many other similar operations are inefficient and should have their resources redirected to proactive prevention measures and the operational front line.
A new Magistrate appointment dedicated to dealing with repeat juvenile offenders has been announced, Herald Sun 20th of January 2025.
Does this mean the Government has lost confidence in the magistracy of this State to deal with repeat offenders, or is it nothing more than a ploy to give the appearance of doing something? Given that they haven’t addressed a primary cause, the failure of legislation, this is probably only a political spin.
As they say, the proof will be in the pudding, but we are not confident that anything will change.
When reviewing this Government approach to juvenile crime, to suggest it is ‘lacklustre’ is an understatement.
More than half the Children’s Courts across the State have been closed, and weak bail laws allow juveniles to ‘give the thumb’ to authority.
A whole cohort of juvenile offenders has been excluded from the Justice system by raising the age of criminal accountability; therefore, the younger cohort offends with impunity and avoids accountability, so no intervention can occur to steer them away from joining the ranks of the repeat offenders.
The youth crime surging to a 14-year high is only the beginning, not the end; we have more pain to come. And that is the pain suffered by the victims whilst the judiciary is immune.
If the government has not lost faith in the Magistrates of this State as this appointment indicates, the public certainly has. Young thugs, by their actions, treat the Courts, at best, as an inconvenience or, more likely, a joke.
Continually, we read how young thugs are bailed for various very serious crimes that are committed while they are on bail for equally serious charges.
It is not uncommon for thugs who have been bailed on multiple occasions, sometimes 30-50 times, to be granted bail again. And that is ridiculous and unconscionable. This is aggravated by the rising age of criminality, where there is no intervention to redirect the younger juveniles but instead teaches them there are no consequences for their criminal actions.
The Government is blind or ignoring the causes; where do they think the quantitative surge in juveniles is fed from? It is the 8-12 year olds providing the impetus.
Figures previously released to the Herald Sun revealed more than 100 kids aged between 10 and 17 years old were involved in at least 30 crimes each in 2024.
That number has tripled over the last five years.
There were just 34 youths offending at a minimum of 30 crimes a year in 2019.
The 103 repeat offenders recorded last year carried out at least 3090 crimes in 2024 alone, an average of eight offences per day.- Herald Sun.
The actual number of offences committed is doubtless very much higher.
The major problem is either the structure of legislation currently in vogue or the judiciary have steered away from convention and have embarked on ideological fantasy escapade, or both, which is our pick.
It was not so long ago; Police were reporting that 30 or so prime thugs were committing the majority of the crimes. That has now not only been debunked, but the number has tripled to 103.
How the appointment of one Magistrate will rectify the anomalies of a broken judicial process is beyond comprehension.
An outstanding omission in the Government’s response was the limited reference to Victims by the Youth Justice Minister quoted as saying,
“We know there is a group of repeat offenders driving the rise in serious crimes – that’s why we’re taking action to hold them to account while offering support to help young people turn their lives around.”
Youth Justice Minister Enver Erdogan said: “This is another important step in delivering a justice system that protects the community and rehabilitates young people”.
“We want to help victims get closure by holding young people to account and helping those heading down a wrong path realise the effects of their actions.”
Minister, if you want to help victims, helping them get closure genuinely is arrant nonsense. How about first stopping the crime and the impact on victims? How about re-introducing some of the past programs, not just paying lip service to the past programs but genuinely embracing them? Why do you want to turn lives around rather than stop them from offending in the first place, which would be the sensible approach?
The key is directing young people away from crime before, not after the fact. It is called prevention.
We are seeing disturbing reports of student misbehaviour in schools, and yet the proven Police in Schools Program, Operation New Start and Blue Light, has not been embraced to deal with this; instead, a facsimile to look like the original police school program is touted but it has not been demonstrated it works. A mere shadow of the real program.
We are unsure, but the age change to criminal liability may have completely scuttled the Police Cautioning program, the real bulwark against younger children moving through the criminal spheres to become the next generation of repeat offenders. Although it can’t be quantified accurately, the Police Cautioning Program was responsible for diverting vast numbers of young people from a life of crime.
We wish the new Magistrate well but are not hopeful that she will make a scrap of difference. At the same time, the Government fails to acknowledge and address their failures in relation to Bail, other legislative blunders and Police operational failures that feed this growing problem.
With this new Magistrate’s depth of experience, she should first be tasked with reviewing the legislation to make it effective, and then she may have something to work with. Still, as the status quo continues, she has little hope of pushing back against the Restorative Justice ideology that has infected our judiciary, one of the main causes of the judicial failures.
There is no adequate expression to describe the youth problem in this State.
Is the problem with the Police, the Courts, the juvenile legal services, the schools, parents or the mishmash of the government departments?
Quite clearly, the problems are with all of them. They all have one common denominator: they are not accountable in any tangible way for their failures.
It would be an interesting challenge to examine the performance of each resource and determine its effectiveness. Unfortunately, the spin doctors would have a field day explaining why their organisation is faultless; it will invoke the ‘it is him over there’ syndrome.
It truly is a mishmash when you ask Google AI to determine which Government department is responsible for youth-
The Department of Families, Fairness and Housing (DFFH) in Victoria is responsible for youth, and the Minister for Youth is Natalie Suleyman MP. The DFFH also supports the Minister for Children and the Minister for Disability.
The Commission for Children and Young People (CCYP) is an independent body that promotes the safety and well-being of children and young people in Victoria. The CCYP’s vision is to respect and defend the rights of children and young people.
The Department of Justice and Community Safety Victoria supervises children and young people in the criminal justice system.
Notably absent from CCYP’s charter is the promotion of the obligations and responsibilities of children that must go with protection of their rights.
It is not some aberration that the offences being committed by youths have been climbing in intensity for some time, highlighted by the level of violence currently being reported daily.
It is fast becoming a war zone out there.
What has become even more obvious is that the current systems, programs and strategies for keeping youth to be safe and away from violence and crime are not working.
Youths armed with machete-type weapons taking on Police at a Christmas Carol’s service has got to be the absolute last straw.
It would also not be a surprise if we found out the perpetrators responsible for the firebombing of the Jewish synagogue last week could well be the work of juveniles.
Juveniles again running amok in the CBD highlights the ever-present danger to all citizens by this crazy state of affairs.
There have been, and there will be, inevitable deaths as a result of this behaviour. Recently, it has become perilously close to being reality when a juvenile involved in a home invasion tried to attack a young mother who had a two-month-old baby in her arms. The baby suffered severe head injuries.
That the incident happened in another State is irrelevant but demonstrates the major danger of violent juveniles. They do not consider any consequences that deter them from this violence.
Many years ago, a highly respected trainer of police recruits, Les Harly, an ex-Olympic boxer, repeatedly warned recruits that the most dangerous perpetrator they would confront with a gun was a juvenile because they would not consider the consequences of pulling the trigger.
This is sage advice today as police will inevitably confront armed teenagers not with machetes as is the current favoured weapon, but guns.
The consequence of unchecked escalation of violence.
Still, the underscored effect on families whose safe haven, their home, is regularly violated is the most impacted and has the longest severe effect on the families.
Where do we start?
Our civic leaders of all political persuasions must first acknowledge there is a problem.
Then, a team must be assembled to advise on how the issues can be addressed.
As complicated as the problem first appears, the solution or solutions are easy to identify as the activities of the juveniles themselves provide the answers.
If a child is told not to put their hand in a flame but ignore the advice, then the pain of the burn will dissuade them from ever trying it again; there is a consequence for the action.
If they play on the roadway and ignore parental advice, with the parent resorting to dragging them off the road, the lesson is learnt: there is a consequence for their action.
Considering solutions from the top down would always fail, but we never expected the spectacular failure we are currently witnessing. The terrifying part of this trend, and like all trends, it will continue to escalate, is the current trajectory bodes very poorly for all of us, including the youth.
The arrest of a juvenile perpetrator is the closest we come to a consequence of their actions; however, the impact of the arrest is diluted by the legal process that follows.
While the judiciary believes their actions are compassionate and balanced, what they think is irrelevant as much as they won’t admit it. The key is what the perpetrators believe, being lectured doesn’t cut it.
The imperative is that the perpetrators understand that there are consequences for their illegal activities that are not palatable to them, irrespective of what the judiciary might consider appropriate.
What the judiciary might consider a consequence is useless if the perpetrator does not see it that way.
All the words directed at juveniles by the judiciary are just white noise to them, and anyway, their lawyer speaks for them, so in their eyes, it doesn’t impact them.
The youths consider walking out of Court, whether on bail or with a non-custodial sentence, as ‘I beat it again’. No matter the threats and lectures they are given during the process.
There is also the phenomenon promoted by older criminals that allows the youths to be recruited for crime; the nothing will happen if you are caught’ principle.
Many young people are aspirational to climb further up the criminal pecking order and share in the rewards, albeit ill-gotten, and this is a serious motivator.
The other motivator for youth is the influence (bragging rights) within their sphere, and that can become all-encompassing for younger people driving their lives. That there are no consequences for their behaviour has built their ethos.
In either of these two examples, the common denominator and drivers are the lack of consequences other than the risk of being arrested, and even that is diluted because the Courts do not fulfil their function as the community intends.
Some time ago, a high-profile person working in the youth space for a respected youth organisation reacted to our suggestion that as part of an accountability strategy, parents could, in consultation with the Police, have young people lose access to their mobile phones as part of the Police cautioning program for a period.
The response we received is a demonstration of how some with a socialist ideological bent view punishment or consequences as irrelevant and only promote more antisocial behaviour.
The person became very indignant at the suggestion and claimed that it was absolutely the wrong approach because all the young person would do was act out until they got it back.
Doh! That response proves the suspicion that many working in the youth space do not understand their role. Giving into the youth is the antithesis of effective youth management. Rewarding bad behaviour will never work.
The issues are monumental, but unless a new approach or an old one in part is re-introduced, then the consequences really do not bear thinking about.
In a new documentary, Port Coquitlam, teens describe how safer supply drugs are diverted to the streets, contributing to youth drug use.
CAA comment;
Victoria is inching towards the concept of ‘Safer Supply’ for drug users supposedly aimed at reducing the harm of the illicit drug trade, however as Canada is experiencing this strategy is a failure as it promotes drug use, particularly among teenager’s hood winked by the ‘Safer’ reference in the strategy – no drugs are safe.
There is pattern developing where governments are blind to the consequences of fashionable strategies when they are just playing into the hands of the drug cartels by promoting ‘Safe’ as a part of the illicit products.
There is little doubt that every drug pusher in the country can leverage off the Government ‘Safer supply’ mantra as a means of encouraging vulnerable young people to experiment.
The Video ‘The invisible Girls’ should be compulsory viewing for every politician in this State to ensure we do not follow any further the Canadian error that costs young people their lives and helps promote illicit drug use.
Madison was just 15 when she first encountered “dillies” — hydromorphone pills meant for safer supply, but readily available on the streets.
“Multiple people walking up the street, down the street, saying ‘dillies, dillies,’ and that’s how you get them,” Madison said, referring to dealers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Madison says she could get pills for $1.25 each, when purchased directly from someone receiving the drugs through safer supply — a provincial program that provides drug users with prescribed opioids. Madison would typically buy a whole bottle to last a week.
But as her tolerance grew, so did her addiction, leading her to try fentanyl.
“The dillies weren’t hitting me anymore … I tried [fentanyl] and instantly I just melted,” she said.
Kamilah Sword, Madison’s best friend, was just 14 when she died of an overdose on Aug. 20, 2022 after taking a hydromorphone pill dispensed through safer supply.
Madison, along with Kamilah’s father, Gregory Sword, are among the Port Coquitlam, B.C., residents featured in a documentary by journalist Adam Zivo. The film uncovers how safer supply drugs — intended as a harm reduction measure — contribute to harm among youth by being highly accessible, addictive and dangerous.
Through emotional interviews with teens and their families, the film links these drugs to overdose deaths and explores how they can act as a gateway to stronger substances like fentanyl.
‘Not a myth’
Some last names are omitted to respect the victims’ desire for privacy.
Safer supply aims to reduce overdose deaths by providing individuals with substance use disorders access to pharmaceutical-grade alternatives, such as hydromorphone.
But some policy experts, health officials and journalists are concerned these drugs are being diverted onto the streets — particularly hydromorphone, which is often sold under the brand name Dilaudid and nicknamed “dillies.”
Zivo, the film’s director, points out the disinformation surrounding safer supply diversion, highlighting that some drug legalization activists downplay the issue of diversion.
In 2023, B.C.’s then-chief coroner Lisa Lapointe dismissed claims that individuals were collecting their safer supply medications and selling them to youth, thereby creating new opioid dependencies and contributing to overdose deaths. She labeled such claims an “urban myth.”
In the film, Madison describes how teen substance users would occasionally accompany people enrolled in the safer supply program to the pharmacy, where they would fill their prescriptions and then sell the drugs to the teens.
“It’s not a myth, because my best friend died from it,” she says in the film.
Fiona Wilson, deputy chief of the Vancouver Police Department, testified on April 15 to the House of Commons health committee studying Canada’s opioid crisis that about 50 per cent of hydromorphone seizures by police are linked to safer supply.
Deputy Chief of the Vancouver Police Department, Fiona Wilson, testified on April 15 during the House of Commons ‘Opioid Epidemic and Toxic Drug Crisis in Canada’ health committee meeting.
Additionally, Ottawa Police Sergeant Paul Stam previously confirmed to Canadian Affairs that similar reports of diverted safer supply drugs have been observed in Ottawa.
“Hopefully, by giving these victims a platform and bringing their stories to life, the film can impress upon Canadians the urgent need for reform,” Zivo told Canadian Affairs.
‘Creating addicts’
The teens featured in the film share their experiences with the addictive nature of dillies.
“After doing them for like a month, it felt like I needed them everyday,” says Amelie North, one teen featured in the documentary. “I felt like I couldn’t stand being alive without being on dillies.”
Madison explains how tolerance builds quickly. “You just keep doing them until it’s not enough at all.”
Madison started using fentanyl at the age of 12, leading to a near-fatal overdose after just one hit at a SkyTrain station. “It took five Narcan kits to save my life,” she says in the film.
Many of her friends use dillies or have tried fentanyl, she says. She estimates half the students at her school do.
“Government-supplied hydromorphone is a dangerous domino in the cascade of an addict’s downward spiral to ever more risky behaviour,” said Madison’s mother, Beth, to Canadian Affairs.
“The safe drug supply is creating addicts, not helping addicts,” Denise Fenske, North’s mother, told Canadian Affairs.
“I’m not sure when politicians talk about all the beds they have opened up for youth with drug or alcohol problems, where they actually are and how do we access them?”
Sword, Kamilah’s father, expressed his concern in an email to Canadian Affairs. “I want the people [watching the film] to understand how easy this drug is to get for the kids and how many kids it is affecting, the pain it causes the loved ones, [with] no answers or help for them.”
Screenshot: Dr. Matthew Orde reviewing Kamilah Sword’s toxicology report during his interview for the filming of ‘Government Heroin 2: The Invisible Girls’ in March 2024.
Autopsy
Kamilah’s death raises further concerns.
According to Dr. Matthew Orde, a forensic pathologist featured in the film, Kamilah’s toxicology report revealed a mix of depressants and stimulants, including flualprazolam (a benzo), benzoylecgonine (a cocaine byproduct), MDMA and hydromorphone.
Orde criticizes the BC Coroners Service for not following best practices by focusing solely on cardiac arrhythmia caused by cocaine and MDMA, while overlooking the potential role of benzos and hydromorphone.
Orde notes that in complex poly-drug deaths, an autopsy is typically performed to determine the cause more accurately. He says he was shocked that Kamilah’s case did not receive this level of investigation.
B.C. has one of the lowest autopsy rates in Canada.
Zivo told Canadian Affairs he thinks a public inquiry into Kamilah’s case and other youth deaths involving hydromorphone since 2020 is needed to assess if the province is accurately reporting the harms of safer supply.
“That just angers me that our coroners did not do what most of Canada would have done,” Sword told Canadian Affairs.
“It also makes me question why they didn’t do an autopsy, what is our so-called government hiding?”
Surprise, surprise, the State has lost control of juvenile offenders.
The crime Tsunami CAA predicted almost ten years ago is well and truly upon us; what we didn’t expect was that the government’s ineptitude would contribute to fuelling the severity of the tsunami.
A massive spike in criminality by juveniles has made this State arguably the most dangerous in which to live, with the safety and sanctity of our homes being eroded daily by rampaging out-of-control youths. Not to mention the attacks on businesses.
Our safe haven bolt hole has all but disappeared.
The oft-quoted line of ‘you can’t arrest your way out of this problem’ rings very true, and a government that tinkers around the edges in the crime space is unquestionably the cause.
Law enforcement can only do so much, and we know they are trying their hardest, but with limited police resources, inept, ineffective courts, and the failing of so-called professional support services, all come at a considerable expense to the policing of the rest of the community and even more egregious, a huge cost of the failed development of our youth into meaningful contributors to our society, a penalty so severe it fades other sanctions into paltriness.
The latest tinkering with bail laws will have little impact because the primary cause of this imbroglio is the Courts lacking accountability in their role and the poor performance of individual jurists who operate without answerability. The influence of woke ideologies is a significant culprit embraced by gullible jurists.
Just as the government touts its latest reforms to bail, the impact of lifting the age of criminal responsibility is yet to be fully realised.
To aggravate a dire situation, the government has announced closing many of the children’s courts.
That will push out even further the current wait for justice, making truth of the adage ‘Justice delayed is justice denied’. Denying justice hurts victims and perpetrators alike.
When coupled with the age adjustment, the closing of the courts is no more than a cost-saving exercise. A cynic may argue that this has always been the plan. Raise the age of criminal responsibility to reduce court traffic and then shut the courts because they are inefficient – they are inefficient at administering the law, as the crime tsunami attests, and that should be the focus. Courts like any other entity has obligations for service delivery, how does making the courts less accessible improve the delivery of court services?
The combination of these two government actions means we will have more crime as there is no enforceable intervention in criminal behaviour of young children to prevent them from a further life of crime being ingrained in their psyche.
It has not gone unnoticed that all the advocates who promote the age of criminality changes are strong on the emotional rhetoric but near mute on the alternative process for managing out-of-control kids. Perhaps the advocates should talk sternly to the kids on the street to solve the problem. Good luck with that.
There is a lot of noise in the Northern Territory (NT), where the government has recently reversed the lifting of the age of criminal responsibility. Noise from advocates claim that little ten-year-olds will end up in the infamous Don Dale youth centre.
Notably, the rest of the community made the noise to reverse this decision at the Ballot box. It’s funny how, on social issues, the advocates never accept they may be wrong. As remote as the Youth Centre option is, it would be a last resort to protect the community and the child.
Even with the NT crime rate amongst young perpetrators, the courts are the arbiters of punishment, so the chances of a child going to prison are remote.
But back to the crime issue in Victoria because it is at a critical stage.
The solutions, in no particular order, are;
Provide financial incentives for homeowners to improve security – physical barriers, not just CCTV, which record after the fact and are so prolific that they have little preventive value. Criminals, including kids, are inherently lazy, and if entering the house is more complex, they will be discouraged from trying.
Make the Courts and jurists accountable for performance. This does not impinge on the independence of the Judiciary but at least makes their performance effective against reasonable benchmarks.
Introduce a Police Reserve to release operationally competent police from non-operational roles to bolster front-line numbers, allowing for better and more effective proactive policing. Stopping crime before it starts.
Review the role and accountability of the Children’s Commission.
The current Commissioner’s CV exposes extensive and severe conflicts of interest at play to the degree that would make the appointee unable or unwilling to help young people without the influence of an ideological bent.
The silence of the Commissioner in the current crisis speaks volumes.
Liana Buchanan is the Principal Commissioner for Children and Young People
Liana Buchanan commenced as the Principal Commissioner for Children and Young People in April 2016. (Coincidently, not long before the CAA warned of this current crime Tsunami). She also sits as a part-time Commissioner of the Victorian Law Reform Commission.
Liana has a background in oversight and system reform for people experiencing disadvantage, with a strong focus on family violence and sexual assault. Before she was appointed Commissioner, her roles included the Executive Officer of the Federation of Community Legal Centres, where she led the peak body for Victoria’s 50 community legal centres, and the Director of the Office of Correctional Services Review, where she was responsible for monitoring Victoria’s corrections system. Liana has also held legal and policy positions with a social justice focus in a number of agencies, including the Victorian Equal Opportunity Commission, Department of Justice, Office for the Status of Women (SA) and Women’s Legal Service (SA).
It seems Ms Buchaman is only a part-time Commissioner for Children and Young People, and with her career focus on social justice values, this conflict is absolutely counterintuitive to what this role should be about – protecting the young and vulnerable.
Instead of remaining silent, the Commissioner should provide leadership to resolve the problems inflicted on our youth.
It is an apt time for a root and branch reappraisal of the various functions and roles in the non-coal face operatives supposedly working to help police in this war, a reality that is approaching fast.
Police are being sent to fight a war without logistical, legislative or political support, and that is unconscionable, for the Police, victims and youths alike.
Police have been forced to divert even more resources away from protecting us by introducing a new initiative to proactively visit recidivist offenders in a desperate effort to reduce the worst offending.
While the police effort is commendable, as far as that goes, the move highlights the anomalies in the Justice system that police are required to do this. The police effort to manage the 362 recidivists is unlikely to be effective enough to make a huge difference, and although any success is of value, the cost-benefit will become questionable.
Remember that each of these recidivists is already in the Justice system to earn the tag, recidivist.
If the Justice system were doing its job, the Courts would have taken action to ensure the non-reoffending of these children and the risk to the safety of all of us, including the child, is alleviated.
In essence, our justice system is an abject failure.
Of course, everyone in that system will wring their hands and blame somebody else, but somebody must be accountable, or there will be no improvement. And while the Police are focused on the known recidivists, and we hope they have success, there is a new cohort of recidivists coming along to bolster the recidivist numbers as some are removed from the list.
The point is that turning their life around is a mammoth and largely wasted effort by the time a child has become a recidivist, as the crime statistics show.
Three things must occur if we want a solution.
Early intervention -the effort must be made before juveniles reach that problem stage because, for most that do, it is too late and,
Juvenile Sentencing Principles – must be reviewed and,
Courts accountability -The Courts must be held accountable for their failure if a child continues to offend.
Early intervention.
The cancellation of many of the Police proactive programs has contributed substantially to the current crime trends. A formal Police In schools Program instead of the current erratic approach, the regeneration of the Blue Light program so successful in all other States, and the highly successful Operation New Start must be reintroduced.
All of these programs were successful, so VicPol has to suck it up and redirect the energy they apply from ‘why not’ to ‘can do’.
Juvenile Sentencing Principles
The Juvenile sentencing principles are a root cause of the current crime problem and its continued escalation.
The principles make for an interesting read.
Rehabilitation is the principal consideration for sentencing children. Section 362(1) of the Children, Youth and Families Act 2005 (Vic) outlines the considerations that must be taken into account when sentencing a child:
the need to strengthen and preserve the relationship between the child and the child’s family
the desirability of allowing the child to live at home
the desirability of allowing the education, training or employment of the child to continue without interruption or disturbance
the need to minimise the stigma to the child resulting from a court decision
the suitability of the sentence to the child
if appropriate, ensure the child is aware of their need to take responsibility for any action that is against the law
if appropriate, the need to protect the community, or any person, from the violent or other wrongful acts of the child.
Rather than setting young people goals to improve their behaviour with breaches subject to disciplinary action, the whole concept of the sentencing is to create an unachievable nirvana state divorced from reality.
Central to the failure of these principles is the lack of care for the reoffending and, therefore, damage not only to the community but, in some respects, more importantly, the child.
Suppose a child who is a recidivist is stealing cars and driving recklessly. There have been ample instances where, by good luck rather than anything else, young children have avoided death or severe injury in stolen cars. In that case, they are as dangerous to themselves as the community, and for the Courts to not take action to prevent this is irresponsible. Should the unthinkable happen, you can bet the Courts won’t put their hands up for their failure.
These principles need revisiting.
Court accountability
We believe there would be a seismic shift in the management of juvenile offenders if the responsible Jurist were to be held accountable for the consequences of a child’s recidivism.
Jurists have the power to solve many of the problems by adhering to the principle that provides the solution.
‘if appropriate, the need to protect the community, or any person, from the violent or other wrongful acts of the child.’
However, the courts are pressured by the weight of the other principles to allow them to avoid their responsibility to the child and the community. This principle must be the primary one, requiring jurists to consider it their primary function, and then the other principles can be applied.
The current system is broken, and police should not be hampered by the failure of the courts to do their job; instead, they should be delivering the police service to all of us and applying resources to proactive early intervention.
An alarming Headline in the Herald Sun on Wednesday, the 11th of September, ‘Crime Statistics Agency data shows a huge rise in teens breaking into homes’.
Usually, while the victims are present.
It is disturbing and infuriating because it could have been prevented.
The CAA was formed in 2015 on the basis that proactive policing projects had been cancelled, and we knew the community would pay the price. Unfortunately, our prophecy was accurate.
Our protestations over the last nine years have largely been ignored, so there is a degree of hubris to be proven right but anger that the advice was not acceded to.
Certainty, with the latest crime statistics showing an unacceptable increase in juvenile aggravated burglaries, the proof is unquestionable there has been a catastrophic failure in this State, and to continue to do what we have been doing for the last decade would be the height of stupidity.
It might be time for the powers that be to start listening to the CAA.
And while Victoria spends millions on Policing this issue, nobody is looking at the cause other than superficially. When the state leadership sees crime through a jaundiced view, they take us toward even more crime.
It is inevitable that this will ultimately lead to deaths.
Hang on; it already has led to three deaths at the hands of juveniles in a stolen car, stolen during a burglary.
Perhaps our Leadership is waiting for one or more of the juveniles to be killed before action is taken. The other deaths so far seem to be treated like collateral damage as there has been little reaction from the leadership, and certainly, no efforts to achieve change and protect the community.
This problem is killing innocent members of our community, and all we hear from the leadership of this State are ‘crickets’ or occasionally platitudes.
Presumed to be a police responsibility, and by and large it is, there are other significant players avoiding scrutiny and contributing to the upsurge in crime, making the police efforts ineffective in the reactive sense. However, the Force posture that changed to strongly favour a reactive philosophy trying to arrest their way out of problems, at the expense of the well-developed proactive approach, coincides with the increased crime rate of this cohort, so somebody needs to do some explaining because the proactive function of policing is failing. Still, police are not alone in that failure.
In particular, the Courts have failed our society drastically and our children significantly as they have been behind and deliberately obfuscated the laws to follow a woke agenda. We support the independence of the judiciary but not at the expense of the court’s failure to fulfil the fundamental function of protecting the community.
The media reports infinitum, where young perpetrators are persistently bailed with stern warnings that this is their ‘last chance’. So, the rhetoric from the ‘last chance’ bench continues as the child returns time and again for breaching bail conditions and committing other offences.
The whole resistance by the judiciary to putting children in detention, even for their good, has warped the courts from their duty to society.
The concept of incarceration of a juvenile is seen as repugnant. However, this view is based not on empirical data as to the effectiveness or otherwise of the juvenile detention system but a jaundiced view of the alleged draconian regime of detention not consistent with the facts.
It wasn’t that long ago that it was reported that Pizza and McDonald’s were bribing juveniles offending within the detention system to behave.
Correcting juvenile behaviour by rewarding misbehaviour is one of the most outrageous and incompetent management decisions ever made in this space. No wonder we are where we are.
For a period, the push within juvenile detention was to replicate as far as possible the home environment for juveniles to minimise the impact.
That theory is flawed and ineffective.
We cannot and should not shy away from accepting that anybody, including but mainly children, should be punished if they break the law, and the more serious the crime, the stronger the punishment. The scale and effectiveness of the sentence is the key.
This is imperative for juveniles as properly managed detention has a greater hope of turning a child’s life around.
So, detention should not be the last resort for the good of the child and the community.
The deterrent effect of returning to detention will alter developed anti-social and criminal behaviour. As we have argued, detention must not be long to be effective.
If there are failings in the management of the Juvenile Justice System, replace the management.
We can make these claims because the increase in Juvenile crime proves that the current approach has failed along with one of the main drivers, the social experiment ‘ Restorative Justice’, behind many of the current strategies.
The government has been forced to create a specific offence for bail breaches. Still, given the court’s record, there is every possibility that the courts will find a way to continue bailing juvenile offenders charged with this new crime. The courts could push back simply by failing to convict, adjourning the natter with ‘conditions’.
So, with the Courts feeding the problem, the police being hamstrung and either not willing or incapable of undertaking practical, proactive work and the plethora of so-called government bureaucrats and others in the ‘juvenile industry’ failing to achieve effective, measurable outcomes, there needs to be an urgent reset. The Courts would be a good place to start.
Underlying the Court’s failure is a perception that incarcerating young people is abhorrent; tell that to the victims.
What is desperately needed is not a series of inquiries and reviews but accountability from the highly paid executives who run the various components.
The government must establish an independent audit function so that the performance targets and outcomes of the various entities can be evaluated rigorously.
Essentially, the audit function can expose the ‘Yes Minister’ esque justifications trotted out by some executives.
Yes, a lack of leadership and accountability has got us where we are today, and the focus must turn a blow torch on the executives within the Law and Order cohort and demand that they resolve the issue- or, in other words, do their job.
Unfortunately, there is a shortage of leadership in this space; what is desperately needed is a cleanout and replacement of the current leadership stock with others who are employed on a performance-based arrangement.
Another insightful article from Break the Needle and highlights the folly of Harm Minimisation strategy again.
It does not take a visionary to conclude that Victoria is heading down the same path.
This harrowing story of the death of a fourteen-year-old girl from a drug overdose brings into stark relief the flaws that our lawmakers have allowed to permeate our society driven by flawed ideology.
The collision of the principles of harm minimisation and rights of parents over their children which destroys parental responsibility because they have none, according to the State.
This anomaly which conflicts with the age of criminal accountability must be addressed before Victorian children suffer the same fate as Kamilah Sword and the pain inflicted on her family.
By Alexandra Keeler
On Aug. 19, 2022, Kamilah Sword took a single hydromorphone pill, believing it to be safe. She overdosed and was found dead by her grandmother the next day. She was 14.
Kamilah believed the drug was safe — despite having bought it illicitly — because she was told it came from a government-run “safer supply” program, according to Kamillah’s best friend Grace Miller and her father.
“I’ll never get to see her get married, never have grandkids, never get to see her graduate,” said Kamilah’s father, Gregory Sword, lowering his chin to keep his voice steady.
“It’s a black hole in the heart that never heals.”
Sword faced significant challenges trying to get his daughter help during the year he was aware she was struggling with addiction. He blames British Columbia’s safer supply program and the province’s legal youth treatment framework for exacerbating his daughter’s challenges and ultimately contributing to her death.
“It’s a B.C. law — you cannot force a minor into rehab without their permission,” said Sword. “You cannot parent your kid between the ages of 12 and 18 without their consent.”
Sword is now pursuing legal action against the B.C. and federal governments and several health agencies, seeking accountability for what he views as systemic failures.
B.C.’s “Safe” supply program
B.C.’s prescribed safer supply program, which was first launched in 2020, is designed to reduce substance users’ reliance on dangerous street drugs. Users are prescribed hydromorphone — an opioid as potent as heroin — as an alternative to using potentially lethal street drugs.
However, participants in the program often sell their hydromorphone, in some cases to teenagers, to get money to buy stronger drugs like fentanyl.
According to Grace Miller, she and Kamilah would obtain hydromorphone — which is commonly referred to as Dilaudid or “dillies” — from a teenage friend who bought them in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The neighbourhood, which is the epicentre of Vancouver’s drug crisis, is a 30-minute SkyTrain ride from the teenagers’ home in Port Coquitlam.
Sword says he initially thought “dillies” referred to Dairy Queen’s Dilly Bars. “My daughter would ask me for $5, [and say], ‘Yeah, we’re going to Dairy Queen for a Dilly Bar.’ I had no idea.”
He says he only learned about hydromorphone after the coroner informed him that Kamilah had three substances in her system: cocaine, MDMA and hydromorphone.
“I had to start talking to people to figure out what [hydromorphone] was and where it was coming from.”
Sword is critical of B.C.’s safer supply program for being presented as safe and for lacking monitoring safeguards. “[Kamilah] knew where [the drugs] were coming from so she felt safe because her dealer would keep on telling her, ‘This is safe supply,’” Sword said.
In February, B.C. changed how it refers to the program from “prescribed safer supply” to “prescribed alternatives.”
CAA Comment – changing names doesn’t solve a problem but exacerbates it.
Grace says another problem with the program is the quantities of drugs being distributed.
“It would be a big difference if the prescriptions that they were giving out were dosed properly,” she said, noting addicts would typically sell bottles containing 14 pills, with pricing starting at $1 a pill.
Sword estimates his daughter struggled with addiction for about 18 to 24 months before her final, fatal overdose.
After Kamilah overdosed for the first time on Aug. 21, 2021, he tried to get her into treatment. A drug counsellor told him that, because she was over 12, she would need to verbally consent. Kamilah refused treatment.
B.C.’s Infants Act allows individuals aged 12 or older to consent to their own medical treatment if they understand the treatment and its implications. The province’s Mental Health Act requires minors aged 12 to 16 to consent to addiction or mental health treatment.
While parents can request involuntary admission for children under 16, a physician or nurse practitioner must first confirm the presence of a mental disorder that requires treatment. No law specifically addresses substance-use disorders in minors.
When Kamilah was admitted to the hospital on one occasion, she underwent a standard psychiatric evaluation and was quickly discharged — despite Sword’s protests.
Ontario also has a mental health law governing involuntary care. Similar to B.C., they permit involuntary care only where a minor has been diagnosed with a mental disorder.
By contrast, Alberta’s Protection of Children Abusing Drugs Act enables a parent or guardian to obtain a court order to place a child under 18 who is struggling with addiction into a secure facility for up to 15 days for detoxification, stabilization and assessment. Alberta is unique among the provinces and territories in permitting involuntary care of minors for substance-use issues.
CAA Comment – The CAA has advocated for a similar health-based regime to treat all illicit drug users of any age.
Grace, who also became addicted to opioids, says her recovery journey involved several failed attempts.
“I never thought I would have almost died so many times,” said Grace, who is now 16. “I never thought I would even touch drugs in my life.”
Grace’s mother Amanda (a pseudonym) faced similar struggles as Sword in trying to get help for her daughter. Amanda says she was repeatedly told nothing more could be done for Grace, because Grace would not consent to treatment.
“One time, [Grace] overdosed at home, and I had to Narcan her because she was dead in her bed,” Amanda said. “I told the paramedic, ‘Our system is broken.’ And she just said, ‘Yes, I know.’”
Yet Grace, who today has been sober for 10 months, would question whether she even had the capacity to consent to treatment when she was addicted to drugs.
Under B.C.’s Health Care (Consent) and Care Facility (Admission) Act, an adult is only considered to have consented to health care if their consent is voluntary, informed, legitimately obtained and the individual is capable of making a decision about their care.
“Mentally able to give consent?” said Grace. “No, I was never really mentally there.”
System failure
Today, Sword is one of two plaintiffs leading a class-action lawsuit against several provincial and federal health authorities and organizations, including the B.C. Ministry of Health, Health Canada, Vancouver Coastal Health and Vancouver Island Health.
All four of these agencies declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing court proceedings.
The lawsuit was filed Aug. 15 and is currently awaiting certification to proceed. It alleges the coroner initially identified safer supply drugs as a cause of Kamilah’s death, but later changed the report to omit this reference due to pressure from the province or for other unknown reasons.
It further alleges B.C. and Ottawa were aware that drugs prescribed under safer supply programs were being diverted as early as March 2021, but failed to monitor or control the drugs’ distribution. It points to a Health Canada report and data showing increased opioid-related problems from safer supply programs.
According to Amanda, Kamilah had wanted to overcome her addiction but B.C.’s system failed her.
“I had multiple conversations with Kamilah, and I know Kamilah wanted to get clean,” she says. “But she felt so stuck, like she couldn’t do it, and she felt guilty and ashamed.”
Grace, who battled addiction for four years, is relieved to be sober.
“I’ve never, ever been happier. I’ve never been healthier. It’s the best thing I’ve done for myself,” she said. “It’s just hard when you don’t have your best friend to do it with.”
CAA Comment. – When will illicit drug apologists ever learn?
To say the CAA has deep concerns about this Bill and the adverse impact it will have on youth crime in this state is a gross understatement.
What is generally not well understood is that this Bill is ‘the foot in the door’ for further introducing the concept of ‘Restorative Justice’, a monumental change in how Justice is dispensed in this State.
Significant changes included in this Bill include the plethora of conferences and committees required to manage each offender instead of the concept of punishment and accountability, which has been whitewashed out of this Bill.
Effectively, a child can take a position where they will not comply with any processes available to the Courts or any other authorities under this Bill, and nothing can be done about it. No punishment can be applied, regardless of the child’s actions.
We suspect that the majority of the community and many politicians do not understand the consequences this Bill will generate, none of them good.
Why wasn’t the community advised of this change? We are unaware of where the Government of the day achieved a mandate for such a severe and monumental change to the principles of Justice.
It took five years to draft, underscoring the difficulty and, given the outcome, incompetence displayed in the principles that have evolved to form this Bill.
They all will continue to stoke crime, not diminish it.
A fable best describes this Bill;
‘A committee was formed to design a Horse ( the Bill to Reform Youth Justice), but they came up with a camel ( no ordinary Camel but a two-humped Bactrian Camel with three legs).’
With all the effort of five years, the Bill as presented does not address the issue the community now faces and is riddled with extreme socialist ideology and drafted by a committee that has no understanding of the people they are supposed to be protecting. It will feed the crime wave.
The Bill misses the mark by a long way.
Central to the flaw in this Bill is the assumption that children under thirteen (13) cannot form criminal intent.
This assumption isn’t based on any empirical data and flies in the face of the reality of the evolution of human development.
Over the last two decades, the development of young people has accelerated faster than any other preceding era.
The speed at which this has occurred is most evident in the last ten years when evolution achieved warp speed, driven by two significant factors: Nutrition and Technology.
The ‘canary in the coal mine’, generally ignored, has been the accelerated crime rate by Juveniles and the failure to recognise the changes that were occurring in front of us all.
Nutrition
The impact of a higher level of nutrition in recent times must be seen as positive as young people will probably grow up healthier than their predecessors, but with that nutrition comes increased physical development. It’s not an issue until you realise that young people, on average, are taller and better developed physically than their predecessors. A phenomenon that immature minds can and do exploit.
Technology
There can be no argument that the development of technology has and continues to accelerate at warp speed and that the young people born in this era are the ones that maximise its use. They are more connected and have access to more data than previous generations ever dreamed of. This massive influx of good and bad information has developed young people’s mental acuity well beyond the perceived norm.
Still, they lack the ability and maturity to process and analyse this data effectively, leading them to emulate others without understanding the consequences or ignoring the consequences because there are none.
These phenomena point to the main flaw in the Bill and the poor consideration of youth development, both physically and mentally, in its drafting.
Today, a 10 – 12-year-old is the equivalent of a 13–15-year-old ten years ago.
The Bill is headed in the wrong direction and should instead be lowering the age of criminal responsibility, not lifting it.
Lowering the age to 8-10 years old will allow young people who are developing into and headed toward crime, the ability for effective early intervention, not waiting until they are older and more entrenched in crime.
Early intervention will reduce crime and improve the chances of young people developing without the stigma of exposure to Legal processes.
Why do we have to wait until a young person starts to climb the hierarchy of crime before any action is taken?
The Bill is not about Youth and crime. Its only function is to divert young people away from the judicial system with no attempt to distract them from crime before they get involved or turn them away from committing further crimes.
Of great concern to the CAA is that the Bill leans heavily on the ideologically experimental concept of Restorative Justice that, even relying on questionable research, raises significant concerns about its efficacy.
Not only does the concept have a questionable ability to influence crime reduction, but it is also extremely cumbersome. It would be costly to initiate its recommended functions in this Bill, requiring a department to administer this part alone for questionable outcome benefits. The failure of Restorative Justice benefits vested interests, not the community.
The things that Bill aims to,
Promote the broader use of the failed socialist dream of Restorative Justice, a concept of unrealistic goals that lack credibility, and research to support its efficacy. This Social experiment has already failed to live up to its hype. A concept requiring vast administrative support (and funding) for little or any identifiable valuable outcomes for the community.
Allow a child to ignore the ten processes created by this Bill without consequences, ensuring the ineffective and wasted time and resources. All talk, no action.
The CAA notes that the Bill requires the child’s consent for almost all interventions, which empowers the child to avoid any undesirable consequences of their actions.
It will necessitate a considerable increase in the public service to cope with the massive increase in data management and processes this Bill creates.
There will be an unrealistic load put on an already stretched Police Force to achieve compliance. (Taking police off the road to be administrators rather than being on patrol to reduce crime.)
It will increase the severity and frequency of crime not only in the youth area but overall, as younger children coached by older criminals are encouraged to commit crimes as there are no consequences. (No offences for coaching children into crime in the Bill -most of those who coach will be children themselves)
The unintended consequences of the Bill are substantial and mirror the unintended consequences (fatal) of the Public Order Bill that removed the power of Police to intervene in public drunkenness.
The Bill fails;
To hold children to age-appropriate accountabilities and consequences. It erases accountability and accountability as the basis of a deterrent.
The bill intimidates the judiciary from imposing custodial consequences when a child continues ignoring the lectures and threats made by judicial officers or breaches Bail.
By not referring to Prevention as a legitimate function and requirement to avoid children entering the Justice system, this document only has effect when the child has offended It’s then too late.
No Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for any participants delivering the Bill.
No provision for research.
There is no clear direction as to who is responsible for the Bill’s application and coordination of service providers. The proposed Commissioner couldn’t cope with this function without a huge staff.
What do the Service Providers do, and how are they assessed?
More specifically, our concerns relate to;
Addressing the Drug issue with children in either use or participation in the trade. The recidivist juvenile is the addict of tomorrow.
Lack of accountability of Parents – sanctions for parental failure.
We have identified the basis of this Bill, and it has, as we suggest, little to do with Youth or, more specifically, their criminal activity and how that might be prevented in the first place.
The concept of prevention before they commit a crime has been overlooked entirely, as the intent, in our view, is to write much of the Restorative Justice Philosophy that can be achieved, into legislation.
Giving this untested experimental concept the credibility of forming the basis of this Bill and using this Bill to provide status to this concept by using our children as pawns is unconscionable.
The Government is now looking to fast-track this Bill under the guise of addressing the current crime Tsunami.
New South Wales addressed the Recidivist Youth issue with a few minor changes to the wording relating to Youth Bail provisions.
Assessing their strategy, they are dealing with the issue from the juvenile perspective, not some ideological dream.
The youths are being remanded in custody, and that is punishment in the child’s mind and will act as a bigger deterrent than all the conferences that can be dreamt up.
This Bill needs to be stopped until proper analysis, and strategy can be developed – one that will work.
The community is tired of this continual waffle about getting tough on Youth crime. They want action, not words.
As victims accumulate at an alarming rate and the youth cohort becomes more violent and brash, the government’s rhetoric becomes more hollow and meaningless.
How many times do we hear that there is no problem, it is just a small cohort, or we have the lowest youth crime figures in Australia only to be told the next day that the independent Crime Statistics Agency has debunked the government claims?
Yet again, this headline – appeared in the Herald Sun on July 21, 2024
ALLAN GOVT SET TO STRENGTHEN VICTORIA’S YOUTH BAIL LAWS IN A CRACKDOWN ON CRIME
Suggesting that the government is dithering would perhaps be an understatement because the changes they are considering will be to the Youth Justice Bill before Parliament.
If passed, this Bill, some 900 pages long, will make the current situation look benign. Yong people will have no barriers or accountability to control their criminal behaviour.
Astoundingly, the drafting of this Bill took five years: five years to rewrite the laws regarding youth offenders and five years to mess it up completely.
The CAA has examined the Bill and were shocked at its ineptitude, particularly,
not one reference in the 900 pages to any effort or strategy to avoid children becoming involved in crime in the first place,
a focus solely on diverting children from the legal system no matter what they do,
victims only received very scant references and no consideration,
children are treated like disposable commodities as there is no mention of protecting a child for themselves, a concept too difficult for the architects of the Bill to contemplate,
the real kicker was the complete avoidance of any reference to accountability by young offenders.
This Bill is so bad that our critique ran to ten pages,
The bill also lifts the age of criminal responsibility, initially to twelve and later fourteen, currently ten years. This alone makes the bill a joke as while the ideological dreamers may hold sway over the government, the Crime Statistics Agency has children aged 10 or 11 years old recording a 52.6 per cent spike in the number of offences committed, and they want to make those offences go away by classifying those perpetrators as exempt from prosecution.
The age changes may help the shocking statistics but won’t help the children or the victims, but neither of them matters much when statistics are under pressure. One result that can be guaranteed is that the number of victims will increase exponentially.
Try and explain this drivel to a victim of weapon-wielding children in this age bracket or explain why there was no intervention of the younger children to steer them away from further crime. By age thirteen, their behaviour will be entrenched and nearly impossible to divert.
To aggravate the incompetence, the government proposes legislating the Police Cautioning Program, which has successfully diverted thousands of children from its inception many decades ago.
This program is arguably the most effective mechanism developed to divert young people from crime, but being good makes it a target.
The proven adage of ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ should apply.
(‘Whack-a-Mole’ is a 1970s arcade-style game that lives up to its name. It consists of Moles popping up out of their burrows randomly and the players trying to wack them with a mallet.)
At a time when the youth crisis is in an out-of-control spiral, irrespective of how the government tries to spin the problem, the Government is using the police force in a futile effort to resolve the issue by forcing them to play ‘Wack-A-Mole‘
Additionally, the government trumpets action, which turns out to be inaction, that the community is supposed to accept, but it is all smoke and mirrors with no clear strategy.
The problem that we face with young people and crime, in general, is that nobody is doing anything about reducing crime before it occurs. They would rather play ‘Wack-a-Mol’,
As reported in the Herald Sun,
Vehicle thefts have jumped by 25% to 40000.
59,000 motorists had valuables stolen from their vehicles.
And the advice for drivers was to lock their cars and hide valuables – the victim’s fault.
These statistics become more concerning yearly – more offences, more victims.
This crime is shared between opportunistic drug addicts to fund their addiction and juveniles out for ‘the thrill’. The crime surge is the fault of weak legislation and poor strategies to combat crime. Blaming the victim is unforgivable.
But never fear. The government has spent five years drafting a new Youth Justice Bill to address the current anomalies in the Judicial system.
The Bill, if enacted in its present form, will add to the crime problem, not diminish it, as its sole focus is diverting young people from the Justice system after they offend, and its 900 pages do not mention once, what can be done with younger children, to divert them from crime. However, it expends a lot of words to remove concepts of accountability and consequences from all young offenders.
It also lifts the age of criminal responsibility to 13 years from 10 years, an ideological whim not only contradicts the empirical evidence published by government agencies but expends no energy on how these children in that underage cohort who commit crimes will be dealt with.
‘Alarming statistics released in June found crimes involving children as young as ten had soared to their highest level since 2010, with a 52.6 per cent spike in offences committed by ten and 11-year-olds.
Children aged 10 to 13 years old were responsible for 84 aggravated burglaries, while those aged 14 to 17 were considered to be “over-represented” in burglaries, assaults, robberies and car thefts – HS 10.7.2024
A cynic may suggest that the statistics don’t show children younger than 10 committing crimes because they are below the legislated age of criminal intent. That cohort will show a 100% decline in children aged 10 and 11 committing crimes when the age is lifted.
Will the government exploit this statistical foible to pretend they’re solving the problem? Doubtless, they will.
With contributions like ‘dob in a mate’ the latest government offering, all we can say is, ‘good luck with that’. However, it points to the disconnect between the government and its advisers and the real world.
The reality is that Police and the community will just have to wait until a perpetrator turns 13 before their criminal endeavours can perhaps be curtailed. On occasions, police in the past have had to wait until a child turns ten before they can be presented to the judicial system to curb their criminal behaviour.
These arbitrary age limits do not necessarily coincide with the child’s acuity development or when a child is acting in concert with others who may be older in the commission of crimes.
They must be scrapped.
Of course, being charged is only part of the problem. The main issues are,
Ineffective bail laws.
The failure of the Bail Laws, which the Courts say is not their fault but the legislators, is the lamest excuse ever hidden behind, a weak excuse and entirely accurate.
Failure to hold children to account for their actions.
If criminal behaviour does not have consequences, what motivation exists to change children’s behaviour – talk fests and meetings don’t cut it.
Failure to apply sanctions for criminality.
The law is based, in part, on a fear (Deterrent factor) that certain unacceptable behaviours attract sanctions imposed by a Court, but illogically, this concept is removed from children, which is a significant part of the problem as they seldom suffer any accurate or effective sanctions.
The future for the children is not looking good; by the time their unlawful behaviour is checked, crime is entrenched in their psyche or soul, and the chances of rehabilitation are problematic.
Easy bail is only one of the many illogical approaches the government has persisted with, as, for example, the most recent absconding of a juvenile bailed on charges of culpable driving causing death after a stolen car he was allegedly driving ploughed into another vehicle, killing the occupant.
The perpetrator absconded within hours of being bailed, and the real fear is that he was behind the wheel of another stolen car. Now in custody, what he did for the three days on the run will no doubt be exposed in due course.
In this matter, the government and the courts have blood on their hands, but will that be enough to have them wake up and do their job in the community’s best interests?
The CAA calls on the government to act before more innocent lives are lost.
Immediately amend the Bail Act to unshackle the Courts (who will then have no excuse) and follow the New South Wales model of liberalising the ability of the courts to reject applications for the privilege of Bail in appropriate cases.
Immediately reinstate the offence of breach of bail conditions.
Immediately abandon the notion of lifting the age for criminal intent. All children develop at different stages; therefore, the age is somewhat irrelevant anyway, and all ages should be removed instead, relying on the common law principle of doli incapaxa, a Latin phrase meaning “incapable of evil”, a defence available to all children. children under 14 years.
Immediately develop proactive initiatives that divert young people from crime before offending rather than relying on diversion programs after offending.
Immediately abandon the flawed Youth Justice Bill, which, if enacted, will increase the crime rate.
The ball is now squarely in the Government’s court, and a failure to act as outlined will condemn this government forever.
This article gives an insight into the direction and traps in managing drug addiction.
Canada has been the window to the future of the drug addiction problem in Australia. It has shown the world the contrasting outcome of pragmatic management as opposed to the id
We will bring you further articles authorised to be published by Break the Needle, giving a window into where the drug epidemic is headed and what works and what doesn’t. We would do well to note the Canadian experience.
We have our own conflicted approach, with one arm of the government expending vast resources trying to control the illicit drug trade and use, the Legal system and the Health system dealing with the consequences of use, while all the while the government is promoting and facilitating drug use, with the Drug Injecting Room and further promotion of safe drugs, the Pill Testing service.
Captured by the failed ‘Harm Minimisation’ fallacy, we can expect the next big thing will be an emphasis on ‘Safer Supply’. The toe is already in the door with Pill Testing.
Opioid seizures exploded by 3,000% in Ontario City after a “safer supply” experiment.
Doctors and journalists wondering why local police failed to disclose concerning statistics to the public sooner.
JUL 07, 2024
A London (Canada) police drug seizure in April included 9,298 Dilaudid eight-milligram tablets.
By Matthew Hannick
Nigel Stuckey saved more lives during the last five years of his policing career than the previous three decades combined. “Every time you go back to the street, it has a different flavour,” said Stuckey, a former sergeant with the London Police Service (LPS) who retired in 2022. “As a frontline police officer, you are constantly going to overdoses in the city. I’ve administered Narcan to multiple people, and this is just something that never existed before.”
Stuckey first noticed a dramatic increase in overdoses and drug-related crimes occurring throughout his city – London, Ontario – in 2019. While the reasons behind this increase were initially unclear, recent data released by the LPS suggest that “safer supply” programs may be contributing to the problem.
Safer supply programs aim to save lives by providing drug users with pharmaceutical-grade alternatives to the untested street supply. That typically means distributing hydromorphone, a heroin-strength opioid, as an alternative to illicit fentanyl. However, addiction experts say the program is having the opposite effect, as many people who are enrolled in safer supply programs are illegally selling or trading their prescribed hydromorphone on the black market, a practice known as “diversion.”
Harm reduction advocates claim that safer supply diversion is not a significant issue, but according to an investigation into London Police Services (LPS) seizure data by journalist Adam Zivo, the number of hydromorphone tablets seized in London increased by 3,000 per cent after access to safer supply was greatly expanded in 2020.
In 2019, the LPS seized fewer than 1,000 hydromorphone tablets. This number jumped significantly in 2020 and continued to rise afterwards, reaching 30,000 tablet seizures last year – an unprecedented amount. The London police estimate that last year’s record will be met or exceeded by the end of 2024.
Doctors have said that this is only representative of a small fraction of what is actually out there, and that just 3-4 of these pills, if snorted, are enough to induce an overdose in a new user.
Some people are wondering why this data wasn’t released months, if not years, earlier.
Dr. Sharon Koivu, a London-based addiction physician, was among the first to recognize the harms of safer supply and has been warning the public about widespread diversion for years. Based on her clinical experiences, she believes that diverted safer supply hydromorphone is causing new addictions and falling into the hands of youth.
When Koivu tried to speak out against safer supply and call attention to diversion and an overall lack of program transparency, she was bullied and told that the suffering she was witnessing didn’t exist. This harassment was so severe that her mental health deteriorated and she worried about whether her career had been irreversibly damaged – yet the London police had quietly possessed data showing that she was right all along.
“It’s become an ideological thing,” she said. “People seem to have doubled down on the information they have. They don’t want to hear from someone who has information and concerns that don’t align with their, I’m going to say, ideology – because it’s not science.”
News of skyrocketing hydromorphone seizures might have remained hidden from the public had it not been for a major bust earlier this year.
On April 12, the London police announced a drug seizure which included 9,298 hydromorphone eight-milligram tablets. When Zivo inquired into this seizure, he received no answers to his questions for almost two months. He says that he was “stonewalled” and that the police seemed unwilling to release key data until it became impossible for them not to.
Zivo found it particularly concerning that the 2019-2023 hydromorphone seizure data was not released earlier. “Journalists and addiction physicians have been trying to raise the alarm about this issue for years,” he said, “but have been called liars, grifters and fearmongers, despite the fact that data validating their concerns existed and was held by the London Police Service.”
Stuckey, who now works as a documentary filmmaker covering London’s homelessness, addiction and mental health crisis, had a similar experience when he queried the LPS about the 9,290 hydromorphone pills seized this April.
Despite multiple requests for information about a possible connection to safer supply, the police service did not get back to him. He expressed frustration at the police’s unresponsiveness and worried that a lack of government transparency is endangering both the general public and law enforcement officers.
“Members of the London Police Service are being put in harm’s way dealing with organized crime and firearms to take drugs off the street, which were provided by the federal government. It’s absolute lunacy that we are paying one branch of government to rid a problem that was created by another branch of government,” said Stuckey.
It would be deeply concerning if the LPS knowingly withheld data pertaining to safer supply diversion. Not only has the failure to publish such data hindered informed public debate and policy development, it has also compromised the safety of the very communities which police are tasked with protecting.
According to Zivo, safer supply programs have benefitted from the silence of powerful institutions like the LPS. He said that, as there seems to be significant institutional resistance to acknowledging the community harms of safer supply, then more attention and trust should be given to local grassroots-level addiction medicine practitioners “who are bravely testifying to what they are seeing in their clinics.”
However, Dr. Koivu thinks that “the tide is turning” and that more people are beginning to understand the harms of safer supply
“I think it’s unfortunate that this data wasn’t made available sooner, when it was relevant to the funding of these programs and the changes we’re seeing in the city. The police need to be accountable for that. I really don’t understand their rationale for not addressing this” she said. “They hung me out to dry while knowing that what I was saying was accurate. If the police are afraid to come forward, no wonder physicians are afraid to come forward, too.”
To say the CAA has deep concerns about this Bill and the adverse impact it will have on raising youth crime in this state is a gross understatement.
What is generally not well understood is that this Bill is ‘the foot in the door’ for further introducing the concept of ‘Restorative Justice’, a monumental change in how Justice is dispensed in this State.
A plan that promotes ideology over pragmatism.
Significant changes included in this Bill include the plethora of conferences and committees required to manage each offender instead of the concept of punishment and accountability, which has been whitewashed out of this Bill.
Preventing young people from committing crimes in the first place is not even mentioned.
Effectively, a child can take a position where they will not comply with any processes available to the Courts or any other authorities under this Bill, and nothing can be done about it. No punishment can be applied, regardless of the child’s actions.
We suspect that the majority of the community and many politicians do not understand the consequences of this Bill, and none of them are good.
Why wasn’t the community advised of this change? We are unaware of where the Government of the day achieved a mandate for such a severe and monumental change to the principles of Justice.
It took five years to draft, underscoring the difficulty and, given the outcome, incompetence displayed in the principles that have evolved to form this Bill.
This Bill will continue to stoke crime, not diminish it.
‘A committee was formed to design a Horse ( the Bill to Reform Youth Justice), but they came up with a camel ( no ordinary Camel but a two-humped Bactrian Camel with three legs).’
With all the effort of five years, the Bill as presented does not address the issue the community now faces and is riddled with extreme socialist ideology and drafted by a committee that has no understanding of the people they are supposed to be protecting. It will feed the crime wave.
The Bill misses the mark by a long way.
Central to the flaw in this Bill is the assumption that children under thirteen (13) cannot form criminal intent.
This assumption isn’t based on any empirical data and flies in the face of the reality of the evolution of human development.
Over the last two decades, the development of young people has accelerated faster than any other preceding era.
The speed at which this has occurred is most evident in the last ten years when evolution achieved warp speed, driven by two significant factors: Nutrition and Technology.
The ‘canary in the coal mine’, the juvenile crime surge, generally ignored, has seen the accelerated crime rate by Juveniles and the failure to recognise the changes that were occurring in front of us all.
Nutrition
The impact of a higher level of nutrition in recent times must be seen as positive as young people will probably grow up healthier than their predecessors, but with that nutrition comes increased physical development. It’s not an issue until you realise that young people, on average, are taller and better developed physically than their predecessors. A phenomenon that immature minds can and do exploit.
Technology
Technology continues to accelerate at warp speed, and young people born in this era are the ones who maximise its use. They are more connected and have access to more data than previous generations ever dreamed of. This massive influx of good and bad information has developed young people’s mental acuity well beyond the perceived norm. This has happened without comparative life skills development.
They, therefore, lack the ability and maturity to process and analyse this physical development effectively, leading them to emulate others without understanding the consequences or ignoring the consequences because there are none.
Impact
Today, a 10 – 12-year-old is the equivalent of a 13–15-year-old ten years ago.
The Bill is headed in the wrong direction and should instead be lowering the age of criminal responsibility, not lifting it, particularly when the child understands what they did was criminal.
Lifting the age of criminal intent to 12 years before children can be charged with a crime, irrespective of their development, is a recipe for increased crime. Waiting until they are older before any legal intervention can occur entrenches the child further into crime, making efforts to rehabilitate them from crime much more difficult.
Early intervention will reduce crime and improve the chances of young people developing without the stigma of exposure to Legal processes.
Why do we have to wait until a young person is climbing the hierarchy of crime before any action is taken?
Remnants of the stolen car after Burwood fatality. Picture: Nine News/Today
It was a needless and shocking fatality, avoidable on a number of levels, and probably would have had more significant consequences had the thieves not taken a top-end car with all its advanced safety features to protect them, but not the innocent and hapless victim.
This needless loss of life is the direct consequence of a government ignoring advice, and unfortunately, the trajectory the government is on will only increase the risks, not mitigate them.
The government response was reported as:
A state government spokeswoman said what happened at Burwood was an unthinkable tragedy.
“Our thoughts are with the loved ones of the man who lost his life,” the spokeswoman said.
“Details about the incident are still being investigated and we are in close contact with Victoria Police. We are confident police will apprehend those who are still on the run as quickly as possible.”
She said Victoria had more police on the beat than any other state of territory and that the force targeted the worst young offenders, making 2700 arrests in the past year.
This statement attributed to a spokesperson is heartless and disrespectful to the victim and insulting to his family. We are not sure how the thoughts of the government can be with the Victim’s loved ones when they don’t even have the courtesy to use Ash Gordon’s name. However, the revelation in this statement should worry every Victorian when the spokesperson bragged of the 2700 arrests in the past year.
Again and again, this government ignores the simple concept of prevention, which is the only tried and proven way to stop this growing crime tsunami.
Arresting offenders is essential, but it will not reduce crime as the perpetrators are as inane as their actions. Still, they believe they won’t get caught, so the whole concept of deterrence is lost, exacerbated by the current judicial practices that obviously fail miserably to address the real issues.
The CAA has long argued that there are mechanisms that have been tried and worked in the past that could be reintroduced. A serious investment of money and resources into provocative policing is required to stem the tide.
The problem is set to become much worse as the government processes its latest effort, the Youth Justice Bill.
This 1100-page Bill that took five years to write doesn’t herald any innovation but is an extension of all the bad aspects of the current system. All the current flaws are further entrenched.
So, more of the same, only worse. More people will die, and more lives will be ruined, including devastating our young, because the government is focused on an unproven experimental concept, Restorative Justice, which nobody can indicate where this process has worked.
The government’s current and future strategies do not deal with diverting young people from crime.
Unbelievably, their new Youth Justice Bill regularly mentions diversion as one of its central planks. However, that is not a diversion from crime but from the legal system.
The two concepts are not mutually inclusive; they are different and seek different outcomes, which, in our view, are counterproductive objectives. Under the government’s new Bill, when a child commits multiple offences or a series of offences, there is no intervention or effort to have the child accept accountability or be subject to consequences. The Bill aims to put the child through a series of meetings and conferences, assuming that will solve the problem.
The recommendations of the CAA would have gone a long way to avoiding this tragic situation. See:
A necessary and effective process of reducing the crime associated with cars is to ensure the vehicle, when stolen, can’t be used for the crook’s intended purpose. Take away their tools of trade; in this case, the stolen car, and the crime of Aggravated Burglary and car theft will plummet. Moreover, there are a raft of other serious crimes that stolen vehicles are currently used in commissioning; this initiative will curtail overall criminal activity. Crooks may have to resort to public transport or Uber.
An upgraded and relocated (within the vehicle) G-Tag could replace the E-Tag and perform that function to enable authorities to turn off the car, thwarting the crook’s ability to use the vehicle for criminal activity, including driving recklessly.
There will also be a perfect chance the car can be recovered intact, a blessing for those of the lower socio-economic strata, and the reduced losses of vehicles should reduce insurance premiums to benefit us all.
A number of cars already come with this capacity, and the owner can activate the disabling function; however, this assumes that the crooks didn’t take the victim’s phone and the victim is in a state to make sound decisions. Totally temporarily disabling the car at the wrong time could cause more significant risks to the community. Imagine if a car was disabled at speed on a freeway without warning; this would cause carnage. With control of this resource by authorities, the vehicle could be monitored and disabled safely. With the owner having control, the consequences for their partner driving the car during a domestic dispute could have disastrous consequences. See:
One problem the government has is being briefed by people who are not in touch with reality. The government was recently given a confidential briefing on youth-related matters only to have the staff from the Justice Department responsible for writing strategy for the government complain that the presentation was too graphic and stressful.
It is interesting how the victims of this crime may view this sensitivity, and it goes a long way to show that those drafting government policy are out of touch with the reality of the issues, perhaps living in a bubble of fantasy. Given some of their recent contributions, fantasy appropriately categorises their efforts. Unfortunately, the tragic death on Tuesday involving a stolen car is a portend of more to come. Lives are wasted by inaction. See:
It is fast heading in the direction that the only option for Victorians is to demonstrate against the Government’s direction as it is not only ruining people’s lives now living in fear but also ruining the lives of young Victorians coerced into crime.
An article appeared in the Herald Sun on the 20th of June under the above heading and exposed the real and present dangers that Victorians face.
Crimes involving children as young as 10 years old have soared to their highest level since 2010 as alarming new figures reveal the state’s growing youth crime wave.
Children aged 14 to 17 years old were “over-represented” in burglaries, assaults, robberies and car thefts while almost 400 youth gang members were arrested within the past 12 months.
Baby-faced offenders aged 10 or 11 years old also recorded a 52.6 per cent spike in the number of offences committed.
More than a third of young criminals aged between 10 and 17 years old are repeat offenders, with the number of recidivist offenders rising by 10.4 per cent.
Children aged 10 to 13 years old were responsible for 84 aggravated burglaries across the state.
Five years ago, they had only been involved in 18.
These alarming figures are from the Crimes Statistics Agency Victoria, and apart from the danger these figures indicate, we are exposed to the more problematic fact that the Government is working hard to fan the flames of the issue, not resolve it.
More importantly, the government holds overall responsibility and is protecting ineptitude in the various arms of governments responsible for managing youth crime.
These must be held to account as much as the government.
The Courts
Daily, yet another juvenile responsible for atrocious crimes is being granted bail.
And given the Bail Act, it makes us wonder just what the judiciary is at.
The recent Bail Amendment Act 2023 (the Act), which commenced on 25 March 2024, made further changes to the Bail Act 1977, seeking to ensure bail laws protect the whole community and better target the use of remand for cases where it is necessary to prevent an unacceptable risk to community safety.-https://www.criminalsolicitorsmelbourne.com.au/blog/victorian-bail-law-reform
The Act is clear and applies standard English interpretations to the understanding of the Act’s purpose as amended; how do the courts circumnavigate this legislation, not occasionally but regularly, without apparent intervention by the government?
If the Attorney General does not provide leadership, the Director of Public Prosecutions must appeal some of these Court decisions.
What’s the good of having a government that produces a law that the courts ignore, suggesting they are not interested in subservience to the legislation?
It is our opinion that we are reaping the folly of the Restorative Justice fantasy forced on us as a solution to crime, but it has been an abject failure – just look at the crime statistics.
Why would any sane, reasonable person countenance any principles of that failed social experiment defies logic? And it is even more astounding that the judiciary could be seduced by this rubbish.
The Police
The Police do not help the whole issue.
The first point is that they need to stop making excuses that support the mindset that they can arrest their way out of the problem.
It took two decades to convert the Victoria Police Force under two visionary Chief Commissioners, Miller and Glare, from one predominantly reactive (as they are today) to a predominantly proactive force, particularly with youth.
The results were that crime by juveniles was not the epidemic it now is, and overall, crime declined as fewer juvenile offenders grew into adult offenders rather than managing and encouraging the juveniles into crime.
It took only one Chief Commissioner to destroy the effective direction of the force and three consecutive Chiefs, predominantly with a background of exclusive reactive federal police experience, to ensure the proactive approach was kept from developing, even though many operational police know the value of the proactive approach but gained no support as the police priority remains reactive.
The current Chief Commissioner has attempted to push back against the trend with limited success, as the crime statistics illustrate.
There is a major problem when you have an Acting Deputy Commissioner of Regional Operations, Brett Curran, quoted as saying, “A small group of hardened” young criminals were now committing severe and violent crimes more often.” (spin)
The following line says, ‘nearly 400 youth gang members have been arrested in the past 12 months.’ (fact)
Mr Curran also said, “Police arrested seven youth gang members, child thieves and car thieves every day during the past year.” (Spin)
That claim by Mr Curran equates to 2,555 youth gang member arrests, not nearly 400.
Indeed, some are arrested time and time again. Why? Because the courts are failing in their duty to the citizens of this state.
So much for the claim of a small number.
Victims would undoubtedly be impressed by the Deputies’ analysis (and maths) as they try to put their lives back together after an experience with the “small group”.
We wonder whether the Deputy who spent a considerable time out of policing as Daniel Andrew’s Chief of Staff has lost perspective.
As a Police executive, he has to learn not to use political spin he knew in his last job. The community sees straight through it and expects better from their Police leadership.
Department of Justice Youth Workers
Very little is said about their role or lack of success in the youth space, so we generally can only rely on the data, and by that measure, they have failed demonstrably.
They are referred to often in legislative discussions and are provided with powers to do their job. Still, there is something obviously and categorically wrong with the function of that government component.
These Youth workers aim to empower – young people in custody to steer their lives in a more positive direction when they return to the community”.
What a nonsensical function because the courts have demonstrated they are determined to have no juveniles of any age in custody. This supports the view that the courts wear this as a badge of honour and a demonstration that they are not subservient to the legislation. It is very dangerous and challenging to our democracy.
So, theoretically, those youth workers at the Department of Justice have little to do, as no juveniles are returning to the community; they never left.
Lifting the age of criminal responsibility
If a government were ever grossly tone-deaf, this issue is a classic. The age of criminal responsibility is planned to move from 10 to 14 years during a youth crime tsunami that the CAA warned was coming nine years ago. This has got to be the stupidest act any government has embarked upon in the crime space.
All this is based on is a feared notion that all children will end up in jail – which they don’t. Ideological nonsense is based on no empirical evidence.
This rubbish sways a government that wants to be taken seriously and is in denial of reality, a dangerous place for any government.
Moreover, children in this age bracket only ever get charged as distinct from being put in jail if they are not Doli Incapax, meaning incapable of forming criminal intent.
The question, therefore, is what to do with these miscreants, and that is a million-dollar question that all the “experts” advising the government on the bill have failed to resolve because no solution is offered.
The non-solution
The non-solution was reported as,
‘Police would still retain the power to intervene with younger offenders, including having the power to transport ten and 11-year-olds that find themselves in trouble with the law.’
The solution
The solution remains as elusive as it always has, and this legislation will not help, as it lacks a fundamental guiding principle for children and young people: accountability.
If children, or anybody, knows there are no consequences for criminal behaviour, then that’s what they will do, and they won’t change. Why would they if they enjoy it?
The problem is a lack of foresight and understanding of children and juveniles.
Children and Juveniles who play sports are less likely to commit offences, and the key is that sport has rules, and if the rules are disobeyed, there are consequences. That applies whether they are spectators or participants. Those youths who regularly attend school are also less likely to offend than those who don’t; again, rules with consequences.
Most people of all ages live within society’s rules; if they digress, there are consequences.
A significant contributor by a long measure to our present youth crisis is that for criminal behaviour, there are no consequences if you break the rules.
The issue of incarceration of children has been the primary driver for this reform, based on the emotive argument ‘you can’t put children in jail’, but the problem is being viewed from the wrong perspective.
The reform must encompass the principle of consequences, as all the other approaches are ineffective.
Rather than demonise the broad ‘jail’ concept, we should look at how it can positively affect young people.
We have long advocated that the justice system is too afraid to deal with the crisis of putting a child in jail, and often, that is not serving the interest of the juvenile or child.
One of the current flaws is that the judiciary views young offenders when considering penalties from an adult perspective.
Young people have a different perspective of time than adults, and a week or so in detention, where they gain privileges by compliance, will have a marked positive impact on them.
Young people respond exceptionally well to rules as they offer some solace and security; however, if they have never been taught discipline and breaking rules has consequences, it doesn’t work.
We are not talking about traditional views of jail but of securing the young person without privileges for weeks, not years. Their behaviour dictates the time they are in secure accommodation, not the judiciary. As much as the judiciary thinks they know how a child will respond, they don’t because they are not there with the child 24/7.
There are significant omissions in the proposed Youth Justice Bill currently before Parliament.
The most significant omission in the Bill
As much as the parents of these miscreants (if they have any) are criticised for lack of action, the Bill does nothing to elevate the role of the parents or guardians.
Yes, there are hopeless parents responsible for troubled children, but the vast majority try; many try but are judged poorly, and there is no provision to help upskill parents, and they have all but been omitted from this Bill. They have an essential role to play in reinforcing other initiatives.
Home detention
Supported by electronic monitoring, home detention should be the first option for any child convicted of an offence. Children do not understand ‘Orders’, and the other plethora of titles bandied about in the Courtroom.
Many need to understand that if they walk out after a court hearing unpenalized after a hearing, they haven’t necessarily beaten the charges, and their bragging rights within their cohort are worthless.
The new sophisticated Electronic Monitoring (EM) devices can fix a virtual perimeter for the child to live within, while providing for their education, sports and other essential family functions.
The EM device can alert a parent their child is leaving the house, breaching physical or social media curfew rather than finding they are gone the following day. Home detention means they cannot exercise their free will outside boundaries, and the EM gives the parents the tools they need to enforce it.
Use of their social media devices also needs to be controlled, and privileges gained by good behaviour and compliance to the rules, allowing more access.
The length of time that the child is in home detention should be based on the child’s or youth’s behavioural improvement.
Home detention is a very cost-effective way to manage miscreant children and divert them out of their criminal behavioural cycle.
Although we won’t hold our breath, maybe the enlightened members of parliament will see this legislation for what it is: a half-baked hotchpotch of ideological one-liners masquerading as legislation for the betterment of the State and its children.
There indeed are flaws in the current system, and they should be fixed rather than embarking on an untried excursion. Fix it; don’t replace it with thousands of pages of convoluted rubbish that will only hurt our most vulnerable children.
Inevitably, this legislation will leave vulnerable children at further risk, will do nothing to prevent more victims from being traumatised and will further impede effective policing.
An urgent community-based examination of a better way forward might lead to a real improvement in our juvenile justice system.
Simply raising the age of criminal culpability will have the effect of increasing crime as there are no barriers to young people offending.
The CAA at least supports and acknowledges that the Government is trying to address the Youth Crime issue, but their approach has intrigued us.
It is obvious that those advising the government are so far off the mark that they make these new government approaches to juvenile crime almost laughable.
Unbelievably, this legislation has taken five years to develop, and it ends up something as inane as this.
The proposed changes to the relevant laws will not have any meaningful impact because they are designed to appease, not provide a solution.
The major flaw is how the juveniles who are the perpetrators react because that is critical to the success or otherwise.
In general, there will be no reaction because they will ignore any changes even if they hear about them, and that is highly problematic. They will not alter their behaviour if they even hear about it, and much less understand what these changes mean. As unrealistic as it may seem, youths commit crimes believing they won’t get caught, so sabre rattling at Spring Street is about as useless as hip pockets in underwear.
Let’s take a realistic look at the proposed changes,
Recruiting children for crime.
Once a child has entered into crime, their mentors are to them demi-gods, and the last thing they would do is cooperate in bringing them down. The drug scene is renowned for the loyalty users have to their dealers, and users rarely dob them in. The closest authorities get is that the perpetrator’s best mate is probably their dealer, but proving it is nigh on impossible.
The 10-year penalty only applies if recruiters are caught; given the understanding of most offenders, this will have no deterrent effect.
Contrary to popular belief, the recruiters are not some giant ogre, but most probably, they are the same or similar age to the juvenile being recruited. The age disparity of the young means that twelve months could have a substantial impact on the aspirations of the younger juvenile.
Using intensive supervision orders.
Empowering the Courts to apply intensive supervision orders is also next to useless because the perpetrators will not modify their ways, as being issued with that order has several flaws.
The child will generally have no idea what it means, and in their minds, they have beaten the charges (bragging rights). That occurs every time a child appears before a Court for a crime and walks out the door afterwards; irrespective of the outcome of their hearing, they have beaten it, they are free.
If Youth justice workers were effective, we would not be in the crisis we now face, so having them play a part in this space will only exacerbate the issue, and the problem will continue to escalate. History shows that there are never enough youth workers to effectively monitor young offenders.
Consider how often juvenile offenders now breach bail – another court order.
Youth Justice workers gaining judicial powers.
According to the media report, the legislation allows youth justice workers to exercise judicial power by deciding if and when a child might need to be electronically monitored (an ankle bracelet).
There are several critical failures in this approach.
Allowing youth justice workers to exercise judicial discretion in this manner will guarantee that the EM will never be used, as it is contrary to the ethos of youth workers.
Most significantly, it allows unqualified (in the area of Law) persons to make decisions that alter the conditions of a court-imposed Bail, effectively overruling a court’s decision.
This undermines the Justice system, and the power must never be granted.
Inevitably, this power will be sought by all Youth workers simply by adding Justice to their title, as is already the case.
A cursory search reveals no less than six occasions where the term Justice is used in their title or job description, but they are not part of the Justice Department. The courts are the rightful place to adjudicate matters such as bail conditions, and the Courts must not be undermined.
This must be non-negotiable.
No matter how well they may be intentioned, it is simply not a Youth workers role.
EM Monitoring
It is highly probable that the Youth Justice workers would not be capable of effectively applying the necessary restrictions to enable the child to have reasonable freedom but sufficient to achieve compliance with their bail conditions.
It is not simply putting on an EM and monitoring it; many technical aspects of its operation are necessary to be effective, and that involves determining the conditions/locations that the child will observe. We note that their parents are not even worth mentioning, and irrespective of their parenting skills, this is very sad.
The system must have integrity and accountability for the opportunity for Natural Justice to be applied to any change in bail conditions imposed by a Court. The victims and the perpetrator (and, critically, the perpetrator’s parents) must be able to input into the monitoring parameters. The courts are the final arbitrators to determine the parameters and conditions of the use of EM, the opportunity to exist for decisions to be tested, and the final application to be capable of review.
It should not be up to the worker or, for example, the police as they are intimately involved, but in the child’s best interest, the decisions have to be made on the evidence by a dispassionate court.
The approach proposed is not in the best interest of the child.
Intensive supervision orders
The name implies something so open-ended that it can prove useless to influencing the average 10 to18-year-old hell-bent on the thrill of their criminal endeavours.
If they ignore the bail conditions they already have, then the ‘Intense’ order will also be ignored; to children, it is just a word.
Youth workers and police will spend all their time tracking down the miscreants and taking them before the court to be re-released. The impact of reducing crime will be nil.
If a child misbehaves and requires upgraded supervision, they must be controlled by electronic monitoring.
Transferring prisoners 18-21 to adult prisons.
This significant announcement is totally unnecessary and no more than political spin.
But the power already exists and properly is a matter for the Courts, not some bureaucratic whim.
Raising the age of criminal responsibility.
We have previously raised the stupidity of this move on many occasions as it will lead to more younger children being involved in crime, recruited at a younger and more impressionable age.
The idiots who proffer this notion that young children end up in jail have no contact with reality.
How often are juveniles jailed? Practically never.
We do not argue that children should be jailed; however, where the circumstances are required, a short term (weeks, not months) would be appropriate not only to protect the community but also to protect the children from themselves and achieve Court compliance.
Threats of jail are of no value unless the threats are followed through.
It was very recently that a child in this age category committed murder but was not prosecuted, as many children who commit serious crimes are not because the threshold of the child’s understanding to meet the level of intent required before a prosecution can proceed. The system generally was working fine, so why the need to fiddle with it, mainly as it will not reduce crime but exacerbate it.
The energy of those pushing this agenda should be redirected to something useful, like developing effective strategies to avoid children committing crimes in the first place. A novel idea.
Police Powers
Police would still retain the power, including having the power to transport 10 to and 11-year-olds who find themselves in trouble with the law.
The picture being painted is that this age group are too young to be prosecuted, so what do the police do with them when they are transported?
Take them out for a Maccas to reward their behaviour.
“This would ensure the state’s youngest offenders aren’t given free rein to offend.” A statement attributed to a senior government source.
They can’t be serious or that naive, but they are. Heaven help us.
These changes took five years to develop, reflecting poorly on the government and its capabilities. In five years, and this is the best they can come up with? Heads must roll.
It will be up to the public in two years to decide the value of this strategy, and in our view, there will be no tangible improvement in the situation from this scheme, which might be reflected in the ballot box.
We are just going to have to grow many more lettuces.
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