Acting children’s commissioner wants crime stats broken down into youth and adult sections

The NT’s Acting Children’s Commissioner has called for crime statistics to be broken down into youth and adult sections, for a better understanding of the youth crime situation

Acting Children’s Commissioner Sally Sievers has called for crime statistics to be broken down into youth and adult sections, hoping it improves an understanding of the youth crime situation.

Speaking to ABC Radio, Acting Children’s Commissioner said it was hard to gauge what crimes youth were committing based on how the stats were currently presented by Northern Territory Police.

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“I noticed the stats that came out on Friday, they weren’t broken into youth crime more, or adults,” she said.

“It’s really just meant to be that closer analysis of what’s going on, for children, obviously, what’s going on for children in that space.

“We generally know it’s much easier to apprehend children, children’s criminality is often spontaneous and so from my conversations with police over youth, it’s much easier to clean up the breaking inches from your child, I think, as than what it is for adults.”

Ms Sievers said their were a number of changes which would help improve the behaviour of the Territory’s youth and the perception of them.

“There are many changes (I’d like to see made) but the ones which are the two priorities would be one to cover all children so that we can do that preventive work and actually show the amazing things that Territory children do, so we have the whole picture for the community,” she said.

“Second is to formalise the monitoring role that we have in the youth detention spaces in other places where children are detained.”

Acting Children’s Commissioner Sally Sievers

Ms Sievers said the pandemic may have skewed data and statistics needed to be recalibrated.

“It’s a time when we actually need to gather data from the post COVID so, in the rest of Australia lots of things have been amplified by the inequality that comes up in a COVID type situation,” she said.

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“Across Australia there’s been much greater reported domestic and family violence and that’s fairly common apparently internationally in places whether it’s an emergency or a disaster.

“We’ve seen that in Alice Springs in relation to youth we have seen increased crime.”

Originally published as Acting children’s commissioner wants crime stats broken down into youth and adult sections