Massive cost of Gold Coast’s youth crime nightmare

Householders and small business owners are paying dearly for the youth crime wave sweeping the Gold Coast. This is the reality they face.

WHAT is the true cost of the Gold Coast’s youth crime crisis?

It would be almost impossible to quantify.

In pure dollars, it must be tens of millions each year. And that’s before we get to the horrible fact that there have been Queenslanders killed and injured by young offenders in the past 12 months, losses that are of course far worse than financial.

This column spent much of yesterday visiting two cafes which were both broken into in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

Youths pictured breaking into the Black Lime Cafe in Carrara.

Youths posing with a Ford Mustang stolen from an address in Helensvale in pictures posted on social media.

The perpetrators at one of the break-ins were four young people who looked, from CCTV footage, to not yet be out of their teens.

We do not have similar footage to make a determination about who broke into the second venue.

But there were other, strikingly common links.

In both cases, offenders escaped with very little. No more than a couple of hundred dollars at most.

For that small return the business owners must shell out for window repairs and new tills. At one of the cafes, they also lost a day’s worth of takings.

That’s just two cafes, on one morning on the Gold Coast. How much might the accumulated losses for every such incident amount to each year?

Would those losses, for example, equate to more or less than the cost of employing more police and building more youth detention centres?

Teens are arrested after allegedly stealing a vehicle in Ashmore. Picture: Bradley Cowper.

Deputy Premier Steven Miles created a lot of headlines last Friday when, in response to news that a Townsville magistrate had released 13 young offenders in one day, he said what a lot of people were thinking.

“We’ve given them the tools and the resources, now they need to act,” he said.

“We cannot stand and watch a media stunt like this one from someone who clearly does not agree with our policies (that are) designed to keep dangerous offenders out of the community.

“We cannot allow the safety of Townsville residents to be held to ransom by rogue courts and rogue justices.”

The comments quite rightly set off a firestorm for flying in the face of the separation of powers between politicians and the independent judiciary.

But while Mr Miles’s frustration may have been in many ways understandable, there was another problem he didn’t acknowledge.

Nine of the children involved had been in watch house detention. It is suspected the magistrate in question released them back into a fearful community because there was nowhere more suitable for them to go.

Deputy Premier Steven Miles. Picture: Annette Dew.

Building and operating juvenile detention centres is, of course, the responsibility of state governments, not courts.

That a magistrate sees no better option than releasing such kids back out onto the streets is an indictment of a failing system of which the courts are only one part.

The state government wants to look tough on youth crime, but what have the measure taken actually achieved?

Not a lot, it seems, when we are now at a point when it’s impossible to find anyone on the Gold Coast, who, if they haven’t been subject to a break-in attempt themselves, certainly knows plenty of others who have.

The price, of course, is paid by ordinary people – including the two cafe owners this columnist spoke with yesterday.

Increasingly such small business people are shrugging off these incidents as the price of doing business, something that cannot be avoided in the modern Gold Coast.

That’s just not good enough. These business people pay enough in taxes and charges to expect far better.

Angry words from politicians are not enough. There needs to be more serious action taken.

Before the cost being paid becomes too high to bear.

Follow @keithjwoods

Originally published as Massive cost of Gold Coast’s youth crime nightmare