Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll outlines her plan to rein in youth crime
Queensland’s top cop said that while detention may give the community respite from teen criminals, it will never scare them straight so police have to work smarter, not harsher.
Toowoomba
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Queensland’s top cop can pinpoint when youth crime started to spike across our state, but said more work was needed to address the root cause of the problem.
Speaking with The Chronicle, Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll said her officers reported an increase in offending across the board in early 2022.
This included offences related to mental health, road crash deaths and youth crime.
“We know that clearly from February last year that things changed dramatically and not just in Toowoomba, we have seen it across Queensland,” she said.
“I talk to police commissioners in other states.
“It is a phenomenon everywhere and it is a challenging one.”
Ms Carroll made the comments during a visit to the Garden City on Friday, about two weeks after she addressed a public safety forum at Empire Theatres’ Armitage Centre.
That forum was hosted by Police Minister Mark Ryan and Youth Justice Minister Leanne Linard and was held after the shocking death of the 75-year-old photographer Robert Brown after he was pushed over during an alleged robbery in the heart of the CBD.
The community forum came about following sustained calls during The Chronicle’s Enough is Enough Campaign to have Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk address the escalation of youth crime in our city.
Tension boiled over with the crowd expressing its anger at what it saw was a justice system that fails victims.
Ms Carroll said her police have taken steps to make Toowoomba safer.
“I get well briefed by my police about the stats, but what a forum does is give you the sentiment that the community is hurting,” she said.
“Many of the people spoke about not feeling safe, that is wrong (and) we need to do a lot of work to change that.
“It is very hard to watch good people hurting.”
Car theft has been on the rise in the Darling Downs since as far back as 2016 but according to QPS data there were big spikes in early 2022 and again over the Christmas period into 2023.
Meanwhile robberies and assaults also spiked over those periods.
The main line of attack by police has been to roll out a co-responder program where police and Youth Justice case workers patrol the city together.
Ms Carroll said those teams have proven successful in other cities because they have “intimate” knowledge of each high-risk young offender, their upbringing and the problems they face at home.
“(The co-responder teams) go to the next level to make sure the offenders are referred to the services they need, to case manage them and their families,” she said.
“The plan is to not necessarily have the teams patrolling 24/7 but do an analysis of when those kids are out so we can concentrate our efforts.
“We know these children come from very difficult and complex backgrounds.
“Some have cognitive issues, mental health issues, they come from domestic violence backgrounds, or they have drug and alcohol issues.
“So success has to involve assisting the family.”
The co-responder teams will be backed with $25m from the state government to fund extra street patrols in crime hot spots across the state, including Toowoomba.
The QPS is also recruiting an extra 500 officers from overseas and is developing a specialist team tasked with combing social media for evidence of youth offending and having that material taken down.
While Ms Carroll said she understood the community’s desire for harsher sentencing for young offenders, ultimately a more holistic approach was needed.
She pointed to an overall increase of 80,000 more young people in Queensland in the past 10 years that corresponded with about 4000 fewer young offenders.
“There is the 10 per cent of young offenders that are the most challenging,” Ms Carroll said.
“In some instances the only way you can get respite is when they are in detention centres, but we also know that having kids in detention centres for long periods of time does not work.”
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