Alice Springs bottle shop: Police officers stationed outside Liquorland as town battles crime wave
Two police officers are stationed outside this busy Liquorland bottle shop as crowds line up to buy booze - but there’s a tragic reason they’re there.
National
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In Alice Springs, buying booze starts with a police interrogation.
“Where are you taking the alcohol back to?” asks one of the pair of officers posted inside the bottle-shop entrance.
“Which hotel?” he demands to know, examining your driver’s licence.
“Room number?” he continues.
“Will you consume the alcohol?” — yes.
“Share it with anyone?” — no.
With that, customers queuing outside the busy Liquorland in the town’s CBD are allowed in to buy their Australia Day drinks.
Printed notices around the store detail the latest “temporary restrictions”, announced this week in response to a shocking wave of youth crime and alcohol-fuelled violence gripping the Central Australian town.
“In consultation with government and local police, we’ve made the following voluntary commitments on alcohol sales to help minimise alcohol related harm in the community,” the notice reads.
Under the new rules, which started on Monday, customers are limited to one purchase per day, and can buy up to two cartons of full-strength beer, cider or RTDs, one 750mL bottle of spirits, or six bottles of wine.
Additionally, takeaway sales of alcohol have been banned on Monday and Tuesday, and opening hours have been shortened to 3pm to 7pm.
But the new measures, announced by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Northern Territory Chief Minister Natasha Fyles after an emergency visit to the town, have been met with widespread scepticism.
“People are getting really pissed off,” says local bakery owner Darren Clark, who has attracted nationwide attention to the issue of crime in Alice Springs with his Facebook page Action for Alice.
“It’s not going to fix anything.”
Mr Clark said reducing the opening hours would only cause more problems, while doing nothing to address the underlying issues.
“There’s usually a rush at 2pm and then they go,” he said.
“But now the shopping centres at 3pm, when mums have picked their kids up, that’s when it’s peak hour. So everyone’s going, f**k I can’t even take my kids shopping. We can’t do it already, it’s so f**king scary.”
Mr Clark, who has lived in the town for 25 years, has been warning that the problems go far deeper than alcohol bans, which were rolled back in July last year after the Stronger Futures legislation lapsed.
“How does that stop a 13-year-old walking into a shopping centre with a machete?” he said.
Many of the children causing the problems are too young to buy alcohol anyway, and often resort to abusing common items like deodorant, methylated spirits, mouthwash and even hand sanitiser.
“They mix hand sanitiser with lemonade and orange juice,” he said. “They were coming into businesses and just stealing it off the counter and mixing out the front of shops and drinking it.”
On some nights there are “200 to 300 kids on the street”, he says, amid a terrifying surge in home invasions, car thefts, ram raids and assaults.
Businesses in the town, which has been described as a “war zone”, have been forced to take drastic measures. Most major retailers such as Woolworths now shut their doors at sunset to protect staff and customers.
Many shopfronts around the CBD have smashed windows.
“We’re going to lose another generation,” Mr Clark said.
“Albanese didn’t say a thing about the kids. They don’t know what to do. Someone was in on that meeting when they sat down. And they all sat there and it was like, ‘So, uh, what are we going to do?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Do we close the pubs down?’ They were going to close all the pubs down for three days or something. I hate to think what’s going to happen here Monday, Tuesday nights. They’ll go f**king nuts.”
Indigenous Alice Springs councillor Michael Liddle also argues there is one major problem with the new restrictions – they aren’t known to those who need them most.
“The problem with these new restrictions is that the target group doesn’t even know about them,” Mr Liddle said earlier this week.
“They know nothing about it. These are people who are walking aimlessly around town, looking for a drink. When there’s a public holiday, they wonder why supermarkets are closed. Now, they’re just going to wonder why the bottle shops are closed.”
Mr Clark said locals were fortifying their homes as the level of violence and brazenness of the crimes escalated.
“Crimsafe, alarms, cameras — but they don’t care,” he said.
“Last Saturday they went up to Cavenagh [Crescent], they got two cars up there, 15 kids got out, went around to the houses, got into one house, ripped out all the CCTV. They’re going around now cutting power supply to houses, turning meters off, ripping fuses out.”
Some 300 people have been arrested in Alice Springs in the past seven weeks alone, while another 400 were issued infringement notices.
Overnight on Tuesday four young men — one armed with an edged weapon — broke into the home of a 70-year-old woman, before allegedly assaulting her and stealing a mobile phone.
Detective Acting Senior Sergeant Adam Donaldson called it a “cowardly attack on a vulnerable member of our community,” as he urged witnesses to come forward.
Mr Clark fears it will only get worse.
“The next thing will be the ice,” he said.
“You take grog away from people, that’s fine, but watch the ice come. When they start getting guns — and they’ll get them, because they can get car keys. They’ll get into gun safes soon enough. That’s the scary part.”
— with Chloe Whelan
Originally published as Alice Springs bottle shop: Police officers stationed outside Liquorland as town battles crime wave
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