Youth crime: 15-year-olds Victoria’s most prolific young criminals
EXCLUSIVE: STARTLING new figures have revealed Victoria’s most prolific youth criminals, laying bare a “live now, die young” mentality that has shocked police.
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CHILDREN aged just 15 are Victoria’s most prolific youth criminals.
And girls are responsible for one in five youth crimes, startling new figures compiled for the Herald Sun have revealed.
Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton, who is holding a Youth Crime Summit on Thursday, said it was time for bold change to deal with youths being “locked out” of society and trapped on a crime treadmill so bad that some police were operating a “sausage machine ... arresting the same, again and again”.
Possible measures he has flagged include high-supervision bail laws and closer monitoring of social media.
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A four-month Herald Sun investigation of youth crime, in partnership with Victoria Police, found:
A “LIVE now, die young” mentality is driving youths to “one-up” each other and commit increasingly violent and dangerous acts;
FIFTEEN-year-olds are the most prolific youth offenders, each law breaker being responsible for an average of three incidents a year;
THOSE aged 14 and 15 also account for more than a third of youth offenders: major spikes in offending occur between ages 13 and 15.
STRANGERS are “swarming” on social media to carry out impromptu crime sprees;
GANGSTER wannabes are blowing cash from robberies on trivial items such as designer shoes and hats;
YOUTH criminals are pleading guilty early to dodge strict bail conditions, so they can reoffend sooner.
Mr Ashton said the depth of the problem struck him when he saw an image shared by a young criminal.
“There was a photo of a really flash house, like one of those really big McMansions, that one offender had been showing another offender and the message with that was: ‘We keep stealing, we’ll end up in houses like this’,” Mr Ashton (above) said.
Mr Ashton said: “That to me was sad … these young people are aspirational, but they’re aspiring to gain wealth and success by being thieves and engaging in crime, rather than, ‘If we work hard, look where we can live one day, in a nice house like this’. To me, that was a very distorted message.”
Police say the problem ex-tends to youths from all ethnicities and backgrounds.
While the number of youth offenders has been decreasing over recent years, police are alarmed by a minority who repeatedly commit increasingly serious and violent crimes.
Freshly compiled Crime Statistics Agency data shows 13 per cent of youth offenders aged 10 to 17 were involved in five or more crime incidents in the year to March.
The average number of incidents for problem juveniles increased across every age group. Even 10-year-olds were linked to an average of two criminal incidents.
The number of criminal incidents linked to children aged 10 to 17 spiked 7.6 per cent to 20,380, after previous declines.
Mr Ashton said “bigger issues than we understand” were driving youth crime, and the role of parents was crucial.
“There seem to be two groups of parents with offenders: this group of parents that feel like they don’t have any control over the young people; and there are other parents who don’t give a toss where their kids are at any hour of the day or night,” he said.
Last month police held a special youth forum in a bid to better understand the mindset of offenders.
“What they had to say was sometimes hard to hear,” Mr Ashton said.
“Melbourne, the world’s most liveable city, is anything but liveable for some of our young people, who told us they felt ‘locked out’ of society.
“There is anger amongst these young people, because for some of them they feel rejected by the broader community, and that’s why the time is right for our summit.”
Victoria Police is gearing up to have a “closer look at social media” because young criminals rely on it to gather and then disperse. “Being able to get that data really quickly and analyse it is really important for us,” Mr Ashton said.
And he said broader understanding would be needed.
“Unless we start to deal with the contributing factors, what’s driving it, we’re probably not going to reduce that offending ... we’ll just keep arresting more young people, and arrest the same young people again, and again, and again.
The summit is a chance to “put a stake in the ground” and plan to make Victoria safer: “There’s an opportunity for us to jump on this now.”