Olivia Jenkins: The government buried their heads in the sand until youth crime was too difficult to ignore
Victorian youth crime rates have soared and the government was warned, with the evidence right in front of them why didn’t they listen?
Opinion
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Numbers don’t lie. They’ve been painting the terrifying picture of Victoria’s skyrocketing crime crisis for years.
Last year, they told us youth crime was exploding, when we were already seeing the highest youth crime rate since 2010.
And this week, they told us that offending by children has soared to levels not seen since record keeping began in the early 90s.
Victoria Police’s top brass could see it coming, too, and tried to sound the alarm.
Right up until he was axed last month, former chief commissioner Shane Patton had warned Premier Jacinta Allan and her predecessor Daniel Andrews that crime would go “through the roof” if they forged ahead with watering down bail laws in 2023.
A plan that included remanding repeat offenders after three strikes on bail fell to the wayside.
Sources say this was because the government was strapped for cash and prison beds, a claim senior minister Steve Dimopoulos branded “ridiculous”.
Officers at the coalface have grown tired of rearresting the same offenders who had been bailed dozens of times.
“Once upon a time, our focus was on real crooks. They’re going under the radar. All the regional focus is on kids,” one said.
But if you asked Ms Allan and Police Minister Anthony Carbines months ago how they were tackling rising crime, they would have downplayed its impact, repeating at press conferences and in written statements that only “a small cohort of repeat offenders” were causing major harm in the community.
They would have reminded Victorians that they were supplementing weakened bail laws by slapping ankle bracelets on the worst offenders and tasking police “crime reduction teams” with knocking on their doors, making sure they were home and not breaching their bail.
After the bail laws were wound back, the government gutted funding for stopping crime before it started, halving the crime prevention budget from $24m to just $12m last year.
But now, violent crime has become too difficult to ignore.
Young men are being slashed to death with machetes, in some cases just days apart from one another.
More families than ever have been left traumatised by armed intruders smashing their way into their homes.
In February, Police Minister Anthony Carbines placed himself at odds with the Premier when he downplayed her instructions to undertake a review of Victoria’s bail laws.
Fast forward to Thursday, Mr Carbines said the Allan government “couldn’t act any quicker to get these laws before the parliament” when speaking about hurriedly introducing legislation on tougher bail and banning machetes.
But the numbers show us that the government was warned about rising crime each year for the better part of a decade.
It wasn’t until traumatised victims spoke out through the Herald Sun that leaders vowed to take action.
The evidence was there – in statistics, in shocking footage of murders and home invasions and in victims’ desperate pleas.
All the government had to do was listen.
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