If what we saw this week in Alice Springs was no more than a horrific fight between people from the settlement of Utopia and another family, that is the best possible scenario.
The bloodshed at the Todd Tavern and beyond would remain an internal dispute. People across the Northern Territory, however, know that is not what is going on.
They see hatred and fear on the streets that flows two ways.
Crime has tripled across the territory – there is chaos in Darwin, Katherine and Alice Springs.
The NT’s Chief Minister Eva Lawler is saying all the things we expect a politician to say in a crisis such as this – she is appalled, she has had enough, she is sending extra police. No children in the CBD after 6pm. There will be many police “bouncers” outside bottleshops.
It might work, for a few weeks.
At her attention-grabbing press conference in Darwin on Wednesday, it was police commissioner Michael Murphy – the one who is not trying to get reelected – who started talking about the longer term. He knows.
This man has been a police officer for a very long time – long enough to have locked up generations from the same family.
He has been to the funerals of Aboriginal people who died young after a life that could have been so much more.
If Murphy values his job, he will not say so but he knows that the only way out of decades of policy failure is the slow way.
“We are seeing children enter the criminal justice system and they become domestic violence offenders later in life so it is about looking at all those long-term strategies,” Murphy said.
There are no votes in the sorts of policies that steer kids away from crime. It feels abstract to talk about the importance of adequate housing as a non-negotiable but researchers know that without it, a child’s life goes off the rails pretty fast.
Other crime prevention policies look like kindness to criminals, and they sort of are. In reality, justice reinvestment is a kindness to all of us because a child who becomes a criminal does not just ruin their own life: a boy or girl who graduates to adult jail will hurt many people along the way.
In Western Australia, the small but standout policy in juvenile crime prevention is kept as quiet as possible for fear the opposition will label it a butler service for deadbeat parents and kill it dead.
It is called Target 120 and it works. There has been a quiet and slow rollout, though former premier Mark McGowan never praised it from the rooftops.
His political instincts were too good for that.
To see where Target 120 goes next, you need to look hard for it in the budget papers.
The Target 120 program was conceived in 2017 to help 120 families whose children were in regular contact with police.
A community youth officer works with each family to help them solve big and small problems in their lives. This can include helping them to find stable housing, to find the right treatment for an ongoing illness or help for kids struggling with their schoolwork.
After three years, the result was a 65 per cent reduction in the children’s contact with police … and massive savings for the taxpayer.
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