Darling Downs top cop outlines police focus for 2024

The numbers don’t look great on paper, but top officers in Toowoomba have revealed why a 400 per cent spike in bail breaches is a positive step in the battle against youth crime.

A year-long campaign to drive down youth offending in our region appears to be paying off, with noticeable drops in teen property crime and offences of violence.

From July to December there have been 1129 property offences committed by teens in the Darling Downs in 2023, which compares to 1648 by the same time in 2022.

Offences of violence are down from 267 in 2022 to 193 in 2023.

Over the same period youth bail breaches have increased by about 400 per cent, from 57 to 198.

Darling Downs District Superintendent Doug McDonald said the spike in bail breaches was a result of the focus police have put on curfew checks, to make sure teen offenders were at home and doing the right thing.

“Since the program launched in May, our Youth Co-Responders Teams have done more than 2000 bail and curfew checks at all times of the day and night,” he said.

“We have seen a turnaround in kids being more compliant, but that has resulted in us identifying where they’re not complying with bail and we’re taking action.

“It is a labour intensive thing to get that compliance, but while magistrates will issue bail it really is only a piece of paper unless we do that follow up work.”

The extra bail checks were bolstered by an injection of funding for increased uniformed police patrols and mobile police beats deployed at high-risk areas, like parks, shopping centres and the CBD.

While there was a longer-term drop in youth crime over the past 12 months, the trend was punctuated with spasms of violence when small groups of hardened offenders are released from custody and commit high-profile offences, like armed robberies or home invasions.

The severity of these spikes was amplified by CCTV clips that bounce around social media, broadcasting that violence into homes across the city.

Supt McDonald said the local police had developed a program of tracking high-risk offenders as soon as they returned to our community, and were primed to strike the second they step out of line.

“Every morning, my Detective Inspector meets with the Crime Group to work out what the day’s priorities are and what’s occurred overnight, and what is emerging,” he said.

“We are also taking a regional approach to see who is offending from the South Burnett down to Goondiwindi, Toowoomba and Ipswich.

“We know who we’re dealing with, and we really wrap a lot of resources around targeting those people.”

As momentum grows through 2024, Darling Downs Police will shift focus to violent adult offenders, particularly around domestic and family violence.

Supt McDonald said domestic violence often fed into youth offending.

“There’s no way you can really separate the two because often these kids that are offending have come from domestic and family violence relationships, either themselves being victims or being witness to it,” he said.

“It is all tied in and it all has underpinning social issues that we must deal with.”

There will also be more support given to victims of crime, to help with referral to counselling services and to stop them from becoming victims a second time.

“There is a trauma there that people feel when they become victims of crime, particularly if the offending was violent,” Supt McDonald said.

“People are looking at their social media pages, the same images of offenders on CCTV in another person’s backyard, it may as well be in their own backyard.

“I can talk every day about how crime is reducing and how this stuff is working, but it’s much trying to give people confidence that we’re out there doing the best we can.”