BONUS EPISODE: Four conversations about crime

In the year twenty fifteen there were only one hundred and nineteen youth crime offenders or offenses, and that figure in the most recent financial year had leapt to twelve hundred and thirty, so just over one hundred to just over twelve hundred, an amazing leap. We could all see it coming. But the authorities and the officials, the apologistsandemic lawyers, the senior police who were trying to massage the message

for politicians, they didn't really want to acknowledge it. They wanted to say nothing to see here, this is not a big deal. This is all about perspective and statistics and this and that and the other thing. But the brutal raw facts cannot be hidden anymore. And we know that people who as recently as twenty eighteen or even later, were pooh poohing the idea of youth gangs and youth ethnic gangs and all the rest of it are now either acknowledging they were wrong, or they have fallen silent.

They are saying nothing because the writing's on the wall. And it struck me this week while I was away in rural Victoria looking for the property the country high away of an old murderer. Incidentally, it struck me while I was driving back to Melbourne from the Country that every phone call that I received while I was driving, the person I spoke to, and these are all different people, and I did not instigate the subject of conversation. It just came up. Each person I spoke to in a

couple of hours brought up youth crime. And one guy, ex detective, he said to me, all these young people that were gathered at this demonstration in South Bank, you know many of them were young, not all, but many of them were young, and their lack of respect for authority and for the police and for the community stands out. They just don't care. And that is the same attitude that we see in youth offenders. We see it with the Eggbergs. We see it with the people who steal cars.

They break into your house with or without weapons, then they take your keys, then they take your car. Then they drive far because they'd lunatics and just want to have the thrills. And of course sometimes they run into innocent people and kill them. He just made that point about that. The next conversation I had within twenty minutes was with another caller who mentioned that someone they knew,

a relative or a friend, it doesn't matter. Someone they knew had been drugged and mugged in the inner suburbs. They'd been slipped some sort of drug which knocked them out, maybe in a drink, I think, and they woke up in a back lane uninjured, thank god. But their phone was gone, their sneakers were gone, and their wallet was gone, so their credit cards and everything was gone. So that

person saw as a youth crime thing. People who steal sneakers are generally not you know, senior fifty year old criminals. It's the young brigade. And then I got another call, and this was from a woman who I'd arranged to meet and to interview about the pet Gill family, the notorious Pett and Girls, Cath pet and Gill, of course, is the mother of bad guys that were drug dealers and killers and thieves and all the rest of it.

And I was to interview this woman about one of those children, one who went straight interestingly, and the lady rang up and was apologetic. He said, I can't meet you today or tomorrow. I'm sorry. I'm at the hospital. I said, oh, it's everything, okay. She said, I know. It's not me. It's my son. He's been stabbed. Now it turns out a son is an adult. He's not a youth who's been fighting in the street. He's someone

in his thirties who's a social worker. And he's been stabbed by some mad kid, by some teenager, and he's in hospital and he ill survive, but it's sufficiently serious that he's been in hospital several days, and his mother he's visiting him because she's so concerned about him. That was the third conversation I had in the space of

a couple of hours. Then I get to work, and I get to the Herald's son office and I go to my office and I'm sitting there working out what to do, and along comes one of my colleagues and she says, Oh, this is something you'd be interested in. I said, what's that and she said, well, a friend of mine is visiting Australia from England. He's doing the

big tour of Australia. He saved up his money, he came out here recently and he bought a camp a van and he's doing the trip of a lifetime around Australia. And he thought it'd be great, and it was great until he parked and camped at a spot near Newcastle in New South Wales. Now this is not Victoria, but it's you know, Australia's East Coast is probably similar in many ways crime wise. And poor old mate from Yorkshire,

I think he's from. He's asleep in his nice camper van that he bought and late at night, middle of the night, after midnight, bang bang bang, very rough knock and he thinks, oh, somebody's in trouble. They need help. And he opens the door and says, oh, can I help you, and three young men dragged him out at knife point or machete point, dragged him out of the car and said we're taking a van and he's just wearing a pair of jocks. And one of them said oh, let him put his jeans on and a jumper, but

he was still barefoot. He put on his jeans and jump up, but was still barefoot. And they left him there in the middle of the night, out somewhere, you know, camping bush somewhere, and he had to go and find other campus, and they of course didn't want to help him because they were frightened that he was a bad guy. And the bad guys, the three took his van and they just trashed it. They drove it fast, then they smashed it, and then they trashed it and they just

buged up his van. So this is the fourth conversation I've had in one day to people I know, none of whom know each other. And in each case they have brought up the subject. I haven't raised it with them. The fourth one, Oh God, there's a pattern here. The damn has burst. And I thought of that, Hemingway saying. Hemingway once said, you go broke slowly at first, and then you go broke all at once. And I think it's the same with this youth crime explosion. For years,

it was building up for years. We could see it coming, and the naysayers said, oh, it's not that bad, it's not really happening much, etc. But all of a sudden the levee has burst and we're surrounded by it. That same day, same day, I'm thinking about this, and I'm thinking I should write something about this, because Shennondery's story with the statistics is being born out by personal experience. It seems everybody I know he's got a story to tell.

And I ring an old friend of mine. He's by way of being a cartoonist, and I rang him and we had a chat about something, and he said, what are you doing? And I said, I'm thinking about writing something about youth crime, the rise in youth crime. He said, oh, tell me about it. I said what he said, Oh, I was in Williamstown the other day and I was in a store there and this bunch of kids, a bunch of teenagers they weal seen and just pick up a lot of stuff and then just brazenly steal it.

They just walked out of the shop without paying. And he said. I went over to the counter and said, did you see that? Did you see those kids? And they said, yeah, we saw it, but we've been told don't interfere, don't get in their way. It's not worth it, you know, it's not worth the risk, etc. And so basically it seems that a lot of stores have got that attitude that when certain groups steal stuff, they don't interfere,

they don't try and stop them. When they call the police, the police know exactly who it is, but they've lost the taste for the fight too, because a lot of these kids are relatively young, and the police are tired of grabbing them arresting them because they know that they go into a revolving door where they just automatically get bail because of their relative youth. Some listeners might think that that's just a bald assertion that it's a revolving door,

and that we're exaggerating this. Well, you can think that, but a person got in touch with me recently. Now, this person, I've got to be careful not to identify this person, but this person has a very good first hand understanding of bail and bail justice work and all that. This person is a sort of an official who gets to see bail justices at work firsthand. This person named a night and said, on that night, youth is brought in by the police, clearly a problem child for the community,

steals cars, does Agberg's home invasions a real problem. You know, a dangerous person in many ways and the potential to hurt people because they steal cars and drive fast and just go through red lights. They're very dangerous. And this person said that youth was held for the night, but next day he faced children's court and he faced a magistrate and a bail application was made for him, and the magistrate let him walk, put him back on the street.

So nighttime, held overnight, next morning face caught. Magistrate says, yeah, go in the revolving door. You're back on the street. Guess what happened. By the night after that, that kid was back in business. Let's to say he had a big night out, been grabbed after stealing cars, home invasion. He's grabbed, next day, faces court, he's released on bail, he goes out. Let's say, within twenty four hours, does

the same stuff, same offenses. He's grabbed again. And so by the next night, and I'm making those days up. By the next night, he's back in custody. Now, whether he stayed in custody or that third night, I don't know, but on form he won't have because that youth. His record of offenses is eight pages long of very closely typed material, so he has dozens and scores of offenses already,

which is staggering. But as my colleague Mark Butler points out, there is a youth out there somewhere who has got at least four hundred offenses on his record, his docket as we used to call it, as four hundred offenses. He will hit five hundred pretty rapidly and keep going because at his age and stage, the magistrates are virtually told to not lock them up, put them back on the street, give them bail. And this is the problem.

And the person that contacted me, the whistleblower that contacted me about this, is someone who is involved in that process up close and personal, but feels that that level bail justices and magistrates sort of had their hands tied by policies imposed on them from above. And that is the reality of youth crime in Victoria and to a large extent in Australia. Thanks for listening.