Logan police know youth crime isn’t a “battle we’re going to win overnight”, but a leading detective says they’re making leaps and bounds.
Detective acting inspector Glen Antonie said Logan police’s approach to tackling youth crime was sophisticated.
He said police have ditched an out-dated ‘enforcement-only’ model in favour of a community and engagement based response.
“Don’t get me wrong – where enforcement needs to occur, we will do it. And where the community needs to be protected, we will do it,” Mr Antonie said.
“But the idea back in the day that we just identified the offence, arrested the offender and the job was done and solved obviously doesn’t play.
“Youth crime is not as simple as we’ve ever been able to define, because we’ve got all these social issues that exist in the background of young people, and we see that a fair bit here in Logan – displaced from education, substance abuse within the family, and those types of issues.”
Mr Antonie said police had now learned to work with other community agencies to treat these social issues as “part of the process of rolling out solutions”.
“It’s about what prevention methods we can put in place and what early engagement initiatives we can have with that young person or the family, to divert them from crime,” he said.
One of the most successful programs has been R.E.A.P (Response Effort Attitude and Participation) the Rewards, which uses touch football to re-engage youth.
Of the fifteen teenagers who participated in the program in its first eight months of operation, including several serious repeat offenders, all but one decreased their level of offending.
Eight participants stopped offending completely, while the remaining six decreased their offending in both severity and volume.
“We’re getting young people actually putting their hand up and asking to be involved in those programs, through word of mouth – through other young people that are attached to the reward program,” Mr Antonie said.
“That’s a sign of success for us, that people want to go. They ask ‘Can you pick us up? Can you drive us?’ We say ‘absolutely we can’.”
Mr Antonie said his Logan youth crime and protection units were mostly dealing with property-related offences.
“Mainly opportunistic sort of stuff in relation to property crime,” he said.
“It can range from what we might deem to be low level – anything from a simple shop steal – right up to quite serious, protracted crime.”
He said boredom was often a motivator for young people; particularly those not attending work or school.
“Peer pressure and social influence is enormous with young people,” he said.
“A lot of the programs that we look to set up here in Logan work towards re-engagement in either employment or education.
“It’s that positive engagement.”
Mr Antonie said he was proud of the work local police were doing, especially considering that the city saw a reduction in several offending areas last year.
In the final quarter of 2023, youth crime in Logan dropped by 25 per cent.
Police arrested 132 young people on more than 500 charges, but the number of individual youth offenders decreased from 336 to 282.
“That’s a really positive turn for us here in Logan,” Mr Antonie said.
“The things that we’re doing now, it was always going to take time to see the implications and the benefits.”
