Page 2751 - Week 09 - Thursday, 27 September 2007
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The government is satisfied that the offences I have outlined and the punishments that go with them carry the necessary deterrent effect. Ten years imprisonment and over $100,000 in fines are significant penalties. The full deterrent effect of the criminal law is realised with the sentencing and publicity following a successful prosecution and conviction. That is where we need to continue to focus our efforts when it comes to deterrence.
Mr Pratt’s call for charges of attempted murder, which he called for on the weekend for this type of offence, shows his ignorance of how the law works. If Mr Pratt ever became police minister, prosecutors would be faced with the impossible task of making a charge of attempted murder where intention would need to be proved. Mr Pratt would be making this already very challenging task of prosecutors impossible, by placing them in the situation where they would have to prove intent to murder, which is one of the highest standards required in the criminal law. It is a naive approach and it adds nothing to the solution to this problem.
The work that ACT government agencies and ACT Policing are doing offers the real solution. The challenge that the government and the community as a whole face is the phenomenon of copycat behaviour. The media is playing a legitimate role in informing the community of where these incidents occur and how they have occurred. Unfortunately, associated with this is the risk of copycat incidents. We know anecdotally that, following the reporting of serious incidents in places such as New South Wales, we see a step up in the level of less serious incidents here in the ACT.
ACT Policing are particularly concerned about this type of dangerous behaviour and are applying quite a significant strategy which I would now like to outline to members. Current strategies centre on police communications response, crime prevention, intelligence gathering and media communication. Incidents of rock throwing do not seem to be targeted at any particular mode of transport, with both buses and private vehicles being struck. It seems that the throwing of objects is an opportunistic crime committed mostly by juvenile offenders. Nor have any particular suburbs been heavily targeted, although southside suburbs have recorded more instances than northside suburbs.
Officers in charge of the four ACT Policing district police stations are continuing to meet with ACTION bus management in order to develop a wide-ranging strategy to address these incidents. This contact has also been extended to private bus companies that operate within and through the ACT. Police and ACTION have agreed that education about and public awareness of the dangers of such attacks are the best way forward. As a result, schools have been issued with information about this issue as part of regular news bulletins to schools.
The ACT Policing territory investigations group has formed a dedicated team to investigate these incidents where objects are being thrown at buses and vehicles. So we have a dedicated team that is based at the Tuggeranong police station. It was formed after the ACT police operations committee recognised this was an emerging problem and it needed a dedicated response. In support of this team, police operations monitoring and intelligence support has been developing intelligence on previous rock
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