Page 539 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 21 February 2012
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compared to the 12 months to June 2010—1,683 fewer burglaries. These are fantastic results and, again, I place on the record my thanks and the support of the government for the important work being done by the ACT Policing volume crime targeting team, who have delivered these significant improvements when it comes to the level of these property offences.
But building on that, we need a new property crime reduction strategy. The strategy which I will shortly release provides a comprehensive and collaborative response to reducing and sustaining these lower rates of property crime in the territory. To do this, the property crime reduction strategy will be driven by three objectives: stopping the cycle of offending through justice reinvestment, engaging those who are disengaged through early intervention, and creating a safer, more secure community by supporting victims of crime and making buildings and public places safer and cars more secure.
Stopping the cycle of offending and breaking the associated cycles of vulnerability—including low levels of education, unstable or no employment, unreliable or lack of housing—requires a collaborative cross-agency approach to working with those with high and complex needs and their families. There are three core strategic focus areas with priority work. One is enhancing and sustaining a multi-pronged, intelligence-led police method for locating, apprehending and monitoring recidivist property offenders. The second is to focus on reducing the overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the criminal justice system through the related actions contained in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander justice agreement. The third is through developing, designing and delivering justice reinvestment and through-care programs for adult and juvenile recidivist offenders.
The property crime reduction strategy will also focus on the role of early intervention and engaging young people who are disengaged from education, from employment and from their community. We will focus on diverting more young property crime offenders away from the courts towards diversionary options, including at-risk programs and restorative justice programs. We will look at ways to identify, refer and comprehensively support at-risk young people and their families, and we will enhance and develop a variety of new pathways and strategies to ensure that these young people actually stay at school, stay in training or are able to stay in a job. All of these things help prevent them from getting back into the cycle of crime.
The third objective of the strategy will focus very strongly on reducing and preventing property crime by supporting victims of crime, designing out crime from people’s homes, public places, the work environment and reducing opportunities for car theft.
I would like to turn to another program that the government has already put in place to help implement this approach—that is, the high density housing safety and security project. This project has been funded in previous budgets because it is well documented that public housing estates, particularly high density public housing estates, have increasingly become sites of economic and social disadvantage, physical deterioration and criminal activity.
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