By Mitchell Clarke
Almost 400 arrests have been made in an operation targeting youth in suburbs within the Cardinia, Casey and Greater Dandenong policing areas.
Since April this year, police have made 396 arrests and executed 126 warrants of apprehension while 278 traffic and 50 crime infringements were handed out.
Superintendent Paul Hollowood from the South Metro Region said the operation was focused on addressing youth related offending across three major crime themes.
The themes included robberies, public order offending and vehicle crime linked to serious offending.
“We know crimes such as robberies and public order offending has been a concern to the community and Operation Tidal has been developed to specifically target these issues,” Supt Hollowood said.
Tidal is linked closely with the Southern Metro Crime Team’s Operation Pendsend, a youth response team which is made up of detectives who monitor at-risk youths and develop disruption and enforcement strategies.
“This is a strategic approach to sharing information to ensure we have an intelligence-led approach to our enforcement of youth offending in this area,” Supt Hollowood said.
Turning their attention to social media as a means to put an end to the youth violence, Commander Libby Murphy said officers were able to respond to perceived threats in the community through received intelligence.
“We have our monitoring and assessment centre manage intelligence and they’ll feed that back to us and we have strategic intelligence to suggest different groups are at play,” Cmdr. Murphy said.
“We monitor all sorts of social media, so we’ll look at Instagram, Facebook, we’ll look at Snapchat and all those sorts of things, we use intelligence based policing to make sure we’re targeting where and when we need the resources in that area.”
And while police wouldn’t name a particular problem suburb, they said the rise in crime could be attributed to the growth of the south-eastern suburbs.
“Our area is an area that’s fast expanding so it has a large proportion of youth, so I think that’s probably part of our focus,” Cmdr. Murphy said.
“Youth are often disengaged and we know that we’ve got to connect with youth and not just have an enforcement approach.
“But our enforcement approach is really important, particularly for that high harm offending where we actually have things like robberies and car jacking’s and theft from motor cars or theft of motor cars which is then linked to other offending.”
Despite this, Victoria Police said youth crime wasn’t directly related to gang activity.
“We do know there are some gangs we target but I wouldn’t say the majority of the offending is gang related, most of it is opportunistic,” Cmdr. Murphy said.
“I don’t think there’s a need to be alarmist or extreme about it, I think we need to put it in perspective.
“If you look at the data, while we’ve got over half a million youth aged 10-17 in Victoria, only two percent are offenders.”
Seeing the operation as a real opportunity to work with government and other agencies, police hope therapeutic options through cautioning and diversion will be applied to future cases.
“With youth, our main aim is to actually make sure there are therapeutic options and good justice outcomes,” she added.
Operation Tidal remains ongoing.
