Three-week Alice Springs youth curfew ends

There’s a lot of discussion around long and medium term solutions. We know to the end of June, we’ll have at least 25 additional police officers, but there’s also local decision makers right here and we’re going to speak to one right now and that’s Mayor of Alice Springs, Matt Patterson. Thank you for joining the ABC today. Matt, you know you were very critical of the government initially before the curfew was called in the days prior to and then the curfew has now come into place. I wonder do you think it’s been a success and you’re happy with the ending? Yeah, I was very critical and I think the Chief Minister showed an incredible amount of leadership to call the Emergency and have a curfew and extra resources, and I thank her for that. The curfew is one part of it, the extra resources of the other and I think the community have been able to have a break for the last three weeks and it’s certainly been welcomed. And what about the matter of ending now? Do you think that’s the right time to end it? I think with the extra place staying here, we’ll see the positive impact of visual presence of police and I think that’s what we welcome. People feel safer with it. So I think the extra resources is is the real key part going forward. There’s also this matter of medium and longer term solutions beyond policing, where do you see decisions that can be made and that you’ll be looking to advocate for as mayor of this town? So I think one of the biggest issues is please spend 80% of their time on domestic violence. And so they get tied up doing domestic violence and that is, and that is a national shame that police is spending so much time doing that. We need to address that. We also need to address safe places for these kids to go who are in unfortunate positions, whether that’s a youth foil, which I really think it’s the time to pull the trigger on. It may not be the silver bullet, but it’s certainly worth a try because every other jurisdiction has fantastic success rates for it. So just there already, James, you’re hearing there’s solutions looking around housing for young people in the CBD, in particular, young people who might not have a safe place to go, as well as domestic violence and policy responses. There just one from Matt Patterson, who’s joined me now here from Alice Springs Shams.