Restrictions banning young people from CBD have now ended

Quiet scenes on Alice Springs streets, the intended goal of a dramatic youth curfew. It’s been highly successful, the community of Alice Springs breathing a collective sigh of relief after a period of rising unrest and violence. I think the three weeks that we’ve we’ve just gone through is. Everyone’s taking a deep breath and relaxed, and it’s been dramatically different around what has happened in the community’s attitude. Over 20 days, police had 338 interactions with young people in the high risk precinct, and while no arrests have been made for breaching the curfew, eight people have now been charged over the violence that triggered the emergency response 3 weeks ago. We’ve worked towards figuring out how many police we need to continue that good engagement with the youth. And those other aspects of the operation and reducing property crime, Reducing offence against a person. Despite the circuit breaker response ending this morning, the anti government says additional police officers and youth workers will remain in the Red Centre. In all, borough shops will continue to be manned by officers and while efforts are underway to fix the ongoing social issues, there’s still more work to be done. We had elders back in the day to help us, but nowadays the the respect is gone with a lot of young people. If the respect came back, it will be good. But going into the medium and longer term, we need to look at the domestic violence. Police are spending 80% of their time on domestic violence cases. That’s too much. That is way too much. A hope for a stronger, safer community and for a genuine effort to bring change.