‘Pulling people out of the river isn’t enough. We have to go upstream and ask why they keep falling in,’ Cairns Mayor

A 25 year old Cairns Northern Beaches resident was killed when a stolen ute hit her RAV4 and another car in a head-on collision on Wednesday, August 5.

The driver, a 36-year-old man who was on bail at the time has been charged with a string of offences including manslaughter.

The family of Savannah Spence Paige, 25, who was killed at the scene of the crash on the Smithfield Bypass say they are “beyond devastated.”

Cairns Mayor Amy Eden says she has had enough of out of control crime in Queensland’s largest northern city, an internationally respected tourist hot spot on the edge of the Great Barrier Reef.

“The death of 25-year-old Savannah Spence Paige has shaken our community. It has caused grief, anger and, understandably, some very difficult questions about whether our justice system is doing enough to protect the community from serious and repeat offending,” Mayor Eden said.

She has issued this statement aimed at the Queensland LNP Government which this week is toughening the state’s bail laws:

“Those questions deserve answers.

When an experienced Cairns police officer publicly expresses his frustration with the system he has worked within for almost four decades, we should listen. Our frontline police see the consequences of crime every day. They see the victims. They see families devastated. They see people cycling repeatedly through a system that sometimes seems incapable of breaking that pattern.

I believe community safety must come first. Where a person is accused of serious offending and presents an unacceptable risk to the community, our bail laws must provide adequate protection. That should not depend solely on whether it is their first serious offence or their twentieth.

The presumption of innocence is fundamental to our justice system. So too is the responsibility of that system to properly assess risk and protect the community. If there are weaknesses in our bail laws, the Queensland Government should address them.

Bail is only part of the answer

But changing bail laws alone will not solve this problem. By the time we are arguing about bail, we are already at the expensive end of failure.

The cost is measured in police resources, court time and public money, yes. More importantly, it is measured in damaged lives, traumatised families and victims who should never have become victims.

We need to protect the community from people who present an unacceptable risk today, while doing the work that reduces the number of people who present that risk tomorrow.

That means looking at what happens once someone enters the justice system, but also having the courage to go further upstream. Why are people becoming entrenched in offending? What happened between a young person’s first interaction with the system and their fifth, tenth or twentieth? Where were the opportunities to change that trajectory? Which ones did we miss?

Are we making meaningful use of the time someone spends in the system to address the behaviour that brought them there? Are families receiving help when warning signs first appear? Are mental health, drug and alcohol, education, housing and family-support services available when they are needed? When authorities identify someone at high risk of repeatedly offending, are all parts of the system communicating and responding effectively?

These are not arguments for being “soft on crime”. They are arguments for preventing crime. We should not have to choose between accountability and prevention. Cairns needs both.

Going upstream

Before entering local government, I worked for the Department of Youth Justice as part of the Cairns Safer Streets Task Force. It was a different way of working. Police and officers from different government agencies were brought together, co-located and able to share information so we could see more of the picture around a person or family, rather than each agency seeing only its piece.

The work was concentrated in Manoora, Manunda and Mooroobool, but the experience taught me something I have never forgotten: by the time someone is deeply entrenched in the justice system, opportunities to intervene have often already come and gone.

There comes a point where pulling people out of the river isn’t enough. We have to go upstream and ask why they keep falling in.

Some of these questions aren’t new. They were being asked when I worked in Youth Justice years ago. If we are still identifying the same gaps today, then we need to ask another uncomfortable question: are we listening? And if we are, why aren’t we fixing them?

Not another talkfest

That is why I want the people who see different pieces of this problem around the same table: Police, Youth Justice, Government, Health, Education, victim support, First Nations organisations and frontline services. Not another talkfest, but a room focused on where the system is failing and what we are going to do differently.

We already know there is a cohort of repeat offenders cycling through the system. What are we collectively doing with that knowledge? Where is intervention occurring too late? Where are services missing or overwhelmed? Where is information not being shared? What happens when warning signs are repeatedly raised? Most importantly, what are we going to do differently next time?

Cairns has also been identified for the Queensland Government’s Risk Response Bail program. We should welcome that investment while ensuring it delivers what our community needs. What will success look like? How quickly can agencies intervene? What happens when bail conditions are repeatedly breached? What support and intervention will be available? How will we know whether the program is actually reducing offending?

The answers cannot come from one politician, one police officer, one government department or one level of government.

Turning anger into action

There will understandably be anger following Savannah’s death. But anger alone will not make another family safer. The challenge for government is to turn that anger into action.

We cannot promise that government can prevent every crime. But our community is entitled to expect a system that protects them when the risk is unacceptable, uses every opportunity to intervene and learns when warning signs have been missed.

We need to listen to our frontline police, protect the community from serious offenders who present an unacceptable risk, intervene earlier and break the cycle of offending before there is another victim.

We owe that to our police, to victims of crime and to the Cairns community. We owe it to Savannah, and to every victim who should never have become one.”#