1. What is driving increases in offending amongst Victorian youth?

2. Agenda
Introduction to the Agency
Context
Findings
Implications & Next Steps

3. Introduction to the Agency
Commenced public operations on 1 January 2015.
Crime Statistics Act 2014
“(1) The Chief Statistician has the following functions –
(a) to publish and release statistical information relating to crime in Victoria.
(b) to undertake research into and analysis of crime and criminal justice issues and trends in Victoria.”
Established in 2014 and commenced public operations on 1 January this year.
Business unit within the Victorian Department of Justice and Regulation.
2 key teams within the agency – one team produces our quarterly statistics and works on data development and my area is responsible for research and evaluation projects.
Crime Statistics Act 2014 establishes the role of the Chief Statistician to:
- publish and release statistical information relating to crime in Victoria.
- undertake research into and analysis of crime and criminal justice issues and trends in Victoria.
Receive law enforcement data from Victoria Police on a quarterly basis – and our data holdings go back to about 2005, which is good because it means we’ve got some time series that we can work with.
- The over-arching objectives of the agency are to make information about recorded crime more accessible and better understood – and to support evidence-based policy and decision making.

4. CSA service offering
Release of quarterly recorded crime statistics and data tools on our website.
Customised data supply.
Regular publication of research papers.
Collaborative research projects.
Customised research and evaluation projects on request.
- Research papers are generally aligned with our research agenda – though we are flexible as issues of interest and policy relevance arise unexpectedly over time.
- Contributed analysis to the Royal Commission into Family Violence
A series of publications on drug use and possession use
Youth crime

5. Context
Decreases in overall volume of youth crime in NSW, UK, USA, Canada.
Australia-wide, ABS identifies a decrease in number of youth offenders over the past few years.
Context:
At least partly triggered by riots at the Moomba Festival in March, which “began at Federation Square and continued up Swanston Street, with up to 200 people wielding chairs as weapons and brawling in the streets” (news.com.au article May 24, ‘Police arrest two dozen over Moomba riots”
This, along with increased ‘car jackings’ in Melbourne’s suburbs, ramped up the pressure on government more broadly and police more specifically to do something about this perceived increase in young offenders
Media outlets linked these events with the Apex gang, and there have been references to many of the events being perpetrated by young men of Somali or Sudanese descent.
Victoria Police and the Herald Sun announced they would hold a “youth justice summit”, which was held on July 21.
It appears nothing concrete has emerged at this point in time, though the Premier did say three or four concrete changes or reforms would emerge over time.

6. Youth crime in Victoria
Context
Youth crime in Victoria
to inform public debate about the evidence on youth crime, the Research and Evaluation team at the CSA put out three of our ‘In Fact’ papers, which are short and concise publications designed to be put together and published at short notice, in response to this sort of thing.
The statistics I’ll be sharing with you are a mixture of those publications with some additional unpublished work which we have done in the time since
We also have another publication out today on youth crime – at the end I will share some of the findings of that paper as well.

7. Findings
Annual number of unique offenders aged under 25 and 25 and over, July 2006 to June 2015
NUMBERS, 10 TO 14: 28,494 unique offenders in 2006 to 17,830 in 2011

8. Findings Number of unique offenders aged 10 to 14 in 2006 and 2011
NUMBERS, 10 TO 14: 109,676 offences in 2006 to 96,337 in 2011

9. Findings
Number of offences committed by the two cohorts, 2006 to 2015
NUMBERS, 15 to 19: 44,949 unique offenders in 2006 to 44,607 in 2011

10. Findings Number of unique offenders aged 15 to 19 in 2006 and 2011
NUMBERS, 15 to 19: 196,518 offences to 221,623 in 2011

11. Findings
Number of offences committed by the two cohorts, 2006 to 2015

12. Findings
Proportion of 10 to 19 year old offenders who had 1, 2, 3 to 5, 6 to 10, and 11 or more incidents recorded

13. Offence types
Proportion of 10 to 19 year old offenders who had at least one of each offence division recorded
The increases in justice procedures

14. Findings
Proportion of offenders who committed at least one offence, by selected offence subdivision, percentage point change from 2007/08 to 2015/16

15. Findings
Volume of offences committed by young offenders, by selected offence subdivision, percentage change from 2007/08 to 2015/16

16. Findings
Percentage point change, proportion of first offence ever recorded, 2007/08 to 2015/16

17. Findings
Percentage point change, proportion of outcome to first offence ever recorded, 2007/08 to 2015/16

18. Summary of findings
10-14 year olds
15-19 year olds
Number of offenders and offences
 number of offenders
No change in number of offences committed
Small  in young offenders with multiple incidents
No change in number of offenders
 in number of offences committed
Demographic characteristics
Small  female & Indigenous
Small  offenders from least disadvantaged postcodes
Small  in offenders from mid-disadvantage postcodes
Small  Indigenous
Offence types
 theft offences
 violent offences
 drug offences
The people offending are very similar (in the ways that we can see), it is the manner of the offending which seems to be changing.
Postcodes are split into three groups
10 to 14 year old offenders:
Increase in proportion of females and those that identify as Indigenous
Decrease in proportion of offenders living in the least disadvantaged areas
15 to 19 year old offenders:
Increase in proportion identifying as Indigenous
Increase in proportion of offenders living in the middle 4 deciles of disadvantage

19. What we still don’t know…
What caused these changes?
Are there indications of increased organised crime among youth offenders?
Are police more likely to detect recidivist offending?
Are police targeting specific, more serious offence types?
Are the small group of high-frequency offenders experiencing worsening risk factors for youth offending?
Do the majority of high-frequency youth offenders desist from crime in late adolescence or early adulthood?
NSW: property crime decrease, serious assault decrease since 2008
Anti-social behaviour, association with anti-social peers, anti-social cognition and anti-social personality pattern, level of education or engagement with other learning opportunities, unemployment, substance abuse, relationship problems, mental illness, intellectual disability, Indigenous status, ethnicity, low socioeconomic status, homelessness, history of involvement in the child protection system.
What drug types are leading the increase in drug use and possession offences – traditionally young people have offended using cannabis, however this does not take into account the increases we have seen in recent years with methamphetamine use

20. New publication 1997/98 birth cohort. First 8 years of offending.
Beginning to explore patterns of offending frequency in more detail for young Victorian offenders.
This is the first paper outlining our findings.
Statistical techniques have shown sub-populations of offenders follow markedly different trajectories
Large number of studies have been run, but not in Victoria
These studies have found consistencies in the shape and number of groups
The paper uses semi-parametric group based modelling to identify the latent offending trajectories of a cohort of Victorian offenders born over a two year period between April 1996 and March 1998, across the first eight years of their offending as recorded by Victoria Police

21. New publication Similar to other jurisdictions, we found….
Four groups:
Low (88.7%) – doesn’t get above 0.36 events per year
Adolescent limited (6.4%) rises to 3.1 events per year at age 15 before falling away
Late developing (3.4%) still rising at age 17 at around 7.5 events per year
High (1.6%) peaks at age 15 at around 11.6 events per year, before falling to a similar level to the late developing group
Offenders who were male, identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, and who were living in the most disadvantaged areas at the beginning of their offending careers were more likely to be classified in a high frequency offending group.

22.
Paul Sutherland
Analyst, Research and Evaluation
Melanie Millsteed
Manager, Research and Evaluation