On the right track

Editorial: Cassandra Stanghi

Photography: Gary Richardson

Senior Constable Amy Holden sits down at her desk to contact the mother of two teenage brothers with a significant criminal history.

For the past few months, Sen Const Holden (pictured above left) has been tasked with monitoring and engaging with the youths, who had committed a long list of serious, violent offences, including aggravated burglaries, robberies and theft of motor vehicles.

One of the brothers had previously been issued more than 50 serious charges in a three-month period, with the other not far behind at about 40 charges.

Regular contact with the youths’ mother had become the norm for Sen Const Holden as she worked to keep their family informed about how the youths were tracking — either forwards or backwards — on their path to law-abiding lives.

But today’s message is different.

Now, after months of constant proactive police contact with the youths, their family and external support services, their offending has come to a sustained halt.

“James* and Marcus* are now too good to stay on our books, so we are taking them off and turning our focus to other high-risk youths,” Sen Const Holden says to their mother.

The brothers are just two of 12 high-risk young offenders managed by the Somerville Crime Reduction Team (CRT) who were put on the right track and cleared from the unit’s list in its first six months of operating.

Targeting recidivist, serious and often young offenders, CRTs were established throughout Melbourne and Geelong in July 2024 to improve community safety.

CRTs have two main objectives: stopping further offending and providing support pathways to encourage rehabilitation.

For Acting Sergeant Trent Delaney, who leads the Somerville CRT covering the Frankston and Mornington Peninsula areas, this two-pronged approach to showing young offenders a better path is paying off in spades.

“We operate with the intention of giving these offenders pathways away from crime, but we have no hesitation in arresting them if they offend,” A/Sgt Delaney (pictured above right) said.

Before we even knock on their door, we’ve done our research, spoken to external support services and come up with a plan to help get them back on the right track.

Those support services include youth workers, rehabilitation services and advocates to name a few — all tailored to suit the needs of individual offenders.

Each offender is allocated a single police officer to allow for continuous building of rapport, making the CRT member a consistent element of an offender’s day-to-day life.

“The engagement and relationship are important, but we’re not a toothless tiger either — we make it very clear that the minute they stuff up, we’ll be coming to arrest them,” A/Sgt Delaney said.

“When someone on our books messes up and there’s a warrant out for them, we want it executed as quickly as we can, so the close working relationship we have with our local detectives is vital.”

Sen Const Holden said the speed of enforcement action is a key element of the team’s strategy to nip any further offending in the bud.

“We know that, if we’re not giving these kids consequences quickly, they won’t associate them with the offence and they’re not going to learn that lesson,” she said.

For CRT officers, the need to build strong relationships extends beyond just the offender. Regular contact with parents and family members is just as important, to ensure the good work is continuing at home.

Thrilled by the news that her sons would no longer be on the CRT’s monitoring list, James and Marcus’ mother thanked Sen Const Holden and her colleagues for their commitment to helping the brothers get back on the straight and narrow.

It’s hard to believe that Sen Const Holden and the youths’ mother had a challenging start to their relationship when the CRT came knocking six months earlier.

“She was initially frustrated with police due to previous interactions and had an extreme distrust for police, which her kids shared,” Sen Const Holden said.

I gave her the space to express her frustrations, which de-escalated her heightened emotions and allowed us to communicate more effectively. Over time, I proved to her that she could trust me.

That trust grew to a point where the youths’ mother was actively assisting police in their efforts to hold them to account.

“There were times when the youths faltered and they had a warrant to their names, when Amy was able to simply call the mum and tell her we needed to speak to them,” A/Sgt Delaney said.

“The mum would then either bring them in to us or give us all the information we needed about their whereabouts so local detectives could walk in the door and find them.”

The full circle moments for Sen Const Holden come when offenders start to take responsibility for their own behaviour.

“We’ve had people that we have been monitoring call us to say, ‘Hey, I missed court, I was an idiot, how can I get it fixed?’, or even, ‘That rehab you got me into was really good and I’m worried I might slip up soon, do you mind if you help me get back into it for a couple of weeks?’,” she said.

It’s an approach that is proving successful for the team at Somerville, with offenders managed in the CRT’s first six months of operation achieving a 200 per cent increase in time at freedom before enforcement action is required, when compared with the 12 months prior.

But for Sen Const Holden, the best measure of success is seeing the people she works with come out the other side of their criminal past.

“We see offenders we work with back on the right track where they are engaging with school, they’re working and they’re back participating in society,” she said.

“It makes me so proud of the work that we do.”