New South Wales’s peak Indigenous legal body has called for an independent investigation after state police briefed media outlets about the alleged involvement of a five-year-old in a break-and-enter and car theft before officers had spoken to the alleged offenders or laid charges.
Repeatedly asked about the incident in the outback town of Bourke over subsequent days, police media refused to officially confirm the ages of the alleged offenders despite two metropolitan mastheads quoting separate officers referring to a five-year-old.
Guardian Australia understands the assertion that one of the alleged offenders was five was based on an eyewitness account, which responding officers held confidence in.
News of the alleged incident was splashed across the Daily Telegraph on Saturday under a headline declaring the child the “most wanted five-year-old”. The child was also described as a “kindergarten crim”.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported the incident as part of a story on regional crime concerns, quoting an officer who said: “In Bourke in the early hours of Saturday morning, we had a five-year-old child with two 12-year-old children breaking into a property and stealing a car.
“I’ve never in 30 years of the police service seen anything like that.”
Later on Saturday, police released a statement saying that four people reportedly broke into a home in Bourke about 2am on Friday 22 March.
“They (the occupants) awoke to find their Mitsubishi Outlander was being stolen from outside the home and police were notified,” a police spokesperson said.
The Mitsubishi was later seen driving on Weir Road and “a pursuit was initiated before being terminated shortly after due to safety concerns”.
Officers found the car about 10.50am and it was seized for forensic examination, the spokesperson said.
“No arrests have been made and inquiries continue into the incident.”
On Monday, a police spokesperson said: “The investigation is ongoing and while inquiries are still being conducted, we are unable to speculate to the ages of the people involved.”
On Tuesday, police were yet to speak with the four alleged offenders and had not laid charges.
The chief executive of the Aboriginal Legal Service, Karly Warner, said there were “very serious questions” to answer about the origin and intent of the briefings to media, and called for an independent, external investigation.
“These stories are fuelling fear while doing nothing to make our communities safer,” she said.
“Instead they are inciting panic about children who are probably too young to tie their shoelaces, let alone be capable of crime – cognitively, physically or legally.
“We all deserve answers as to why [the police] are doing this, under whose direction, and at what cost to children in NSW.”
NSW independent MP Roy Butler, whose electorate encompasses Bourke, said on Wednesday “there is a trickle-down effect of clickbait journalism on regional and rural communities”.
“I understand that media reporting requires catchy headlines … but what flashy headlines can often do is create a bias,” Butler said. “In the case of regional crime, our bush towns will be stereotyped as ‘bad’.
“We do have a serious crime problem in some Barwon communities, and what is needed is intervention to divert these young people towards more pro-social behaviour. Not tabloid journalism. We all have a role to play in changing the culture that these kids are growing up in, including the media.”
Two weeks ago the government passed legislation making it harder for teenagers to get bail and criminalising “posting and boasting” about criminal offences on social media.
The laws were condemned by reform advocates who said the changes would push the state further from its Closing the Gap targets.
The premier, Chris Minns, travelled to Moree on Wednesday to announce a partnership between NSW police, the NRL and Youth Justice NSW to create programs to help ‘at risk’ youth.
Asked about the criticisms of the bail law changes, Minns said the government was committed to doing more on diversion programs for adolescents in regional communities.
“I’m convinced that if we get that balance right, we can reduce the rate of reoffending,” he said.
“My great fear is that we’ll see a young person commit an offence, particularly in a motor vehicle, where they kill themselves or their family members or their friends or they kill a member of the public.
“That would be absolutely terrible. I don’t want that to happen and I genuinely don’t believe that’s in the interest of the young person either.”
Greens justice spokesperson Sue Higginson said the government’s “choice to go down this regressive … law and order tough on crime road” was creating panic.
“It leads to police exercising impunity and pushing out unchecked sensationalist media which results in dangerous and unhelpful headlines,” she said.
“If we genuinely want to deal with youth crime and criminal behaviour we need to follow the evidence and deal with the causes of crime and the failure of social support services within our communities that should be supporting offenders, not throwing kids in prison.”
