Traders join forces to tackle gang of girls

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p2206-Yeperenye-Centre By ERWIN CHLANDA
 
Managers of shopping centres and stores have joined forces to protect their staff and businesses from a gang of girls who have threatened them, stolen merchandise, damaged cars of workers and broken into premises.
 
“We know your car now,” one employee was told by the group, and another had to arrange protection by security because she had been followed home.
 
“I know when your children are home” was another threat by a girl who had been barred from a store.
 
Shop attendants have to be escorted to their cars.
 
Special measures had to be put in place for staff leaving work at night, being “circled and intimidated” by the girls in car parks, says Kay Eade, CEO of the Chamber of Commerce, which held a meeting this week to deal with the issues.
 
Ms Eade says there are also a number of boys committing offences, acting in smaller groups but apparently from the same gang.
 
“Quite a few cars have been damaged,” she says.
 
The meeting was attended by personnel from the Yeperenye, Alice Plaza and Coles shopping centres, senior police and a private security firm, as well as individual stores including K-Mart, which had been broken into.
 
Ms Eade says police had relocated one gang member to her home in Tennant Creek, and another one to a remote community.
 
Police had adjusted rosters to deal with the offences, but it is important that formal complaints are made of each offence so that police manpower can be deployed appropriately, she says.
 
Traders should also give impact of crime statements to the police so that submissions to the courts can be made if prosecutions are launched.
 
She also encouraged affected businesses to communicate with each-other via an email exchange coordinated by the chamber, giving information about kids who are barred from shops.
 
Ms Eade says there is always a spike in juvenile crime in summer, and some of the behaviour is just of nuisance value – the girls trying on clothes and then running off without paying for them, or harassing staff, some of whom are also young people and not well equipped to deal with the problems.
 
Some of the offending girls are from foster homes, says Ms Eade, and it appears that when they are transferred from one carer to another, information about past offending is sometimes not to being passed on.
 
 

6 COMMENTS

  1. Thanks Erwin,
    It’s so nice to read nothing has changed in the past 25 years … nor ever will.
    Patronising ignorant social sippers and the leftard biased pro handout white advisory teams ought be bloody ashamed of their combined efforts.
    And you all know who you are.

  2. Where is your enforceable law?
    Crime does not stop at night time when you have people on footpaths skate boarders on top of tree guards and police just walk past.
    Why worry bikes going up roads on wrong side of roads? Nothing is done.

  3. But we all KNOW what it’s about.
    These kids are set up to harass people so that they leave town and Mparntwe is reclaimed by the original owners.
    Don’t forget multiculturalism is only something WE are obliged to practice.
    Most Australians are just too dumb to do anything about – so – go and get on the p–s, have a barby and watch as the country your fathers and grandfathers died for in two world wars get pulled out from under your feet.

  4. I agree with Bronte, time they showed some guts and addressed the matter. As for threatening the staff, arrest them and put them in jail, might wake them up to reality.
    Dave English
    Sunshine Vic.

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