Low rate of youth crime continuing

Monday 08 September 2014

There has been another drop in youth crime as offending figures for under-18s remain at just a fraction of the numbers only a few years ago.

The Home Affairs department has released stats showing youth crime levels for the first six months of 2014.

Although the level of cases is flat, with 31 from January to June compared to 62 in 2013, that figure is still a huge reduction on the 179 youth crime cases in 2011 and 253 in 2010.

But the trend in the number of offences committed continues to drop, with 107 in the first six months of the year compared to 238 in the whole of last year – compared to a figure of 522 just four years ago.

Home Affairs Minister Ian Le Marquand – a former Magistrate who is standing down from the States at next month’s elections – said that the figure represented a welcome continuation of a downward trend in youth offending in the last couple of years.

He said: “The pattern of a major reduction in levels of youth crime that was constant in 2013 has continued in 2014.”

Figures released by the Home Affairs department have also shown that there were just two young people at the young offender’s facility at Greenfields who were there because of a criminal charge, compared to 20 in 2010 and nine in 2011.