Coast's crime tsunami

Murdered cop Damian Leeding's wife, Sonya (centre), is comforted by friends and family. Photo / Brisbane Courier Mail

This week, as mourners lined streets for the funeral of Detective Senior Constable Damian Leeding, gunned down during a bungled robbery, a new elite police squad began work on the Gold Coast.

Task Force Resolve and its 18 hand-picked detectives are focusing on a list of unsolved armed robberies, topped by eight violent crimes involving guns, knives and a tomahawk, the most recent just days after Leeding was hit in the face by a shotgun blast at the Pacific Pines Tavern on May 29.

The killing of the 35-year-old father of two toddlers rocked Australia's iconic resort city. Leeding, married to another police officer, had only just been promoted when he responded to an emergency call at the tavern and was shot by one of three robbers.

Three men are now in custody, charged with murder, armed robbery and deprivation of liberty.

Leeding took three days to die. His grieving family was faced with the wrenching decision to turn off his life support, while outrage grew in a city where robbery and violence have become a plague.

At his funeral this week, courts closed to allow judges and lawyers to join 4000 officers and thousands of Coasters packing the Convention Centre and lining roads closed for the service. Leeding will be posthumously awarded the Police Medal of Valour, but the new task force may be his greatest tribute. Its formation was accelerated by the detective's death, and followed a review last year that had recommended increasing police numbers on the Coast.

For the Gold Coast this is welcome but tragic news. The city famed for partying, theme parks, family holidays, sun and golden beaches has become robbery central, fuelled by drugs and growing despair.

With the neighbouring city of Logan, the Coast has the highest rate of armed robbery in the state outside Brisbane and the highest level of prostitution-related crimes, police statistics for 2009-10 show.

Of the 505 robberies reported in the Gold Coast and Logan, only 39 per cent were solved.

So far this year there have been more than 60 armed robberies. Weapons have included guns, knives and axes, used in targets ranging from pharmacies and convenience stores to service stations, restaurants, fast food outlets and liquor stores.

In the past two weeks alone a 25-year-old man was shot in the shoulder, the manager of the Kirra Sports Club was left bound after being forced at gunpoint to open his safe, and two men used knives to rob a bottle shop.

The Coast's rate of drug crime is also among the highest. With Logan, the number of reported drug crimes has soared by 66 per cent in the past decade, brought home dramatically this week when state police and the Australian Crime Commission raided a property in the Currumbin Valley and uncovered what they said was one of the biggest clandestine drug labs in Queensland.

But until this year's sudden spike in violent crime, trends had been pointing in the right direction. Over the previous decade, armed robberies in the southeastern police district, which includes the Gold Coast, Logan and Coomera, had fallen more than a third, and police numbers had grown 65 per cent.

Police, lawyers and criminologists say the surge in violent crime has been driven by a mix of unemployment, poverty and drugs as the Coast's economy was pounded by the global financial crisis, disasters at home and abroad, and a strong dollar.

It is a narrow-based economy, depending mainly on construction and the tourism that earns the Coast about A$2.7 billion ($3.3 billion) a year. In the first three months of this year alone, Tourism Research Australia said, international visitor arrivals fell by 6 per cent. Jobs are being created by major projects, including a new hospital, a sports stadium and the A$1 billion rapid transit network, expected to provide 6300 positions. The city council is also trying
to diversify beyond tourism and construction with an investment programme it claims has produced the equivalent of almost two new jobs and more than $105,000 a day for the past two years.

But the huge appeal of the sun-drenched Gold Coast is working against itself.

With a population already pushing past 540,000, the city is growing faster than any other in Australia except nearby Brisbane, and is expected to exceed 730,000 people within 15 years. The Coast also has a large proportion of young people, who are statistically more likely to become involved in crime or drugs, and less likely to find work.

Almost one in 10 are aged between 18 and 14 - one of the Coast's fastest-growing groups - and more than 14 per cent are 25-34.

Unemployment is about 7 per cent, well above state and national levels, and - while at a lower rate than in many parts of the state - almost 12 per cent of Queensland's homeless subsist in the city.

The Gold Coast Youth Service says that any given night between 600 and 700 young people have nowhere to sleep.

This cocktail has produced a crime rate that is rapidly being clouded in politics as the next state election nears.

Premier Anna Bligh says the new Task Force Resolve will send a powerful warning to criminals and has promised to provide whatever resources police require.

But the Opposition has condemned the Government for not providing even more police and has promised A$4 million over four years for a new major crimes squad on the Coast.

Gold Coast

Population: 540,000.
Visitors: 4 million every year including 195,000 New Zealanders.
Crime: A decade-long decrease in armed robbery has been reversed, with a sudden spike in violent raids including the tavern attack that killed detective Damian Leeding.