If you’ve been living in Sydney since February 2014 you will have been privy to the introduction and effects of the lockout laws. It’s been a tumultuous three years to say the least, with opposition to the legislation being extremely public and uniformly persistent.
What the legislators constantly hid behind in their defence of the laws was the drop in crime in Kings Cross over the last three years. Yes, the Cross sees far less violence than it did before the lockout laws, but new data from the Bureau of Crime and Statistics has proved something else we always assumed to be true.
The lockout laws have simply displaced the violence elsewhere. Surprise surprise.
Time to change: new data finally shows a concrete rise in crime in nightlife areas outside Kings Cross since the introduction of lockout laws in Sydney.
The report “found evidence for geographical displacement of assaults to areas immediately adjacent to the Kings Cross and Sydney CBD areas”, as well as suburbs within “easy reach” of those areas.
In terms of numbers, it was revealed that there had been a 12% increase in violent incidents in these adjacent areas, and a 17% increase in neighbouring suburbs like Double Bay, Newtown and Bondi.
Within hours of the report surfacing, Keep Sydney Open understandably had something to say:
Violent offenders will be violent offenders, and enforcing a curfew upon a select few areas in a city isn’t going to get rid of the ones inciting these events.
