Brooke Boney clashes with Alice Springs business owner behind Facebook page highlighting crime wave

Brooke Boney has clashed with an Alice Springs business owner who founded a social media movement documenting the crime wave gripping the inner city.

Visiting the central Australian community for a segment on the Today show, Ms Boney spoke with Darren Clark, who is behind the Action for Alice Facebook page.

Page and Mr Clark have played a major role in highlighting the crime crises plaguing the city, and Canberra has taken notice with alcohol bans being reinstated to stop the sale of alcoholic beverages in indigenous communities across the region.

But extreme racial views are also often aired on the page by some community members targeting indigenous youth.

I am an aboriginal woman. So sometimes when I see people say things like that, some of those comments, it hurts,” Boney said.

Clark argued that if the situation is not properly addressed, “someone is going to die here soon.”

“I’m the only one who has shown the truth in this town, and if I wanted to show even more truth, no one would live here,” he told Mrs. Boney.

The Action for Alice page highlights the crime the city faces every day.

“Commercial burglaries are up 55 percent, alcohol-related assaults are also up 55 percent, and domestic violence assaults are up 53 percent,” Ms. Boney said.

‘Shocking numbers that paint a dire picture of a once prosperous city.’

Clark said many of the content-laden comments on the Action for Alice page complaining about the crime were from members of the Aboriginal community.

‘Do you know all the people there?’ she asked Mrs. Boney.

‘Because some of those comments actually come from indigenous people who live in this town.

Here we are a community. We’re black and white, and the black guys in this town are screwed too.

Darren Clark, who founded the Action for Alice page, told Ms Boney that some of the angry comments directed at indigenous youth were from aboriginal members of the community.

Clark said the page has “grown and grown” since he launched it in 2020 out of fear that a community member would be killed in the chaos.

Starting next week, the Northern Territory government will introduce legislation to return the areas to “temporary dry zones,” Chief Minister Natasha Fyles said on Monday.

“We have heard loud and clear that the issue and decision of alcohol in the community must be made by the entire community,” Ms Fyles told reporters. “That’s why we’re creating a circuit breaker…until communities can develop and vote on the alcohol management plans they want to see.”

The federal government also announced it would invest $250 million in safety and community services, with the funds going toward job creation, youth engagement, and support for domestic violence services.

A recent video shared on the Action for Alice page shows a group of indigenous residents vandalizing a store in the town’s mall.

The decision comes after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited Alice Springs last month amid growing frustration over violence and alcohol-fuelled robberies in the city.

Ms Fyles said the new restrictions were based on the recommendations of the newly appointed Central Australia Regional Controller, Dorrelle Anderson.

Ms Anderson, who was appointed after the prime minister’s visit, reviewed the territory’s voluntary alcohol restrictions, which replaced Intervention-inspired liquor bans expired last year.

Under the new legislation, communities can opt out of the ban, as long as 60 percent of residents support the decision and have an alcohol management plan.

“Alcohol-related harm remains the Northern Territory’s biggest societal challenge,” said Ms Fyles. “But it’s a legal product and we have to manage the complexities of that product.”

Opposition leader Lia Finocchiaro said the measures were not enough. “There was no promise of additional police or Australian Federal Police to Alice Springs today, which would have an immediate impact on the ground today.”

Alcohol bans are set to return to the Alice Springs region as crime and violence continue to rock the inner city.

Earlier, NT Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price made an impassioned plea for alcohol bans to be reinstated in Alice Springs to deal with a rising crime wave.

Price told the Senate chamber that his family had experienced sexual violence, trauma and murder in central Australia because of alcohol.

Federal Labor MP Marion Scrymgour said of her hometown: “I was visiting the hospital over the Christmas holidays and saw first-hand how critical the situation was.” Nursing staff and doctors run wild and the beds are full of alcohol related crimes.

“But the underlying issues driving the crisis in Central Australia – poverty, unemployment, a severe housing shortage, family and domestic violence, disaffected young people, abandonment of the bush – still need to be addressed,” said Ms Scrymgour.