Have we forgot Elijah Doughty? Facebook vigilantes’ calls for vengeance a cause for concern in North West

However bad crime has become in a town, and whoever is doing it, advocating publicly for violence does not end well for anyone. Everyone in WA knows exactly what happens when using community social media pages to call for blood goes too far. Elijah Doughty, 14, was in 2016 killed by a man who mowed him down in his ute in Kalgoorlie-Boulder while riding a stolen motorbike. That tragic incident and the riots which followed came after local Facebook groups became a cesspit of hate, with racist rants and advocacy for taking matters into their own hands directed at children allegedly committing crimes. I wasn’t there in 2016 when it happened, but I was in Kalgoorlie-Boulder in 2020 when that lynch mob mentality started to boil to the surface on Facebook once more. Local police were alarmed this hate could rise again in the very town where it went too far just four years earlier. Relatives of Elijah who still wore visible pain on their faces from his death were desperately calling for calm as vile comments garnered likes and replies egged on the mob mentality around the anniversary of the boy’s death. Someone even said the worst thing about Elijah’s death was it had not taught the kids — not the vigilantes — a lesson. “Elijah was safe here but then he went out for a couple of months and got killed,” Elijah’s grandfather Albert Doughty told me last year as a group of children sat next to him stony faced listening to the story. “He got in the grand final Saturday, I seen him here Sunday, dead Monday.” What was evident from this chat was that this was not a hardened criminal, but a kid with a bright future who had briefly gone astray. Mr Doughty lamented the culture which precipitates the social media vitriol, a culture he believes will never change in his hometown. Now that spiteful rhetoric is alarmingly seeping into northern social media pages. Youth crime is a serious problem in the Kimberley and Pilbara right now, and it is understandable people are reaching breaking point. Police and youth services are facing enormous pressure due to their caseloads and there is little faith so far in the Kimberley Juvenile Justice Strategy the State Government talks up every time it is asked what can be done. It is a trope but it is true — there are no quick fixes and patience is needed to see whether the KJJS can turn things around. If it can, it will go down as one of the greatest successes of this Government. If it doesn’t, one of its biggest failures. That provides little solace to those having their homes, cars and businesses wrecked by out-of-control youths seeking the latest hit to brag about to their mates right now though. But “ramming” and “belting the f... out of” a child as one individual in Derby suggested, or worse, won’t solve the problem either. It didn’t in Kalgoorlie-Boulder, and it won’t here. The best we can do is lock up, ensure our homes, business and belongings are as secure as they can be, trust the police to do the best they can with the resources they have, and keep the pressure on the powers that be to fund and enforce the solutions needed to get on top of this crisis. The vigilante vitriol is callous, it is spiteful and all it does is perpetuate an us-versus-them divide at precisely the time we need to be coming together.