Alice Springs crime crisis continues with Yeperenye Shopping Centre brawl

More frightening scenes have emerged from troubled Alice Springs as youths and a woman were filmed hurling chairs at each other during a running brawl in the town’s main shopping centre. 

In the video recorded late on Tuesday afternoon at the central Northern Territory town’s Yeperenye Shopping Centre, a woman is shown being hit in the leg by a plastic chair thrown by a group of youths milling about a dining area.

As one store quickly brings down its shutters, the woman runs back into the group of youths with the chair held above her head as security tries in vain to stop the chaos.

A woman carries the chair she was previously struck with to use as a weapon in a running brawl inside an Alice Springs shopping centre

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Others youths join the fray and chairs are thrown back and forth as the running battle moves out of camera shot.

The chaos erupted on a day when alcohol sales have been banned and despite hopes that bringing back partial restrictions on sale would help curb the rampant crime wave.

The chaos erupted on a day when alcohol sales have been banned and despite hopes that bringing back partial restrictions on sale would help curb the rampant crime wave

Action for Alice, the Facebook page set up by local baker Darren Clarke to show residents and businesses being preyed on by marauding youths, posted the video with the weary comment ‘No Grog today but … this ain’t going away’. 

‘I’ve run the page for three years,’ Mr Clarke told Daily Mail Australia.

‘The things I’ve seen can’t be forgotten.’ 

Other locals stated they are now too terrified to visit the mall.

The running brawl between the chair-throwing combatants continued throughout the centre

‘Sorry store owners of Yeperenye – no-go zone for me until things improve – just not worth the trauma – so sad for everyone,’ one person wrote.

‘This is what we’re used to here in Alice Springs budda, unfortunately this is normal,’ another said. 

Two weeks ago a machete-wielding youth terrified shoppers as he loitered outside the centre’s Woolworths store before being arrested. 

New revelations of the chaos gripping the remote Outback town have been emerging every day despite the hasty visit of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Tuesday last week and promises to confront the problem. 

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Street brawls broke out in front an Alice Springs Hotel as terrified nurse Rachel Hale filmed the chaos while barricaded in her room 

On Tuesday two videos emerged showing a shocking attack on a 16-year-old boy by axe-wielding youths in broad daylight and frightening scenes of hotel patrons being besieged by a mob of youths as fights broke out in the street, in a video taken at the Diplomat Hotel by nurse Rachel Hale. 

Also on Tuesday police charged two males for a home invasion of a 75-year-old woman who was robbed while being threatened with a blunt weapon.

Alice Springs Detective Acting Senior Sergeant Rob Kent said it was ‘absolutely disgusting that vulnerable members of our community have been preyed upon in this manner’.

A child care centre was also smashed up, forcing it to close down while forensic police attended the crime scene and tradespeople repaired the damage.

Violence and crime has long been part of Alice Springs life but locals say the situation has deteriorated in the 10 months since the Northern Territory Government lifted alcohol restrictions. 

Mr Albanese and the Northern Territory government have faced a chorus of criticism with the prime minister’s fleeting visit being unfavorably compared with the time he spent over three nights watching the final matches of the Australian Open.