Armed teenagers spark South Australian Westfield lock down
Two groups of teenagers were reported fighting in Westfield Marion Shopping Centre at 3pm on Sunday 23 June. Visitors and staff at the South Australian shopping centre sheltered inside while others evacuated.
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00:00This afternoon at 2.52pm the South Australian Police received reports for the fight between
00:05youth in the food court. At that time we had information that the fight involved
00:10three of those offenders, some of them armed with expandable batons.
00:16Police responded and by the time police had got to the centre Westfield had enacted their
00:22emergency procedures and they were following their procedures that take place during the
00:29information and the incident that they had and they were dealing with. Police worked very closely
00:35with Westfield and obviously we escalated our response to ensure the safety of all patrons
00:41in the centre. Some of those patrons had sheltered in place and some had individually evacuated.
00:49It was our job to work very closely with Westfield to clear the centre and ensure that all safety
00:57of all customers within the centre could be ensured. That took us a few hours but we have
01:04to the point now where we were able to safely clear the centre with our specialist police
01:09and allow people that were still sheltered in place to leave. In terms of the incident I have
01:16looked at the CCTV. It involves three youth and I will call them boys under 18 years of a Caucasian
01:25appearance. They approach another group of boys and an altercation occurs. The expandable batons
01:33are seen and at this stage we can't discount any other weapons but we do have some reports that a
01:39knife may be involved. Those three boys chased the other boys through the centre and through the CCTV
01:47we were able to see that they entered the David Jones store and that was the first part of our
01:53focus of where we put our specialist attention to start clearing the centre to ensure that the
01:59safety of all people could be ensured. At this stage we know the identity of the two of the
02:07victims. I would say that it's clear from the vision that this is not a random attack. The boys
02:13would appear to be known to each other but obviously we're still in the early days of
02:18investigation of the incident and we have our investigators here again reviewing the CCTV
02:25trying to make sure that the information we had can be verified in some way.