Bring back Mick.

If ever there was a good time to cooee a retired politician in from the long paddock, this is it.

From all accounts, Michael John Atkinson, our 46^th Attorney-General, former Speaker of the House of Assembly, and its best in modern times, once chancellor of the Traditional Anglican Communion, punter at obscure Victorian country race meetings, fisho, fervent grammar contrarian, annoying unpaid media critic, is enjoying retirement.

But South Australia needs Mick to get back in the saddle.

At 65 he’s still a pup and could be parachuted into the Legislative Council, replacing one of the party’s yawning time-servers on the red benches.

He could return as Special Attorney-General-In-Residence doing what he did best – the Number 1 bogey man of crims, big and small, high-profile lawyers and wobbly judges.

South Australians are facing what looks and feels like an unstoppable snowball of destructive, opportunistic, often vicious and now increasingly deadly street crime, for want of a better description.

As the events of this week have tragically demonstrated, law-abiding people, and that’s most of us, don’t need to go looking for trouble, it comes smashing through the front door.

Living in a pricey suburb no longer insulates homeowners from danger.

If anything, despite the electric gates and security cameras, these are increasingly a magnet for the TikTok generation of offenders.

Toting stolen Gucci handbags and designer runners, they feel right at home.

The callous, vicious and cowardly murder of well-known SA paediatrician Dr Michael Yung in his Gilberton home this week is deeply unsettling.

The courts must now decide the fate of those charged with his murder – Thebarton couple Jacinta Davila, 27 and Kerem Aydin, 22, parents of an eight-month-old child.

SA Police have confirmed they are not seeking other suspects and rule out a connection with the gangs having the time of their dopey lives on our suburban streets.

It matters not. The death of Dr Yung in such an horrific manner is another log on a bonfire of anxiety. It’s hard to keep the smoke out of the house.

The Malinauskas Government’s Attorney-General Kyam Maher is a serious politician and reforming law-maker. It’d be unfair to describe him as soft on crime. He ticks all the right boxes.

But he’s not the sort of Attorney-General that keeps crims, and those who work to keep them free, awake at night, so the rest of us can enjoy the sleep of the just.

Mick Atkinson was.

As former Labor Premier Mike Rann’s chief lawmaker, Atko, as he is known for short, never lost any sleep over legislating for harsher penalties and longer sentences.

He happily poked a burnt stick into the anthills of the legal fraternity and the judiciary.

He wasn’t even fazed about putting the noses of his own colleagues, particularly those on the Left, out of joint.

It’s just the way he’s wired.

In the late ’70s, I was a young reporter with The Advertiser learning the ropes of the industrial round with veteran Bill Rust.

We worked out of a small office in what was then Trades Hall on South Terrace, cheek-by-jowl with most of the state’s union officials.

Bill was a union official himself, secretary of the then Australian Journalists’ Association, and after banging out news yarns on a manual typewriter, he would toil away drafting the AJA’s meeting agendas.

While recruiting new officers is an obvious challenge, it’s also a fact the SA Police Force has never been better funded or resourced.

When Mick Atkinson started work with us as a cadet journalist with a law degree, a rare beast back then, he began pursuing stories on remnants of the anti-communist Labor “Groupers” from the party’s big split in the 1940s, all a mystery to me.

This turned the joint upside down and our phone box-sized office quickly filled with the ruffled feathers of squawking union heavies.

As Attorney-General, Atkinson had the unwavering support of Labor Premier Mike Rann, whose long list of colourful insults for criminals included “scum bags”, “pond scum” and, for bikies, simply “thieves and murderers”.

The anti-crime trio was complete with Rann’s Police Minister and Treasurer Kevin Foley.

When Foley refused to fund a new prison, instead jemmying in even more offenders, some three to a cell, he gave us the immortal line that he would “rack ‘em, stack ‘em and pack ‘em if that’s what it takes to keep our streets safe”.

Outrageous? The crack remains a favourite Adelaide meme.

Not for a fledgling Corrections Minister, one Peter Malinauskas, back in 2016, though.

At the time, InDaily reported on his response to a Productivity Commission report that noted a “concerning” 9.7 per cent increase in SA’s daily prison population from the previous year.

“Previously we have had members of the Government talking about racking ‘em, packing ‘em and stacking ‘em – which I don’t think was particularly helpful rhetoric,” Malinauskas tut-tutted.

“I will be looking at considered evidence-based decisions about how we can improve our handling of the prison population.”

Not “particularly helpful rhetoric”? Such a Malinauskas turn-of-phrase. In brief, he thought it was dumb.

As we approach the end of 2023, battered and bruised as a community on so many fronts, many South Australians may be yearning for a return to the not “particularly helpful rhetoric” of Atkinson, Foley and Rann.

They might prefer it to the “evidence-based solutions to improve our handling of the prison population”.

As we’ve seen with the Albanese Government’s slumping stocks during the cost-of-living crisis, voters need to know you’re on their side, not just bystanders to their struggles.

The same rule applies to law and order. The community needs to see and hear that the Malinauskas Government understands its anxiety over crime.

While Premier Malinauskas and his Attorney-General on Wednesday agreed to a $3m Royal Commission into domestic violence, they need to lift their game on broader issues of community safety.

So does the police force.

While they have a strong record on response to major crime – detectives pounced on the couple accused of murdering Dr Yung barely 24 hours after his death – they are struggling to contain the mounting threat to shops and homes.

Many shop owners, many households, simply see little point in calling the cops after a robbery or burglary.

Back in April, Police Commissioner Grant Stevens urged CBD shop owners, some of whom are now too scared to unlock their doors, to keep a sense of “perspective” about police attending reports of property damage caused by swaggering mobs of thugs.

“If you are a victim of property damage and there are no suspects present and there’s no likelihood of any significant forensic evidence, it’s not necessarily the case that a police officer is going to attend,” he said. “There are other ways to report that type of crime and it will be assessed and investigated accordingly.”

He told FIVEaa that “I’m not sure what people expect”.

“It’s not the job of the police to intervene and prevent that behaviour from occurring,” he said. “Ours is to respond when it does.”

Yet SAPOL’s own strategic priorities up to 2030 dictate “prevention first” as one of its five key objectives.

Its “who we are” description says the force works to “protect and reassure individuals and communities across the state”, including through community engagement and “incident response”.

Why wasn’t the community informed of multiple incidents of crime against people and property by gangs in the suburbs in and around where Dr Yung died?

SAPOL partly blames shop theft and the gang-related crime wave on a shortfall of 176 police officers in a force of 4498, and on cost of living pressures.

While recruiting new officers is an obvious challenge, it’s also a fact the SA Police Force has never been better funded or resourced.

And much of the CBD shop theft is by young, well-fed, pampered punks doing it for kicks.

The same old, same old rhetoric isn’t cutting it any more. The Malinauskas Government needs a radical shift in thinking, action and rhetoric in dealing with community crime.

Rack ‘em, pack ‘em, stack ‘em? Sounds like a great place to start.

Matthew Abraham is InDaily’s political columnist. Matthew can be found on Twitter as @kevcorduroy. It’s a long story.