Steve Price: If we don’t talk about African youth gangs, there will be more bloodshed

Labelling those who refer to African youth gangs racist is fuelling the bloodshed on our streets. And where are these kids’ parents?

Five-years-ago next month, Victorians were outraged when a senior Liberal Minister in the Turnbull government said Melbourne residents were scared to go out to dinner due to gang street crime.

Peter Dutton – now Opposition Leader – was ridiculed with the left-wing activist group GetUp! calling him a fearmonger.

Victorian Treasurer Tim Pallas — the local member for Tarneit, now Werribee — joined the pile-on, calling for Dutton to apologise and blaming the federal government for reducing allocations to migrant services.

The then Victorian Youth Affairs Minister Jenny Mikakos called Dutton simplistic and accused him of a “con job” with his solutions and claimed she had been working with police and community organisations on prevention and early intervention.

Five years on, and two elections later, Mikakos is out of politics and Pallas doesn’t seem to have much to say about street crime, African gangs and knife attacks.

That’s because five years on from the Dutton intervention the Victorian government has done nothing.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was called a fearmonger and racist for daring to address the issue of African gangs. Picture: Martin Ollman

So bad is the gang culture that the Herald Sun this week ran a front page headline “End the bloodshed”.

Pathetically the Victorian Liberals, that were smashed at the polls in 2018, were too scared this election to again highlight what we all know is going on, and that’s out-of-control street crime involving teenage gangs armed with knives and machetes.

Violent home invasions and carjackings are now also in the mix.

Dutton in 2018 was Home Affairs Minister and used his access to intelligence to call out the South Sudanese community pointing out other states didn’t have the same issues.

Community leaders predictably rounded on Dutton, and he was labelled a racist and ignorant of issues in the Sudanese and Somalian communities.

Two years after the Dutton “going out for dinner” warnings, we saw, in March 2021, nine African youths in hospital – one critically injured – after a chaotic CBD apartment party turned violent.

CCTV footage from the apartment’s foyer identified the party as being attended by dozens of young people of African appearance.

Twenty-one months later, fast forward to last Sunday in St Kilda, and if anything, years of politically correct denial about the reality of gang violence involving the children of African

immigrants has made the problem worse.

Knife crime, often featuring teenagers of African background interspersed with teenagers from Islander families or from the Middle East, is out of control.

Postcode wars, they are called, with do-gooders blaming turf disputes. One community leader quoted but unnamed even turned the blame on the wider community.

He said “these groups of kids have nothing else to do”.

Seriously — was he suggesting boredom somehow justifies people stabbing and bashing one another resulting in the death of an 18-year-old?

Police officers at the scene of the recent, fatal St Kilda stabbing. Picture: 7 News

He went on to claim they were not at school, they don’t have jobs, they’re not involved in sport.

A major question to be posed to this joker might be where are the parents of these out-of-control knife and machete-wielding criminals?

The dead boy was Hashim Mohamed who was still recovering from an earlier car accident that killed four of his mates after another gang incident at the Tarneit Shopping Centre.

His mother has denied he was involved in any gangs.

His brother Hamid described his dead brother as a good kid who liked to go out with his friends and called him a happy, normal 18-year-old.

Evidence would suggest the boy was hanging out with the wrong crowd and his brother Hamid is obviously distraught about his death.

So, five years on from the Dutton warning that was labelled racist and scoffed at as being ignorant, what are the leaders of the African community saying now?

As the Herald Sun revealed on Wednesday from an emotional nine-minute video posted on social media by Hanad Hersi – a community leader – he says the streets are “full of blood”.

He claimed, “more young people will die” if no action was taken and went on to ask, “we really need to start asking ourselves real hard questions around what the actual f--- is

going on?”

Someone needs to point out to community leaders making excuses for violent African youth behaviour, the idea of personal and parental responsibility.

Another Somalian leader, Farah Warsame, naively made the point, “our community hasn’t had these kind of issues before”.

Predictably he then called on the government to do something and called for action to get African kids off the streets and lower the youth unemployment problem.

He wants grassroots sporting programs and crime prevention schemes.

Someone needs to point out to Mr Warsame — and other community leaders like him — the idea of personal and parental responsibility and suggest to him that all those denials back in 2018 when people called Dutton a racist might not have worked out too well.

As for the Victoria Police they also need to shake off their delusion about this knife carrying murderous crime wave.

Victoria Police need to shake off its delusion about Victoria’s knife-carrying, murderous crime wave. Picture: 7 News

A statement this week referenced Operation Alliance, calling the 2020 task force an operation intent on disrupting and dismantling youth crime gangs.

Three years on that’s clearly failed.

And what about the actual government, that for years denied the gangs even existed — what was its solution do you think?

“As this (the St Kilda gang stabbing in broad daylight) is an active police matter, it would be inappropriate to comment further.”

Government, police and community leaders have been in denial from when Dutton called this out in 2018.

It’s time they confessed they got it wrong back then and started coming up with some solutions.

If not we will indeed continue to have blood on the streets.

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Originally published as Steve Price: If we don’t talk about African youth gangs, there will be more bloodshed