Steve Price: Why is Melbourne not rising up against gang violence?

There should be no place in modern Melbourne for guns and knives in the hands of warring gangs yet we pay more attention to such crime in the US than we do to our own backyard.

There should be no place in modern Melbourne for guns and knives in the hands of warring gangs.

Last weekend this newspaper featured details of a brutal double murder and the deliberate shooting of a pet dog.

The crime featured on the front page last Sunday with details including photographs of one of the dead men and his family.

Commercial TV carried stories on the Sunday night including an interview with a grieving father. Then nothing.

I must ask all of Melbourne what’s happened to us and our sense of outrage around criminal gun violence and murder?

Why is there not uproar over suburban violence, frightening home invasions, gang wars and car jackings?

Once the media in this town would have been crying out for a stronger police response to such violent crimes and the state government would be called on to find answers to stop such despicable crimes.

Not any more, and the talkback radio I listened to this week – unless I missed something – didn’t even talk about shooting victim Atem Atem and his dead friend and their dead dog.

Atem was 29 years old and one of nine children from a home in Carmichael Drive in Wyndham Vale in Melbourne’s west. His street is tucked halfway between Werribee in the south and Manor Lakes to the north.

Deng Atem, whose son Atem Atem was shot dead in his home in Wyndham Vale. Picture: Luis Ascui

There is some confusion about the chain of events early last Saturday morning but what’s beyond question is that two men and a dog are dead. Shot in cold blood in the garage of the Carmichael Dve home.

Security cameras captured three cars fleeing the scene and neighbours reported hearing a volley of gun shots. A 23 year-old friend of the dead men was also shot but survived and went to hospital for treatment.

This is suburban Melbourne in 2023 not some gun-toting ghetto in LA or a city in the USA overrun with weapons.

It seems we pay more attention to a gun crime in the US or reports of police brutality than we do a brutal murder in our own backyard.

Melbourne clearly has become like the wild west with gangs roaming the western and south-western suburbs wielding guns and knives and thinking they can sort out their differences by killing people.

What happened in that suburban street last Saturday can’t be reported as just another Saturday night in the suburbs. It should be used as an example, as a starting point, for Victorians living in Melbourne to stand up and say “enough is enough!’

How can we stand by and think that’s not a basic breakdown in the way our society ought to be operating. There should be no place in modern Melbourne for guns and knives in the hands of warring gangs.

For me, for some reason I still can’t quite put my hand on, the shooting dead of that family’s pet dog has made this an even more evil act.

What sort of person other than a cold-blooded killer puts a gun to the head of a pet dog and shoots it to stop it barking.

Think about that for a moment.

Atem Atem was shot deat outside a Wyndham Vale home. Picture: Facebook

The father of Atem, Deng Atem, told the media on Saturday that two of his other sons – Luka and Mading – went outside to investigate when they saw their brother and the dog shot dead.

Imagine the impact on them.

What sort of danger might they now be in. The dad revealed that his son was working on building sites and was set to visit South Sudan with his mother next month.

The family moved here from the war-torn nation in 2003 when the dead man was just nine years old.

Locals said police had visited the home about four times in the last six or seven years. Police haven’t ruled out a gang dispute as the reason behind the killing.

What you won’t hear from senior police or from any Andrews government minister is the word gang or gangs being mentioned. Even some in the media are shy to suggest Melbourne has a suburban criminal gang problem largely run along ethnic lines.

The words African and gang are simply not to be mentioned in the same sentence. Same goes for Islander gangs or Middle Eastern gangs.

Better it seems from a political point of view to pretend these things are simply random acts of violence committed by dangerously armed violent criminals who don’t think twice about shooting two men and a dog dead and wounding a third man.

Local politicians that cover the suburbs where these out-of-control young people – and they are mostly in their teens and twenties – live pretend it’s not happening.

Most of the gang-against-gang violence seems to involve turf wars and these brazen thugs travel outside their home turf to steal cars to use in criminal activities like home invasions.

The fact that many of these crimes are committed by the children of migrants arriving here from war-torn places like South Sudan and Middle East countries is something else no one wants to talk about.

It seems police at the very top at commissioner level are too often more interested in keeping their political masters happy and staying on message.

It’s up to the media and the community to bust wide-open that cosy little arrangement by screaming from the rooftops about violence in our town.

No Melburnian should be forced to hide their car keys and surround their homes with security cameras, fearful some twenty-something gang member and his dangerous mates want to steal your BMW or Mercedes.

This is Melbourne not Mogadishu.

Unless we make some noise when two men and their dog are gunned down in cold blood then we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Dislikes

• Mad Greens party idea that governments should be able to freeze private rental prices and spend billions on public housing.

• Linda Burney the new Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister explaining 15 years on from the Apology that communities still don’t have fresh water, fresh food, or even education.

• New confusing Victorian road rules on the use of mobile phones and other devices.

• Massive damage to our nearest Neighbour NZ from a violent cyclone.

Likes

• Premier Daniel Andrews re-asserting his opposition to pill testing in Victoria.

• ABC finally forced to apologise for its distorted reporting from a public meeting in Alice Springs over youth violence.

• Atmosphere at this week’s two big sporting events in Arizona the Superbowl and PGA golf.

• Peter Bol’s second drug testing result seems to have cleared the 800 metre champ.

Originally published as Steve Price: Why is Melbourne not rising up against gang violence?