Andrew Bolt: Race activists have buried the truth on crime

Politicians, journalists and race activists are evasive about Sudanese crime rates but Stephane Shepherd is paying the price for saying we should not blame racism.

Some critics didn’t bother checking on Stephane Shepherd before assuming his arguments were racist. Picture: Janine Eastgate

Stephane Shepherd has just exposed a destructive lie in Australian public policy. Now he’s paying the price: this black multiculturalist is denounced as a white racist woman.

Shepherd (below) is a forensic psychologist and associate professor at Swinburne University. And until last month — when he explained why young African Victorians were 38 times more likely than other youths to be jailed — he’d ticked every box for the progressive Left.

He’s an Australian with African ancestry. The uber-woke Victorian government last year gave him a multicultural award. The ABC awarded him a residency at the Left-captured national broadcaster as “an emerging thinker”.

Trouble is, one of Shepherd’s emerging thoughts is that high crime rates in some ethnic groups don’t prove Australia is racist. No, the culture of those groups also counts.

That’s particularly so, Shepherd says, when we import refugees from countries with a “largely agricultural base that didn’t have much modern infrastructure”, where they lived in “smaller communities with collective parenting and strict gender roles and low levels of formal education”.

You might think no one could deny something so obvious. But you’ve probably not paid attention to the evasions and untruths of politicians, police, journalists and race activists about Sudanese crime rates, particularly in Victoria.

This exploded in 2007, when then federal immigration minister Kevin Andrews cut the refugee intake from Africa, saying we needed to better assimilate those here.

Andrews was immediately buried in abuse and falsehoods.

Stephane Shepherd. Picture: Janine Eastgate

Then Queensland premier Anna Bligh accused him of a “pure form of racism”. The Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission accused him of “divisiveness”.

Worse was Christine Nixon, the Labor-appointed head of Victoria Police, who claimed Andrews was wrong about Sudanese youths: “They’re not, in a sense, represented more than the proportion of them in the population.”

In fact, the crime rate for Sudanese youth was already at least four times the average. But the worse it got, the more farcical were police attempts to hide it. Police even avoided mentioning the skin colour of criminals they wanted the public’s help to find.

The result: the spotlight turned away from Sudanese gangs to the supposed “racism” of the police, the media and the rest of Australia.

Taxpayer-funded legal groups sued the police for targeting African youths, and won an apology.

A Channel 7 report on African crime was vilified by race discrimination commissioner Tim Soutphommasane as “racial hysteria”. That kept the lid on the reporting.

But here comes Shepherd with a study (co-authored by lecturer Benjamin Spivak), plus an article that laid out confronting facts.

“African (predominantly South Sudanese) youth comprise at least 19 per cent of young people in custody despite being less than 0.5 per cent of Victoria’s youth population,” says Shepherd, who then calmly dismantled the usual excuses.

No, this doesn’t show that police are just picking on Africans, because other African communities are not over-represented in our jails (Chinese and Indian Australians have below-average crime rates.)

Former ABC editor Osman Faruqi says Shepherd’s essay should not have been published.

What’s more, the Sudanese-born were jailed particularly for serious crimes against the person such as robbery and assault, “which often involve less police discretion”. For public order and drug offences, where police have more freedom not to charge, the crime rate is relatively low.

Shepherd does not deny there is racism, but says South Sudanese in jail are “most likely” doing the time because they did the crime.

The racism excuse is dead. And good, because it was too often used to excuse the guilty and smash Australia.

But the race industry and media Left is furious.

“I’m so f---king angry,” raged Elfy Scott, a host at Junkee Media.

“Totally bizarre,” spluttered Helen Sullivan, of the Guardian.

“Racist trollop (sic),” sneered Amanda Porter, who identifies as Aboriginal and was appointed senior fellow (Indigenous programs) at Melbourne Law School.

Other critics didn’t bother checking on Shepherd before assuming his arguments were racist.

“Woah it’s so unabashedly pro cop, which is even worse given she’s not a reporter,” tweeted Lauren Carroll Harris, a Guardian columnist.

Former ABC editor Osman Faruqi, a race-baiter now with the equally leftist Schwartz Media, said Shepherd’s essay should not have been published: “But how many editors in this country understand anything about this? How many are even black?”

How racist of Faruqi to suggest a white editor cannot understand crime, race — or statistics.

But, Osman: Shepherd is black. And his argument is important.

Some minorities do badly. Others do brilliantly. So don’t blame racism.

Culture counts. That’s the truth that was buried by activists who declared war on Australia instead.