Rita Panahi: Why Victoria Police needs to act on ‘gang violence’
POLICE command may be patting themselves on the back for “moving on” the youths wreaking havoc in Taylors Hill last week, but the aversion to the word “gang” and lack of arrests convey weakness, writes Rita Panahi.
Rita Panahi
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SOMETHING is terribly wrong when dozens of louts break the law in full view of heavily armed police without a single arrest being made.
Police command may be patting themselves on the back for “moving on” the youths wreaking havoc in Taylors Hill last week but the lack of arrests conveys weakness, as does the obfuscation on what constitutes gang violence.
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Victoria Police’s preoccupation with semantics is bordering on the bizarre. How can we be confident that police officers are tackling African gangs when Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton ties himself in knots trying to redefine the word gang?
Ashton said the “traditional” label of a gang might confuse Victorians and make them think of people in leather jackets, such as the New York street gangs of West Side Story.
The aversion to the word “gang” is widespread among the upper echelons of the force.
After police arrested 14 members of a youth gang on Friday, in relation to armed carjackings and aggravated robberies, they were at pains to point out that they were not a gang but “a collective group of individuals who know each other”.
Gangs, groups, posses, mobs, squads … call them what you want.
The fact is that they exist and they are a problem. Only 0.11 per cent of the Victorian population are Sudanese-born but they are vastly over-represented in official crime statistics. According to Crime Statistics Agency data released last December they are close to 10 times more likely to offend than the general population. That over-representation increases further when looking at violent offences such as aggravated burglaries and serious assaults.
Among youngsters, the statistics are even more sobering.
In 2016, one in seven Sudanese-born Victorians aged 10 to 24 was charged with a crime.
The figures include only those born in Sudan and not youths of African ancestry born here who, according to Ashton, are even more likely to engage in crime.
Addressing the delinquency should be the priority, not playing word games or trying to rationalise and even minimise the impact of the criminality.
The Chief Commissioner described the latest incident as involving groups of about “20 to 30 kids” coming together to have a “bit of a clash”.
That’s an interesting way to describe around 100 rampaging youths who bragged “police can’t touch us” as they intimidated locals and clashed with police, requiring the attendance of dozens of heavily armed riot and plainclothes officers.
Next day, mounted police were patrolling Taylors Hill streets.
Either there was a gross over-reaction from police or the danger posed was a little more than just kids having a spat.
The mixed messages from police command is nothing new.
Earlier this year the Chief Commissioner simultaneously announced the formation of a new African-Australian community taskforce to tackle youth crime and street violence, and rubbished suggestions that there was an African gang crisis.
Victoria Police Commander of the North-West Metro region, Tim Hansen, has assured locals that police would investigate those responsible for the latest incident.
“I just want to reassure everyone we take a zero-tolerance approach to this sort of behaviour,” he said.
But talk of a “zero tolerance” means little when thugs can throw rocks at police and damage a police vehicle without being handcuffed and hauled back to the station.
It must be demoralising for the brave men and women of the force working at the coal face who are just following orders.
This time the lawlessness was in Taylors Hill, but we’ve witnessed similar scenes in North Melbourne, Footscray, St Kilda and other parts of Melbourne in recent months.
And each time police looked on as violent youths broke the law, damaged property, and terrorised innocent people.
In one of these incidents, in mid-December, “youths of African appearance” went on a wild six-hour-plus rampage on busy St Kilda Beach, fighting among themselves, robbing and assaulting a number of beachgoers and ending festivities by trashing a McDonald’s in the early hours — all without a single arrest.
Police condemned the “totally unacceptable” behaviour and called on those responsible “to come forward … before we track them down”. Good luck with that.
It’s time that Victoria Police command stood with law-abiding citizens and tackled gang violence without fear of offending the perpetually offended.
For months now much of the media, academia, political class and usual Twitter brokens have gone out of their way to mock Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton for suggesting that there are people in Melbourne too scared to go out for dinner.
Even Supreme Court judge Lex Lasry tweeted his disdain: “Breaking: there are citizens out to dinner in Mansfield tonight and they’re not worried.”
But a poll in two outer Melbourne suburbs earlier this year, commissioned by Fairfax — no doubt to prove Dutton wrong — showed that people are in fact genuinely worried.
Residents were asked: Are you less likely to go out at night than you were 12 months ago because of the threat of gang violence?
Among the respondents, 62.1 per cent in Tarneit and 55.2 per cent in Cranbourne said yes. Only one in three in both suburbs said no.
Rita Panahi is a Herald Sun columnist
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