African youth gangs committing offences is a genuine problem

It doesn’t occur to those in charge that they might react to real punishment; rather, they need our sympathy and money.

Police at the Ecoville Community Centre in Tarneit that has been trashed by gangs of youths.

I’m not sure if I should have ­laughed or cried. But last week the two successive top stories in the digital version of this newspaper were about Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton rubbishing claims that his state is experiencing a wave of gang-­related crime and then about two service stations in northern Melbourne being robbed by men of ­African appearance.

According to the recently ­returned-to-work police chief, there is nothing to see: the men/boys of African appearance cannot be called gangs because they are not operating like organised criminals, and a newly formed taskforce (money required from the government) of community leaders will do the trick.

The trouble for Ashton and the Andrews government more generally is that very many Victorians simply don’t believe this misleading, mushy messaging. Their lived experience suggests otherwise.

Let me briefly give you my ­experience. I have lived most of my life in Melbourne. When I was growing up we rarely locked our house. When we went away, Mum would shut the self-locking front door and lock the back door with a key she then put under the mat.

These days it’s all deadlocks, monitored alarms and automatic garage doors and gates. When I’m upstairs in my study, I lock the doors if no one else is home. It’s a different world, even though I live no more than a kilometre from the original family home.

Police speak to African youths outside the Ecoville Community Park in Tarneit.

Am I being melodramatic? I’m no drama queen and am quite capable of assessing the scale of risks. But there have been quite a few ­carjackings, car thefts and home invasions in and around the area in which we live. It’s seems sensible always to be on the safe side.

Am I afraid to eat out at restaurants, a claim made by Home ­Affairs Minister Peter Dutton? It depends. There are certainly places and times that would make us think twice but, by and large, it’s not a problem. If we are going into the city, we often take the train. The Protective Service Officers who staff the stations at night are a very welcome development.

So let us assume for a moment that there is a problem with youth crime in Victoria, that there are gangs that operate to perpetrate some of these crimes, often of a ­violent nature, and that members of some of these gangs have been born in certain parts of Africa or their parents have been. You might think Ashton and the unimpressive Victorian Police Minister Lisa Neville might be prepared to consider these conjectures, if only for the sake of argument.

Are there any figures to back up these claims? The first thing to be said is that state governments, ­assisted by the senior police managers, have made it an art form to delay and fudge crime statistics. Indeed, political pressure is often applied to record as little as possible about the offenders, including their country of birth.

But if we look at the data that is available, we note that between January 2014 and December 2016, the number of offenders born in Sudan increased by 28 per cent, and for those aged 14 and 15, the ­increase was 83 per cent. For 16 and 17-year-olds, the number of ­offenders rose by 76 per cent.

This compares with only a slight increase in the number of ­offenders born in Australia — by 2 per cent. There was actually a fall in the number of Australia-born offenders aged ­between 10 and 24 years of age.

We can also look at the figures for those born in India and Vietnam. Again, the figures point to much smaller increases than those for the Sudan-born group. In fact, for those aged under 17, there were hardly any offenders who were born in either India or Vietnam.

Of course, because the number of young people born in Sudan, South Sudan and Somalia, and who live in Victoria, is relatively small, the overall number of ­offenders is relatively low. But this is why the rate of crime becomes the key measure: the number of ­offenders as a ratio of the numbers in the population. This is where the figures become really scary.

Young people born in these countries are 60 times more likely to commit crimes than the average for the youth population.

The clear message is: Houston, we have a problem.

Having said this, the “progressive” press and the ABC do their ­utmost to disguise the problem by presenting misleading averages, conflating minor crimes with major violent ones and effectively dismissing the plight of victims.

That a jeweller in Toorak village could have his shop robbed by a gang of African appearance wielding weapons not once but twice — nothing to see. That an elderly woman could be bailed up in a house for which she was sitting and threatened with violence as the house was ransacked by a gang of African appearance — nothing to see. That a community centre in a western suburb of Melbourne, built to provide activities for young people, could be trashed and effectively destroyed by a gang of African appearance — yes, you guessed it, nothing to see.

The representation of the non-problem by parts of the media, senior police managers and some politicians is in many ways a ­reflection of how modern criminology has evolved. The ­approach of modern criminologists, many employed in our universities, is first to deny there is a problem. Second, to the extent a concession is made that there is a minor problem of crimes being committed by certain groups, the response is to blame other factors for this outcome: high unemployment, low incomes, discrimination and the like. In other words, it is our fault, not the fault of the ­offenders.

As Maggie Thatcher said, the aim is to create “a fog of excuses” and to place the burden of rectification not on the offenders themselves but on the wider community and the taxpayer. Ashton’s hopelessly optimistic community taskforce is in this category. There is no notion that offenders might react to the cost of real punishment such as jail time; rather, these offenders need our sympathy and money.

This excuse-based reasoning also begs the question why some groups that also experience high unemployment, low incomes and discrimination are not over-represented in crime statistics. There is clearly something else going on.

Needless to say, modern criminology has infected the ­judiciary, the members of which are tasked with dealing with these offenders. Bail is easily granted; ­violating bail conditions is overlooked; community orders are given instead of detention; and failure to record a conviction is seen as humane. The offenders, particularly young ones and those from particular backgrounds, have nothing to fear.

It is why federal Labor MPs ­refused to back ­harsher measures to deal with young offenders who have entered under the refugee program, ­including the option of deportation. When the joint standing committee on migra­tion’s inquiry into migrant settlement outcomes handed down its report at the end of last year, Labor members of the committee weren’t having a bar of actually punishing young ­violent refugees. In their world, it’s our fault.

An important issue for the federal government is whether all ­future refugee intakes should be suspended from countries whose citizens are known to have disproportionately high rates of crime. Until we can resolve the issues to the benefit of the community as a whole, it would seem like the sensible course of action.