At the Apex of a crime wave in Melbourne

Rampaging gangs of young criminals appear to have no fear of the police.

Richa Walia, who now keeps a golf club by her bed, and her family have had their lives overturned by a home invasion in July. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

On a cold night back in July, Richa Walia was sleeping the kind of sleep she can now only dream about when her peaceful slumber was shattered by the glass door at the back of the family home exploding. It was just after 5am.

Four Apex gang thugs had hurled a rock through the door and charged into the house.

By the time the 26-year-old university student fully woke, the teenage attackers, armed with baseball bats and metal poles, were threatening her parents and ­demanding car keys.

“I went downstairs and saw one of the guys in my sister’s room. He was looking at me and wasn’t scared at all,” she recalls.

“I said: ‘Who are you?’ And he just put a phone he had taken in his pocket.”

Richa’s brother was hiding in his room terrified as the rest of the thugs were screaming at her parents, Ashani and Rekha, for the car keys.

Eventually they found the keys to both family cars and sped off to commit further crimes.

For the Walia family, the acute terror ended there. But the incident continues to haunt them.

“No one sleeps at all — we have all been sick. It is the fact that the quality of life has been disturbed and the fact that law supports criminals more than us makes it so difficult,” the media and communications student tells The Australian.

The Walia family has not been the same since being the victims of a violent home invasion. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

The family feels the police ­response should have been quicker than 30 minutes, and has watched as two of the four attackers were bailed.

This story, sadly, is no longer unusual. Caroline Springs, the suburb on Melbourne’s western fringes where this hardworking Indian Australian family lives, is now dubbed Criminal Springs by its rueful residents. Back in 2000 the development was marketed by tennis great John Newcombe in TV advertisements as a place where “the kids can have a lifestyle and we can let them go around the corner without being afraid”. Now, residents hold their own neighbourhood watch patrols in an ­effort to keep safe.

Similar patrols have sprung up in parts of Geelong and the southeastern suburbs of Melbourne around Dandenong, the epicentre of the Apex gang, which is named after a local street.

The thugs who attacked the Walias were of African descent and Apex has Sudanese members. But police say the situation is more complex. Pacific Islander and caucasian youths also are involved in Apex and the many other similar gangs that have sprung up in ­recent years.

Members are now only loosely affiliated to gangs, Victorian op­position police spokesman Ed O’Donohue says, and they can have multiple affiliations or ­belong to groups that form spontaneously for social-media led crime sprees.

“It’s causing enormous problems in our youth justice system,” O’Donohue says.

“Police say it used to be that young offenders would steal a car and dump it and run when they were apprehended. Now they jump on the arterial roads and drive as fast as they can for as far as they can. Or they try to ram police.

“They report a trend towards more serious offending, more risk taking and greater preparedness to take police on.”

Not surprisingly, O’Donohue says the government was caught napping by the crime wave and the subsequent public anxiety that skyrocketed after a string of riots at the Melbourne Youth Justice Centre. “They still don’t have a coherent response to deal with youth crime issues,” he says.

The Labor government has introduced new laws creating ­offences for carjacking and home invasions carrying maximum ­sen­tences of up to 25 years along with minimum non-parole periods.

But it is under pressure to ­reverse changes to youth bail laws that removed breaching bail from criminal statues and to get on top of the surge of gang violence and chaos in the youth justice system.

Police Minister Lisa Neville says the government is determined to make sure offenders are held accountable and potential ­offenders deterred.

“That’s why we have put in place tough new laws to target ­offenders who commit aggravated carjackings and home invasions — with statutory minimum sentences, harsh maximum penalties and a presumption against bail,” she tells The Australian.

“Those laws are expected to be in effect by the end of the year.

“We are sending a strong message to would-be offenders with a presumption against bail in the most serious cases. We’re regularly in discussions about the need to provide additional powers to police.”

Neville is careful to play down the impact of ethnic groups. She agrees with police that the youth gangs involved a “United Nations of offending” involving a small but hardened group of young people.

The Police Minister acknowledges that while the overall rate of youth offending is down, “the ­frequency and recklessness of ­offending, together with an appalling lack of respect for authority from this group of young recidivist offenders, (are) most concerning”.

“They are terrible crimes that cause significant trauma for victims and families, who have a right to feel safe in their own homes.”

While police say the sense of fear in the community is out of proportion to the scale of the problem, the statistics do show a sharp rise in violent offences.

Against a backdrop of a crime rate per head of a population that rose by more than 23 per cent in the past five years, the kind of ­offences perpetrated by youth gang members are soaring.

Carjacking offences are up 80 per cent across the past 12 months to March and home invasions where thieves steal a car more than doubled, according to recent media reports.

Burglaries and break and enter offences rose almost 13 per cent while robbery offences rose 14 per cent in the year to June 30, official figures show.

While there has been a slight drop in the number of crimes committed by offenders under the age of 25, each of these offenders is committing more crimes, according to the Crime Statistics Agency Victoria.

And the anecdotal evidence from police is that the brazen and violent nature of the crimes is getting worse.

Victoria Police deputy commissioner Andrew Crisp tells The Australian that gang membership is fluid and many members come ­together from different groups via social media. Police are dealing with a hard core of 550 highly dangerous and brazen youth ­offenders. “Among this group of high-risk recidivist ­offenders, in many respects it is a blatant disregard for law and order, there is definitely a real bravado about the behaviour they are engaging in,” Crisp says.

“It’s concerning that in the ­offending we are seeing, that they will offend until they get caught.

“It is almost as though they are not afraid to be caught, they just try and offend as much as they can until it happens.

“We have seen the increases in relation to ag burgs (aggravated burglaries) and carjackings. I look at this very closely and when you see a run or series of offences committed by the same group I would say generally within a week we have arrested them.”

Crisp plays down ethnic and geographic dimensions to the gang violence. “We have seen ­offenders come together from all parts of Melbourne,” he says.

“Not just Sudanese from Dandenong. It is the United Nations of offending — we are seeing those of African background, we are seeing Pacific Islands youth, and we are seeing those of a very strong Anglo (Saxon) background and some others thrown in as well.”

Police are in discussions with the government about youth bail laws and other legislation and the force is very worried about the trend among young offenders to try to ram police officers, he says.

Operation Cosmas, the taskforce set up to tackle Apex and gang violence, made more than 215 arrests since it was formed in May and police believe they are getting on top of the problem.

However, neighbourhood watch groups remain active in Caroline Springs, where the Walia family lives, along with parts of Geelong and the outer southeastern suburbs as police warn against the dangers of vigilantism.

The reason for the sudden ­upsurge in youth crime, at its most visible last summer when the Apex gang led a run-through of celebrations for the Moomba Festival, stealing phones and wallets from crowds in Federation Square, has everyone scratching their heads.

The answer that most proffer is about employment and alienation.

It is perhaps no coincidence that in Dandenong, the Apex ­epicentre, youth unemployment stands at 30 per cent. Young people are disengaged from education and careers, and drift into the orbit of gang leaders.

Youth unemployment in Melbourne’s northwest stands at 16.5 per cent and 15.1 per cent in the west. In the southeast, which encompasses Dandenong, it is 18.3 per cent. There is anecdotal evidence that youth gangs become pawns for more serious adult criminals who prefer to outsource some of their activities to avoid stretches in prison.

The crime debate tends to flow on to a debate on police numbers with the opposition, the Victoria Police Association and the government using different figures to argue their point.

“Police numbers at the frontline have been going backwards,” O’Donohue says, pointing to Victoria Police data that he says shows there are 114 fewer frontline police since 2014 when the current government came to power.

The police association says the current rate of 102 police per 100,000 Victorians is a new low and another 3300 police will be needed up until 2022, far more than the extra 406 promised by the government in the current budget and brought forward in response to the crime surge.

There is also a debate about deployment with the opposition running hard on closures and reduced hours at some police stations.

Police Commissioner Graham Ashton has made no apologies about reducing hours at some police stations, saying he wanted officers out on the road rather than being behind desks.

Some officers also have been shifted into squads to tackle particular types of crime such as counter terrorism, outlaw bikie gangs and youth crime.

Neville says there are more police now than when the ALP came to power in November 2014 and the government will “continue to give Victoria Police the resources and the powers they need to hold offenders to account and reduce crime in our communities”.

As the debate rages, the government is preparing to act. Next week it is set to announce a big law and order package for the final week of parliament this year.

While the minister is holding the line rhetorically, it is clear the government is rattled.

The most recent trashing of the Melbourne Youth Justice Centre is just the kind of headache it needs to avoid.

The decision by Premier Daniel Andrews to stare down the ALP’s human rights lobby constituency and put the youth rioters in adult prison shows how rattled the government is by the youth crime wave.

“Some will criticise the decision to put young kids in Barwon. Well, they can criticise away,” Andrews said earlier this month.

Back in Caroline Springs, the Walia family wants to see more concern for the rights of victims rather than the young thugs who strike terror into their lives.

Richa Walia says the family has invested in new security systems and a guard dog, but they still can’t get a decent night’s sleep as the shock of the home invasion has left them all in fear.

She survives on a couple of hours’ sleep a night and tells how her brother, Rohan, is now scared to go to school.

“It’s worse now than when it happened,” she says.