Streets of menace: gang violence in the suburbs
The government moved to cut our African refugee intake back in 2007 amid worry over integration. Then Christine Nixon spoke up.
It was more than just an out-of-control party. Having trashed the rented property, the “guests” — dozens of African youths thought to have visited a basketball tournament earlier that day — spilled outside, pelting rocks at neighbouring properties, trampling cars and smashing windscreens with garden stakes or whatever else they could find.
Residents of the quiet street in Werribee, in Melbourne’s west, cowered inside their homes, terrified as the angry mob’s chants about being out to “get whites” were eventually drowned out by the roar of police helicopters.
The scene, according to witnesses, was warlike. And as bewildered police combed through the mess the next morning, they came across a curious calling card: the letters MTS and APEX scrawled on broken furniture.
While the Apex gang was known to police, having become synonymous with Melbourne’s African gang problem following the Moomba riots almost two years ago, MTS — thought to stand for “Menace to Society” in reference to a 1993 US street gangster film, Menace II Society — was something different.
News of a potentially new gang threat, combined with a recent outbreak of violent robberies and attacks, vandalism and affray by young African men across the city, set off a political storm that has travelled all the way to Canberra.
As Malcolm Turnbull accused Victoria’s Daniel Andrews-led Labor government of dropping the ball on crime and federal Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton sensationally claimed the people of Melbourne were too scared to go to restaurants at night, state MPs hit back, accusing their critics of politicising a serious issue.
Amid all the mudslinging, debate has raged over whether Melbourne really does have a gang problem and, if so, whether young African men, specifically those of Sudanese or South Sudanese origin, are at the centre of it.
“If your average Joe Blow in the west is watching the TV news and sees vision of a large group of Sudanese kids mucking up, causing mayhem, what he sees is a ‘gang’,” one veteran police officer, based in Melbourne’s west, the heartland of recent criminal activity, tells Inquirer. “I think trying to tell the public that it’s not a gang, just because it might not meet the criteria of a bikie-style, organised-crime gang, is splitting hairs and it’s a big mistake.
“The reality is we do have an issue with groups of young men, who largely come from Sudanese backgrounds, who are absolutely obsessed with American gang culture — the music, the clothing the lifestyle, the language — and they’re running around town acting exactly like a gang.”
Law enforcement authorities have been talking down public concerns about African refugees and crime for more than a decade, coinciding with dramatic growth in the numbers of Sudanese coming to Australia under the humanitarian intake program.
According to the latest census data, more than 20,000 Australian residents were born in Sudan, with 11,422 settling across Greater Melbourne, mainly in the southeastern suburbs (including Dandenong, Noble Park, Springvale and Doveton) and in the west (St Albans, Deer Park, Sunshine West, Werribee and Tarneit).
Back in 2007, following a move by the federal government to cut the number of African refugees admitted into Australia over integration concerns, Victoria’s police chief commissioner at the time, Christine Nixon, defended the community, claiming that Sudanese refugees were convicted of fewer crimes per capita than the general Victorian population.
A year later, however, fresh crime statistics revealed that Sudanese youth were offending at a rate four times higher than the state average. Victoria Police and the state government have continued to be under pressure over the issue ever since.
When Victoria Police’s Deputy Commissioner Shane Patton gave evidence to the federal inquiry into migrant settlement outcomes last April, he cautiously confirmed that police were seeing offending by African youths.
“We say ‘African youth’, but they may well be Australians — they may hold Australian citizenship but be African in appearance, or they may be second-generation Australians,” he said. “The African community has acknowledged that a small cohort of their youth have issues in high-end offending — and we equally agree with that — but so do other areas of youths. It is not specific to African youth but they are also represented in high-end crime.”
Accusations that police were putting political correctness before public safety weren’t helped the day after Boxing Day when Superintendent Therese Fitzgerald batted away questions about the recent spate of offending, including an assault against a policeman, by claiming that “youth crime in general”, rather than gangs, was to blame.
The resulting backlash prompted Patton, who is now Acting Chief Commissioner, to frankly admit the problem.
“They’re behaving like street gangs, so let’s call them that, that’s what they are,” he said on Tuesday. “We acknowledge that, we acknowledge there is an issue.”
But yesterday the message again got slightly blurred when police addressed the latest crime spree by African youths in Melbourne’s west.
A 59-year-old woman was hit in the face and forced to sit in her front room while a dozen men ransacked her house. The same men were thought to be linked to two other street assaults on teenage boys and another home invasion overnight on Thursday.
Asked whether this represented an escalation of serious gang offending by this cohort, Commander Russell Barrett, in charge of the city’s northwest region, said he wouldn’t go as far as agreeing with that suggestion, “but it’s certainly a serious incident”.
Released in 1993, the American film Menace II Society tells the story of Caine, a “thug with a heart” from the wrong side of the tracks who battles disadvantage, drugs and crime in an attempt to build a better life. Along with the 1991 cult classic Boyz n the Hood, it gained notoriety for its unbridled violence, profanity and drug-related content, helping to popularise the urban crime drama genre.
Sudanese and South Sudanese leaders have lamented the influence on their young men of American rap and hip-hop music, with its origins as the voice of poor and under-represented African-American youth and its frequently violent narratives.
John Kuot, a Sudanese-born business development manager who comes into contact with young at-risk men through his volunteer work, says African kids have become besotted with rap music, frequently adopting nicknames such as 50 Cent, or Snoop Dog, using rap-inspired phrases and speaking in an American accent.
Kuot believes the lifestyle has become appealing to young Africans, many of whom have had difficulties adapting to life in Australia, having struggled with education, finding employment, and racist experiences.
“It has become the go-to culture for many of them in terms of their identity,” he says.
“They can see that over history the African-American people have been marginalised and they feel like they can relate.”
Abeselom Nega, the chief executive of iEmpower, which runs early intervention and prevention programs to support African youth, agrees rap music has had a negative influence on many young men.
“That is how some of them go wrong, they don’t understand that there is a fundamental difference between the experience of African-Americans and what goes on here in Australia,” he says.
“Australia is very different. It’s a land of many opportunities and a fair society ... that has welcomed Africans with open arms.”
Nega first encountered the term “MTS” several months ago, when police sounded out his group about tags that were being plastered across town. However, several police on the beat who spoke to Inquirer claim they had not heard of MTS until very recently. A search of Victorian court records and media clippings turns up just one reference to MTS in recent years: the case of an 18-year-old who robbed and stabbed a teenager on a tram back in 2010, warning his victim, “I’m with MTS … Don’t f..k with MTS.”
Victoria Police declined an interview this week but in a statement to Inquirer say they are “aware of graffiti tags containing the words ‘MTS’ or ‘Menace to Society’ that have been left at some locations where criminal behaviour has taken place”.
“There is currently no evidence to suggest that ‘MTS’ or ‘Menace to Society’ is an active entity or gang — however, police continue to monitor emerging trends,” the statement says.
Community workers at the coalface tend to agree, suggesting that troublemakers have adopted the tag out of a desire to identify with the gang culture they have embraced.
For youths who have dropped out of school, been kicked out of home or struggled to find work, it is a way of standing out and being noticed, they say.
“For these guys it doesn’t matter what sort of attention they get, it matters that they are getting attention,” says Kuot.
Nega agrees: “They like to be called a gang. It gives them a sense of prominence.”
Sudanese-born elite soccer player and aspiring AFL footballer Nelly Yoa came in Australia via an Egyptian refugee camp when he was 13 in 2003. He knows how easy it is to head down the wrong path.
It often starts with trouble at school. Kids, especially those struggling to learn English, fall behind in class, get into fights, and many of them wind up dropping out or being expelled.
Sudanese parents are typically immensely proud and demanding, Yoa says, and having made sacrifices to come to Australia in pursuit of a better life for their children, they become bitterly disappointed when their children go off the tracks.
“(Children) will get disowned by their parents and then they wind up spending time on the street with other kids who have been disowned too. They become part of a group and then feel a sense of empowerment in that.
“They might not see it as a gang but it does become a gang. And with no job prospects and in need of money, many find themselves turning to crime.
“It starts off as petty crime but then it just gets worse and worse.”
Yoa was once headed down the same path, mixing with a troublemaking crowd. It was only when he was attacked with a machete, which almost ended his sporting career, that he started to turn his life around.
Tired of the repeated excuses he was hearing for the behaviour of some of his countrymen, Yoa this week hit out at police, the state government and his own community’s leaders over their denials about the existence of Sudanese gangs.
In a scathing opinion piece published by Fairfax Media, he says there is a “major issue” among young South Sudanese people in Melbourne and trying to defend it or cover it up is “immoral and inexplicable”.
“These gangs do exist and neither the police nor the government should say otherwise,” he says in the article.
“It is a fact that South Sudanese are over-represented in crime statistics and are causing great harm and fear.”
Yoa’s outspokenness has ruffled some feathers within his community, including those of Kot Monoah, who chairs the South Sudanese Community Association in Victoria.
In a Facebook rebuttal, Monoah claims that Yoa was not close to the African leadership in either the eastern or western suburbs and perhaps had not given much thought before speaking out. “I think the youth issues are more of a behavioural problem than a gang issue per se,” Monoah writes.
“More so, the Liberal Party needs to stop playing politics and thwart(ing) ... incredible efforts to address the issues.”
But Noa stands by his comments, telling Inquirer that the community has failed to deal with the youth crime problem and, as a result, a massive disconnect now exists between community leaders, parents and their children.
“I heard a comment from Victoria Police that they had locked up most of Apex,” he says.
“Well, that’s nonsense. I believe this new emergence of MTS — well, I don’t think it is actually new. Apex members released from custody ... are now associating with this label.
“In many ways MTS is a new name for an old gang.”
Those who deny there is a problem point out that the number of Sudanese people behind bars pales in comparison with those born in Australia or New Zealand.
As the Victorian Commission for Children and Young people told the Migrant Settlement Outcomes inquiry last year, Victoria’s Crime Statistics Agency data indicates that low numbers of children and young people born outside Australia are involved in criminal offending in the state.
It also noted a downward trend in youth offending and the number of children and young people committing crimes, with the number of young offenders aged between 10 and 14 decreasing by 37.4 per cent from 2010 to 2015, and the number of young offenders aged between 15 and 19 down 0.8 per cent.
The Crime Statistics Agency lodged its own submission to the inquiry, which makes for grim reading and calls into question the oft-repeated claim by authorities that the outbreak of carjackings, aggravated burglaries and incidents involving the ramming of police cars can be pinned on a small number of repeat offenders.
Rather, since 2014 there has been a 28 per cent increase in unique offenders — adults as well as minors — who were born in Sudan.
Youth Parole Board chairman Michael Bourke says the rise in criminal activity among youths with a Sudanese background has escalated in the past two to three years. “It’s been a developing problem; we’ve been alerted to it but its acceleration has been quite dramatic,” he says.
However, Bourke is concerned by the representation of the problem, noting youths from Sudan are not the only over-represented group, and he believes the issue of Sudanese crime has become “cynically politicised”.
“I think community expectation or opinion about it would not necessarily be what it seems to be if the community were better informed,” he says.
University of Melbourne criminologist Mark Wood believes the use of the term “gangs” is problematic. Although he doesn’t dispute that there is an issue with young Sudanese offending, their conduct does not fit the profile of a traditional gang, which typically has a hierarchy and a stable membership that engages in illegal conduct with a common goal.
He prefers the term “networked offending”, which describes a group that typically connects via social media and arranges to commit a crime. At one end of the spectrum this can involve spontaneously crashing a party or daring an associate to steal a car. At the more extreme end, it manifests itself in, for instance, the spate of jewellery-store armed robberies in 2016 and again last year.
Federal Liberal politician and former police officer Jason Wood, who chaired the migrant outcomes inquiry that has produced a range of recommendations to deal with the gang crisis, has been knocking on doors regarding the African gang issue for several years.
Leading up to the last federal election, the member for La Trobe in Melbourne’s east found himself constantly pulled aside by constituents who had stories about being repeatedly robbed or having their cars stolen by African youths. Soon after, the Moomba riots occurred.
Wood’s main objective is to see the establishment of a joint police taskforce, combining state and federal officers, to get a grip on the problem.
“It’s not too late to do something about this,” he says. “But it is going to require a proper circuit breaker — and nothing will happen if we can’t admit there’s a problem in the first place.”
iEmpower’s chief Nega says his community has been left heartbroken and is crying out for additional support.
“We take this very seriously, we take responsibility for what went wrong,” he says.
“Please don’t fear black people; the overwhelming majority have taken that offer of a better life seriously and are contributing to the wellbeing and prosperity of the community.
“But we have bad apples. Please join us and we’ll fix this.”
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