Victoria is having a debate about gangs. Specifically, it is debating whether it is appropriate to call groups of young people who are predominantly from African backgrounds a “gang” and, so named, what should be done about it.

It’s also having a debate about race, which is being waged in the comment sections of front-page articles on gang violence, and on social media, where comments like “stop immigration until this mess is sorted” populate Victoria police’s official Facebook page.

Both debates are linked to a perceived increase in large-scale violent offences committed by young people of African appearance, most of whom have been linked to Melbourne’s Sudanese migrant community.

Media coverage of the issue, led by the News Corp tabloid the Herald Sun, has dubbed Victoria “a state of fear” and reported that it could undermine the incumbent Labor government’s chances in the November state election.

On Monday the prime minister weighed in, saying at a press conference in Sydney that “growing gang violence and lawlessness in Victoria” was “a failure of the Andrews government”.

However, police say that crime from African “street gangs” is an ongoing, not growing, problem, and also that calling these groups “gangs” might be overstating the issue.

So, what’s really happening?

Concern about crime gangs involving African youths in Melbourne can be traced to the outer eastern suburb of Dandenong in the mid-2000s.

The most recent iteration has its origins in the Moomba festival in March 2016, when a group identified as the Apex gang was named the key culprit in a violent brawl that saw 53 people arrested and 800 people searched for weapons.

Timeline The scare over Melbourne's 'African crime gangs' Show First mentions The “Apex gang”, thought to be an unstructured group of various backgrounds, largely from southern Melbourne, comes to the attention of Victoria Police after a fight with rival group. Members are allegedly linked to string of carjackings, assaults and burglaries. Task force Victoria Police launch Taskforce Tense to monitor the group. Moomba violence Police use capsicum spray to dispel men and boys, allegedly affiliated to Apex, who rampaged through Melbourne CBD during the Moomba festival. Second Moomba affair

Police arrest 53 people after Moomba festival disrupted by brawling youths for a second year, but police say offenders are from across Melbourne and not gang or race related. Police calm Apex fears Victoria Police deputy commissioner Shane Patton declares Apex gang is no longer active, and was never a predominantly ethnic group. McDonald's brawl A brawl at St Kilda McDonald's reportedly involves about 60 youths of African appearance, includes alleged assaults and robberies. Airbnb incident A Melbourne Airbnb property is trashed by youths of African appearance, who tag the name “Menace to Society”, another loosely connected group linked with social order offences over previous six months. Alleged assault on police A police officer is allegedly assaulted by a gang of youths of African appearance. A 17-year-old is charged. Police reject 'gang' references Amid mounting media pressure, Victoria Police superintendent Therese Fitzgerald says there is a problem with “youth crime in general”, not gangs. Deputy commissioner Andrew Crisp urges media not to “play up to the ego” of offenders by calling them gangs. PM attacks Labor Malcolm Turnbull blames the Victorian Labor government for the “gang problem” in Melbourne. Dutton fans fears Home affairs minister Peter Dutton says people are too scared to go to restaurants in Melbourne because of “African gang violence”.



It flared up again last month following three significant incidents: a brawl at the St Kilda McDonald’s on 13 December; the trashing of an Airbnb property after a wild party in Werribee on 18 December; and the assault of a police officer who was kicked and surrounded by a group of young people when questioning a suspected shoplifter at Highpoint shopping centre on Boxing Day.

All three involved youths of African appearance and the Werribee house was tagged with “MTS”, a reference to “Menace to Society”, a loosely collected group of Sudanese and other teenagers that has been linked to a number of public order offences over the past six months.

It has been described as a successor to the Apex gang. But, like the Apex gang, it doesn’t quite exist. It’s a graffiti tag, a call sign, a unifying symbol, an anti-social brand.

But there’s no structure. That, the deputy police commissioner, Shane Patton says, is why police say it’s not a gang.

In a press conference on Tuesday designed to reassure the public that police are taking the issue of youth crime seriously despite their earlier attempts to de-escalate sensationalist media coverage, Patton said police reluctance to label Menace to Society and other groups “gangs” was an issue of nomenclature.

What makes a gang?

Patton’s preferred term is “networked criminal offenders”. which is harder to work into a headline.

Let’s not elevate them to a status they should not be elevated to. Shane Patton, deputy police commissioner

A “gang,” he says, is something like an organised motorcycle gang. That’s the kind of body groups such as the gang crime unit were established to target.

“From a Victoria police perspective we have been consistent all the way along that what we traditionally view as organised crime gangs are those high-level organised crime gangs,” he told reporters. “We don’t shy away from calling people gangs, it’s not an issue for us.

“It’s about the offending … Let’s not elevate them to a status they should not be elevated to.”

Patton’s comments followed an interview by fellow deputy commissioner Andrew Crisp last week, who urged the media not to label groups of “young thugs” as “gangs”, saying: “I don’t accept for one minute that we do have gangs.”

He added: “I urge you [the media] not to play up to the ego of these young people by calling them a gang, because they’re not a gang.”

Patton on Monday attempted to both maintain that argument and say that police did not shy away from the use of the term, saying: “They’re behaving like street gangs, so let’s call them that. That’s what they are.”

Anthony Kelly, the executive officer of Flemington and Kensington Community Legal Centre, which covers areas with a significant migrant population, said calling these groups “gangs” was “ludicrous”.

But he said that does not discount the fact that there is a problem of crime in African migrant communities, or discount the seriousness of those crimes.

The scene of a party in Werribee in which heavily armed riot police had to be called in. Photograph: Caroline Schelle/AAP

“It’s not at all helpful to telegraph this sort of juvenile male posturing and put it into a frame of terrorising the community and equating it with organised criminal activity,” he told Guardian Australia.

“We saw that very clearly with the Apex gang. Young kids would scrawl ‘Apex’ on a car that they vandalised and then it becomes linked to the broader narrative when really it’s just young kids. There’s no membership. It’s just kids scrawling tags.”

A South Sudanese youth worker, Nelly Yoa, disagrees. Writing in Fairfax Media, Yoa said he was “furious” to hear Crisp say there were no Sudanese gangs in Melbourne.

“Nobody should ever try and cover up or defend this unacceptable behaviour – to do so is immoral and inexplicable,” he said. “It is upsetting and completely false.”

Yoa, who was the victim of a machete attack in 2011, said that South Sudanese youths were over-represented in Victorian crime statistics and that the behaviour of some teenagers in recent weeks “made me ashamed and embarrassed to call myself a Sudanese”.

What do the statistics say?

Reading the crime statistics is difficult because there are a number of factors at play.

On the face of it, Sudanese immigrants are over-represented in the crime statistics. About 1% of alleged criminal offenders in Victoria in the year ending September 2017 were Sudanese-born, the Victorian Crime Statistics Agency (CSA) says, while the Sudanese and South Sudanese communities together make up just 0.14% of the state’s total population.

The majority of crimes in Victoria, unsurprisingly, are committed by people born in Australia. The second-highest cohort were New Zealanders, which are the fourth-largest migrant group in Victoria.

The over-representation is a misconception and a misconstruction. Anthony Kelly, Fitzroy Kensington Community Legal Centre

However, by pulling out particular offences you can highlight certain groups. For example, in charges of riot and affray, people born in Sudan made up 6% of all recorded offenders, compared with 71.5% born in Australia and 5.2% born in New Zealand, a federal parliamentary inquiry reported, citing CSA statistics.

Prepare to see these statistics manipulated in many ways, by both sides of politics, as the state election draws closer. The contributions of federal ministers, including the prime minister, in this debate are also likely to increase; Matthew Guy’s Liberal opposition in Victoria is building its case for election on law and order issues.

Kelly said the fact that the Sudanese community has a much younger average age and a higher incidence of other factors that are associated with a high crime rate, such as poverty and a lack of engagement in work and school, meant that those figures should be treated with caution.

“The over-representation is a misconception and a misconstruction,” he said.

The overall crime rate in Victoria fell in 2017, according to the most recent CSA release.

There were 391,153 recorded criminal incidents in the 12 months to September 2017, coming down from a peak in 2016. That’s a decrease of 4.8% over the past 12 months but an increase of 16.3% over the past five years.

The proportion of crimes committed by young people – defined by CSA as people aged under 25 – has fallen in the past decade from 52% of all recorded offences in 2007-2008 to 40% in 2015-2016. However, the proportion of young people charged with three or more offences has grown from 17% to 22% in the same period.

‘A racialised moral panic’

Public commentary on African youth crime gangs is dependent not on statistics but on high-profile incidents, of which there have been many. But it is to some extent a self-fulfilling prophecy – incidents that can be linked to gang activity garner greater media attention, which feeds into the broader public narrative.

That narrative is underpinned by race, Kelly says. And while he says it’s possible to have a debate about different ethnic groups without sliding into racism, in this case, in many areas, the debate has become “clearly racist.”

Malcolm Turnbull says ‘growing gang violence and lawlessness in Victoria’ is ‘a failure of the Andrews government’. Photograph: Brendan Esposito/AAP

“That to me is a far more dangerous issue,” he said. “When it becomes a racialised moral panic, then we start to see the things that lead toward Cronulla over 10 years ago. That was instigated by the a very similar array of panics.”

Kelly said the racialised media commentary around African youth crime, combined with social media commentary and the overarching political debate, created “all the conditions for a race riot to occur.”

Comments on Melbourne law and order Facebook groups such as Protect Victoria are similar to those seen in Kalgoorlie before the death of teenager Elijah Doughty in 2016.

Even comments on Victoria police’s official Facebook page, beneath a livestream of Patton’s press conference on Tuesday, called for racist violence.

“Stop running and start shooting,” suggested one. “Do your job send the charcoal children back to Africa,” said another.

One warned police not to “start sooking up when people take matters into their own hands to protect their own!” while another said “vigilante gangs will happen to take back our communities”.

Many recommended the police use their power to request a visa cancellation for a person involved in a crime punishable by more than 12 months in prison, which was instituted by the Abbott government in 2014, to send all alleged gang members, and their families, “back where they came from”.

“Stop immigration until this mess is sorted,” one said.

Twelve people, from Sudan, New Zealand and other countries, were recommended for deportation under those laws in Victoria in 2017.

African migrants are an easily identified, and targeted, group. A 2015 report on racial bias in Victoria police by Daniel Haile Michael and Maki Issa, who won a landmark racial profiling case against Victoria police, found that young people from countries such as South Sudan and Somalia were routinely stopped by police.

“A young African person who has committed no crime, who has done no wrong, is far more likely to be targeted and threatened and seen like a criminal by police and by shopkeepers,” Kelly said.

It is similar to experiences of over-policing and targeted policing reported by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Victoria police has since introduced policies against racial profiling and its senior leadership has been careful to steer away from racist rhetoric.

Patton, while saying there was an issue of African youth offending, said that young people of all nationalities and ethnicities committed criminal offences, and that the majority of Melbourne’s African migrant population was law-abiding.

“Let’s not say that all of the African community are criminals because they are not. The vast majority are good people,” he said. “This is a small group of youths. We will target them. We will hold them to account.”