In case you haven't been paying attention, Melbourne is supposedly in the grip of a crime wave. Not on the basis of statistics, which show arson, property damage, burglary and theft down (sexual offences and robbery are up), but on the basis of a series of front page articles over summer in the Herald Sun and also The Australian about African gangs, most of them South Sudanese.

The so-called Apex gang came to public attention after a large-scale brawl in Melbourne's city centre last year. twitter.com/@russmulry

Victoria's opposition wants to recall Parliament.

Federal minister Greg Hunt, whose day job is Health Minister and who last year had to apologise to the Supreme Court for calling it soft, says African gang crime is "out of control". Prime Minister Turnbull says he is alarmed by "growing gang violence". And Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton says people are scared to go out to restaurants "because they are followed home by these gangs".

It's feeding on itself. A nationalist group says it's planning a rally on Sunday in order to "take a stand on the streets". African Australians are being harassed and worse by vigilantes who are suddenly emboldened. Police say a Daily Mail photographer helped create the latest "flare-up" by taking close-up photos of a group of Africans socialising.

"The teenagers had been doing nothing of public interest prior to the photographer's decision to move in," a memo reported by The Guardian says. The Mail labelled the scuffle that it helped create "the latest gang flare-up" and boasted that its pictures were "exclusive".

It is familiar because it happened in Sydney with Lebanese Muslim youths (remember the Cronulla riots?) and before that with "Asian gangs" in Cabramatta. In Adelaide a decade ago it was the "Gang of 49". There never was a Gang of 49, but The Advertiser coined the term to describe 49 mainly Aboriginal youths the police said they were looking for.

The catchphrase had incredibly unfortunate consequences. Former police say it created gangs. Dispossessed, often homeless, youths started saying they were part of Gang of 49 and stealing cars and doing ram-raids to prove it.

"It hypes them up, they think they are famous, it's them against the police," a grandmother of one of the self-described members told the ABC. Very young Aboriginals, too young to be part of a gang, started romanticising the idea and looking forward to the day when they could.

It happened after Melbourne's Moomba riots in March 2016, which the media were quick to attribute to the "Apex Gang". More a grab bag than a gang, it grew swiftly as all sorts of petty criminals started scrawling the word "Apex" wherever they had been. The more it was talked about, the bigger it became.

That's why on Wednesday Police Commissioner Graham Ashton rubbished the idea of a gang and referred instead to low-level crime. It was "complete and utter garbage" to suggest, as our leaders have, that Victorians aren't safe.

"The sort of concept that somehow it's unsafe to go out to dinner, how long since you've been out to dinner?" he asked.

Big cities have had aggravated burglaries and home invasions for years, less so in Melbourne in the past two quarters. The perpetrators are overwhelmingly Australian-born. Although Sudanese youths are over-represented in minor crime statistics (as might be expected given high socio-economic disadvantage) and are involved in many more armed robberies than before (98 in 2016-17, up from 20 in 2014-15) the perpetrators of serious assaults are 25 times more likely to be born in Australia or New Zealand than in Sudan or Kenya.

Talk about gangs has probably always created gangs, at least as far back as the Mods and Rockers in the UK in the 1960s. But it's worse now. Would-be gang members can find each other on social media. Words can do even more damage, all the more so when they are used carelessly by newspapers and "leaders" to fill space and score points.