Well, well, well: after years of obfuscation and denial, Victoria Police have finally deigned to notice that Melbourne just might have a teensy problem with African gang crime. In fact, they’ve backflipped in the most spectacular fashion.
Police have arrested 57 young criminals in a series of raids spanning three days across Melbourne’s suburbs.
The youths have been charged with a range of offences including car-jackings, home invasions, street robberies and theft.
These “youths” and “young criminals” all have something in common, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. It’s almost like they’re gangs. Gangs of some kind or other…
Of course, it was not so long ago that the Melbourne rozzers swore black and blue that not only were there no gangs (of a particular sort) in Melbourne, but the city’s residents had nothing to fear from violent crime.
Victoria Police Commander Tim Hansen said police have seen “an increased trajectory in offending”.
“We’re seeing offenders that are entering the criminal justice system for the first time but they’re entering at a really violent level,” Commander Hansen said.
msn.com/en-au/news/other/dozens-of-youths-charged-in-victorian-police-raids/
So, what’s prompted the sudden change of heart? A new wave of spectacularly egregious crimes? Well, no there hasn’t been an escalation in street riots, nor a new outbreak of carjacking and home invasion.
But there was this…
Last night, 4Corners turned in one of those investigations that make you think the ABC — a tiny part of it at any rate — might actually be worth a small slice of the billion-plus dollars the all-media behemoth consumes every year. The topic was the Lawyer X scandal which saw Victoria Police make an informant of gangland lawyer Nicola Gobbo and has since prompted an ongoing royal commission. Viewers who expected VicPol’s past and present brass to emerge in a less than favourable light were not disappointed.
When programs like 4Corners do their job properly (which is sadly rarer than ever), they can have profound effects – even bring down governments, as 4Corners’ The Moonlight State did with the corrupt Bjelke-Petersen government. 4Corners have done a masterful job of tackling a corrupt and inept police bureaucracy.
The upper hierarchy of Victoria police has to take complete responsibility. I mean the buck stops at the top clearly, and it went as high as the Chief Commissioner and some Assistant Commissioners.
Those who knew and sanctioned what was happening were guilty of terrible breaches of duty and extraordinarily unethical behaviour.
But the boys in the corridors of police HQ had an ace up their sleeve.
The 4Corners crew must be just a little miffed that their magisterial overview of such a foul, reeking, unethical mess did not prompt maximum morning-after follow-ups. What they could not have known was that VicPol just happened to have something up its sleeve that would redirect headline writers’ attention.
After years of carjackings, home invasions, riots and stores being blitzed by mobs of hit-and-run thieves and complaints that the constabulary has not been doing enough to arrest teenage gangs, many “of African appearance”, VicPol went raiding all over town in the hours after 4Corners aired, an operation that has so far seen the arrests of 57 alleged miscreants.
Suddenly, a former chief prosecutor’s wonderment that the Chief Commissioner at the centre of the scandal remains on the beat was pushed way, way down the news organisations’ lists of top stories.
Sheer coincidence, no doubt.
https://quadrant.org.au/
Gobbo has a long history with the Victorian Labor party and turned police informant under the watch of Labor premier Steve Bracks. Last year, current Labor premier Daniel Andrews granted her a “Premier’s Volunteer Champions” award. If the corrupt police officials involved in the scandal, and in this shamefully obvious attempt to distract public attention, remain in place, the buck has to stop at Andrews’s desk.
Or does Australia have a new “moonlight state”?