We've probably come to regret the fact that more was not done then, because a stitch in time might have helped everyone, including those young people who were running off the rails.
There's a lot of people.
Who were born somewhere else and came to this country to build a life for themselves and their families, work hard, the whole migrant story, who are frightened of youth gangs. I'm Andrew Rule. This is life in Crimes. Today we're going to have another look at the thorny issue of youth crime.
Now.
It's only a few weeks since we did another aspect of youth crime.
That was the episode we called the Kids.
Are Not All all Right. Today we're going to look at the youth crime wave that particularly involves car theft and home invasion. And I'm indebted for this episode for the inn and knowledge and wisdom of my colleague Mark Butler, whose.
Idea it was.
Now, there always were some desperate escapee or robber willing to grab a car at gunpoint to flee from a jail break or a robbery gone wrong. That has always been a possibility in crime in Australia since since Ned Kelly, although of course they'd be stealing a horse or a horse and buggy in the old day, it's not a car. But the idea of taking a vehicle at gunpoint isn't
exactly new. But what's new, what's new in the sense of new in the last ten, fifteen, maybe even twenty years, is this idea of young people taking cars, car jacking cars, which is very scary. Taking a car by forcing the driver out of the driver's seat and taking it by force, or now more so breaking into houses or entering houses and taking the keys, whether just burgling them quietly and sneaking out, or taking them by force, to steal the cars from the drive why l from the garage. That
is a whole other thing. That is carjacking, That is car theft with a view to joy writing. And it's not perpetrated by a criminal who's trying to escape from a crime scene. It's a different thing, and therefore it's actually more pernicious for most of us, because there are dozens of these kids out in Melbourne in the suburbs every night or every week trying to steal cars to go joy writing at high speeds. Now it seems to me that these kids are not so much trying to
escape the law. As you know at the old fashioned bank rubber Boss, they're trying.
To provoke the law.
They're actually deliberately taking prestige cars or fast cars, high performance cars in the hope of provoking a high speed chase, or at least knowing that there's a huge chance that they will provoke a high speed chase, and not being worried about that. That's all part of the game for them. To them, it is this ridiculous, dangerous, high risk, stupid game. It's a game. They're not actually doing something for profit. They're not trying to feed families, they're not trying.
To pay off debts.
They are just taking cars from innocent citizens in order to have fun. In their terms, they're doing it for kicks. And it is this wave of crime that is of great concern to the police, to the public, and it
should be of great concern also to politicians. Now, when we first heard about carjacking in Melbourne, I'm going to take a wild guess and say the first example of it that I recall noticing, and this is not a statistical fact, this is just me reaching back into my own very average memory, and I think that a car was carjacked in Carlton, I think in daylight by a teenager from memory in probably the late nineties or early two thousand, so it's at least twenty odd years ago,
and I recall noticing it because it stood out it was different, but it echoed a crime that happened with dreadful regularity in other parts of the world. And when I say other parts of the world, I mean very troubled parts of the world, such as Johannesburg in South Africa, which is the worst bits of South America, in parts of Brazil and Venezuela and Colombia.
Places like that where there's a.
Breakdown in law and order and where there are youth gangs and they do a lot of reckless stuff, including stealing cars. Now, when that happened in Melbourne those years ago, it stood out as something that was different from the
usual run of thefts here. There'd always been some kids joy riding ever since cars were invented, you know, there'd be people that would steal them to joy ride, and you know, back in the fifties and the sixties and the seventies, no doubt there was plenty of car theft it was an era when cars were very easy in those days to steal. You could hop bire them with a screwdriver pretty simply and just drive away. Those old holdens and falcons and so forth that everyone had were
easily stolen and often stolen. But these guys these days, they're more determined to get hold of a car. They're so determined that they will commit reasonably serious crimes. They are willing to go armed, many of them, so they can force people to hand over their keys. They're willing to break into houses and commit burglaries or even worse, aggravated burglaries, going into a house armed with machetes or whatever it might be and forcing people to hand over
the keys. Now, this elevates, you know, joy riding into something far more sinister. They're willing to break into people's houses and frighten them in order to get the cars. And that was something that really is new that's crept up in the last decade or so. This wave of carthifts has morphed into a whole youth crime wave, which includes other stuff as well that goes hand in love with it. A lot of these kids are armed, they're carrying knives or machetes or some form of weapon, not so much guns.
But they would if they could get them.
The recent well publicized adventure of the Carlton coach Michael Voss, who grabbed an alleged car thief after he and an accoumptless rolled a stolen Mercedes in Hawthorne, this Vos episode underlines what we're talking about. You've got young people, clearly teenagers, taking high performance or expensive cars and keeping them for as many days as they possibly can, and driving around.
At ridiculous speeds so that they roll them.
You know, you have to drive a good color that fairly stupidly in order to be able to roll it. It's pretty crazy stuff, which means that they are a constant threat to the rest of us. Not only are they going to hurt themselves too often, they hurt other people because they run red lights, they run through pedestrian lights, they lose control and hit foot paths. If the worst happens, they can run through footpaths and through front fences and
hit people's houses. This is a terrible state of affairs, and already, of course, it has led to the deaths and serious injuries of innocent people. Innocent people like that young man who was driving home at night recently. Now that crash was at the intersection of Warregal Road and Highbury Road out in burbledash Burton area. The young man who died was in his twenties. I think he was an innocent party, just going about his business going home.
Never got there because teenagers have stolen a car. They speeding through the streets and they run into him, and of course he's killed. The innocent art is killed, and the alleged bad guys they basically walk. They were not injured or not enough to hold them up. And so in Melbourne we have here a situation where it's alleged that some of these kids are repeat offenders, and some
of them repeat offenders to a great extent. They have been grabbed for karth eft and for driving offenses, and for having machetes and knives, and they've been bailed over and over and over again. Interestingly, when Michael Voss grabbed the young guy the other day with the rolled over Mercedes in Hawthorne, it is said, and I believe it to be true, that when that alleged offender was searched, he had an edged weapon. He had a large knife
or a small machete about his person. Now that tells you that, in a slightly different set of circumstances, had he not been grabbed while still shaken by a very strong, fast athletic man like Michael Voss, somebody like that lad with his concealed weapon could easily have hurt anybody who tried to apprehend him, or even got in his way or looked at him the wrong way.
Upset by fear, upset by.
Aggression, upset by adrenaline, he could easily pull out a weapon and do something very bad. And the fact that he's carrying it indicates that he's not thinking that straight. This is a pretty big deal and a pretty serious situation that we find ourselves in which there's two things about it. One is could it have been prevented? Well, you'd think perhaps it could have been at least ameliorated
in the past. And it's interesting to note that it has a erupt into a crime wave in recent times partly because in the past the authorities, and I mean by that police, politicians and other authorities all deliberately seemed to turn a blind eye to it and didn't want to call it out. For what it was now. One of the reasons for that, I would suggest is that in the past, when we first saw these carjackings and these home invasions, I mean as long ago as twenty fourteen,
these things were happening. These things were starting to happen, and there was talk of teenage gangs. You know, there was talk among ordinary citizens who could see them congregating, and therefore there was talk in media stories of teenage gangs. And to some extent, some of these gangs were ethnic gangs. Some of them would appear to be sued in the gangs, some would appear to be Islander gangs, some would appear to be Middle Eastern gangs, some would appear to be
gangs of none of the above, all sorts of different gangs. Again, we've always had some sort of gang culture of some sort. We had them in the sixties and the seventies, and now we've got them again. But arguably they're committing more serious crimes now. But in twenty fourteen, the police would not call them gangs because there was sort of political pressure not to the police would say, oh, no, well,
there are groups. There are loose groups of young offenders who sometimes meet up and talk to each other and then go off and do things sometimes, but they leant over backwards not to call them gangs, because everybody was afraid that it would become some sort of knee jerk reaction, racist thing to actually describe what was happening with any accuracy.
And we've probably.
Come to regret the fact that more was not done then, because a stitch in time might have helped everyone, including those young people who were running.
Off the rails.
So we saw this sort of thing back in twenty fourteen. It was then that reporters started to ask police about these youth gangs, and reporters were rebuffed routinely by police who back then adopted nothing to see here attitude. Oh no, there's not gangs. Oh no, don't exaggerate, We don't want to exaggerated. It's just isolated events. There's no sign of gangs as such, no sign of gangs per se. Sometimes you know, these groups just break up and whatever.
Whatever.
Well, by twenty sixteen, two years after that, we had the Moonber Riots, and that seemed to turn a spotlight on youth offenders and to crank.
Up public pressure for the authorities to act.
Now, the police of course, are nearly always the meat and the sandwich in these things, because police, to some extent are answerable to the criticisms of the public, but also they have to act in accordance with the orders passed down to them from high in the police force, and the police hierarchy to a large extent reflects the
interests and biases of their political masters. So if you've got a police minister that belongs to a cabinet that belongs to a government that is very keen on saying there's no youth gangs, we haven't got a problem, the senior police will mouth that fairly dishonest platitude, and that will filter its way down to inspectors and senior sergeants and all the rest. But the fact that out on the street, all the young coppers on the beat know very well that it's wrong that there are gangs and
they're doing bad things all the time. By twenty sixteen, of the Moonber riots, it couldn't really be ignored by everybody, but police meet in the sandwich. They resented claims that they were racist. Police are in a bind here because if they said, look, you know, there's two or three groups of views and one lot of African appearance, and one lot of is something else, and one lot is
something else. They know straight away that they will be criticized for that by people who are determined not to address the actual problem and the actual theft and the actual assaults. They just want to criticize police for perceptions of racism, which is really dodging the real issue. But that doesn't make life any.
Easier for the police because they're.
Ducking criticism from everywhere, and so they end up mouthing or well Ian euphemisms instead of just speaking the truth. Despite the euphemisms, despite the evasions, despite the attitude of nothing to see here, it was clear that in that eray fourteen fifteen sixteen, that there were plenty of youth
gangs and they were doing plenty of bad things. Now, by twenty eighteen, this issue had actually generated its own edition of the ABC Current Affairs panel show Q and A, filmed in Dandyenong, which back then and to some extent now was and is a youth crime hotspot. The panel included a once prominent or then prominent police officer, that would be Stuart Bateson, who later hit a hurdle, a politician called Alan Tudsho later hit a hurdle, an African born.
Lawyer who has not hit a hurdle.
She's I think going very well and so she should and a crime reporter, alleged crime reporter that would be met. It was a time of peak denial of youth gangs now Q and A produced by the ABC's finest out
of in a suburban Sydney in a suburban Melbourne. The people that produced it ensured that the audience gathered that night was diverse, but apart from a handful of outnumbered attendees, the prepared questions seemed not to reflect the concerns of a wide range of ordinary people, many of them migrants themselves. What I meant by that long sentences that there's a lot of people out in our suburbs who were born somewhere else, came to this country to build a life
for themselves and their families, work hard. The whole migrant story who are frightened were back in twenty eighteen and many of them now frightened of youth gangs what we're going to call youth gangs or gangs that were used and some of them got older and became gangs that are now in their twenties whatever, gangs of young criminals. And I know this because before this event, I had gone out to truck a Nina out in Melbourne's out of West. Not long ago it was paddocks full of
rocks and thistles and tiger snakes. And now it's full of houses. And the houses are relatively cheap compared with the eastern suburbs, and so it has attracted a lot of people who are keen to buy cheaper houses. And there I found, in the privacy of their own homes, people very friendly, very keen.
To talk about this.
If they took you inside off the street so no one could see, they would take you in and talk to you. And I talked to a range of people. I talked to an Indian grandmother, this lovely woman. She'd moved across there because she saw a chain to buy a better house for less money than when she lived in box Hill or somewhere. And she went out there and she said, I really regret it now, moving from where I was. I said why, She said, I'll show you why. She just moved the curtains a little bit.
She was quite nervous about the people outside. She moved the curtains a bit and said, see. Then they frightened me. And these big, tall kids of African appearance, seventeen year olds walking home from wherever they'd been, maybe school, maybe not, don't know where. And she said, I'm scared of them because they've caused a lot of trouble around here. You know.
They broke that down the park.
They had a fight, and then they broke bottles, and then they lit a fire, and then they break windows and whatever, steel cars. And she went through it all, and she had examples of the alleged atrocities, and we had a chat, and she gave me a drink of water because it was a hot day. And it was very interesting. And then I went around through a park where there was a bit of a cleat of youth, and I tried to talk to a couple of them.
I had a bit of a.
Chat, and they were reasonably sullen and not that communicative, but that's all right. And then it went over and spoke to a group of Chinese students. I would believe them to be Chinese students, but they were students who also worked to make some money to live, so they worked at markets and things. They fit that sort of stereotype Chinese Asian student thing, hard working, polite, careful sort
of people, very unthreatening. And again they took me into their house and said, yeah, we're very frightened here because see out the front of our place, see that where there's been a fire. And they pointed to the bitchumen where somebody had smashed a bottle of some sort of accelerant like kerosene or whatever and burnt it and there was broken glass and there was a big scorch mark and who was melted bitchumen right outside their house in
the middle of the street. And they said, they just do stuff like these young guys.
There's youth.
They wander around, they smash stuff. They're obviously off their heads on something, smash stuff, light fires, throw bottles, scare everybody.
We're very scared here. We don't like it here, but.
We're sort of stuck, and we're very careful when we go out, and if they're in the street, we don't go near them, and so on and so forth. Okay, there's two examples from Track and Nina. Third example around the corner, go and find somebody else. Then I find sort of Joe Blogs. You know Kevin Smith and his wife Maureen who lived there, and they had similar.
Stories to tell.
They said, you know, it's pretty rough and the week Fridays and Saturday nights, it's very ordinary, and we don't want our kids out anywhere in the street because of the trouble it's caused and all that sort of thing. And really everybody in that district was feeling the effects of the anti social activities of youth gangs. And I don't care what ethnic composition the youth gangs were. What they did was making life hard for a whole range of people, many of whom were migrants themselves. So this
is not a race thing. This is just some people behaving badly and other people being affected by it. Let's get that straight. I go to the Q and a recording session at Dandy Longtown Hall or wherever it was, and I'm in a taxi and there's a taxi driver who I would say he was certainly born overseas. I'd say he was probably Lebanese, or he might have been Greek, I can't remember now. And he is a few years
ago and he was probably in his fifties. Abe a guy with a house and kids and the whole catastrophe and working twelve hours a day. And he's the same thing. He said, Oh, these bloody kids, you know, they're always causing trouble, and they try and steal taxis and they get a fair and then they run away and they do this and that, and they make life a misery
for people like him. So when we go to the Q and A recording, I don't hear anybody in the audience that's you know, the Indian grandmother, the Asian student, the Lebanese taxi driver, all the people who had sort of grievances about youth gangs. They weren't in there having
their say about youth gangs. What we had was all these questions prepared by people who were asked to prepare them, who are basically preparing bar the odd one bar perhaps one Dorothy Dix's, for the purposes of making it look as if this whole thing is media buzz about youth
gangs is contrived. It's artificial, it's borderline racist. It's you know, the wicked media holding hands with the wicked police to pick on really nice people like our lady lawyer here, which was a bit rich, really but that's the way it went, that's the way it was presented. And no one there, including myself, apart from one comment I made, no one there really felt they could take on City Hall. It was a stacked deck. But I will say one thing,
and I did say one thing that night. A few weeks before this, Peter Dutton, who I think was then in government, he had been interviewed on Sydney Radio, and as happens on Sydney.
Radio, the debate gets fairly basic.
And he had said some sweeping generalization, albeit one based on truth, and he said down in Melbourne people are frightened to go out because of youth gangs, or because of African youth gangs or something like that. This created a bit of a stir. People, instead of thinking is this right or is this wrong, picked him up on
it and said, oh, you know, he'd be wrong. Instead of looking at the facts of the matter, whether the youth gangs would doing this, they wanted to just pot Dutton and pot you know, Allen Jones the radio program, which is fair enough. But one of the responses that was made to Dutton's comments on radio was from a then Supreme Court judge Lex slavery, very well known Victorian judge, former, very well known criminal barrister, extremely accomplished barrister, very well
thought of as a barrister, good lawyer. I think he'd done his share of prosecutions as well, maybe respect the judge as far as I know. But it was I think a Saturday night, a Friday night or a Saturday night. And when these comments of Peter Dutton's wor aired more widely, apparently mister Lazary was sitting in a restaurant or a friend's house or somewhere at Mansfield. Now, he wasn't in
Druga Nina or Werriby or Dandy Nong. Funnily enough, He's at a friend's place or a nice, cheeky little restaurant in Mansfield, which is the most comfortable, safe, middle class town in Australia. Manfield it is the gateway to Melbourne's snowfields a buller.
It is where people.
Pull up in range rovers to fill with fuel and to buy a few good bottles of wine before they head up the hill to the snowfields that is Mansfield. It's a very safe place if you don't fall off your snow skis or hit a wombat with your range rover, or run over a Geelong grammar boy who's at Timbertop. If none of those things happen, you are very safe. And believe me, Lex Slasury and his friends and his family, they were very safe at Mansfield. And so he's tweeted
a tweet. His comment that he tweeted was breaking. There are citizens out in Mansfield tonight and they're not worried.
Well, gee whizzy, Now that was sharp. It was tart, It was sarcastic.
It was sort of funny. I don't think it's funny, but some people his ilk would think it was funny.
No doubt. But it wasn't wise.
It was very unwise, which is probably why as a sitting Supreme Court judge, I think next day he.
Took that down.
It disappeared, but too late. The damage you've been done. Now have you ever heard such a tone death message?
This is the sort of.
Thing that is not going to reassure Indian grandmothers and Chinese students and Lebanese taxi drivers that everything's okay where they live.
Because Lex Lazri.
And his group feel safe in Mansfield on a Saturday night, It's hardly the point which I'm sure he realized when he thought about it later, because he's not a fool. He's a very clever man, and he probably regretted saying that he may not regret the sentiment, but he probably
regrets expressing it, stingpointing. Six years later, Lex Slattery in an interview with that most excellent broadcaster Neil Mitchell, who I have to admit is a longtime colleague and friend of mine from decades ago, Lex Slaztery, he now concedes, six years later, that there is a very real threat posed by youth crime. Youth crime, I must add, which is now migrated from the outer suburbs into affluent areas where these tear away kids steal high performance cars and someone.
In this very frank interview with Neil Mitchell, Lex Slattery said that youth crime was a quote horrifying problem that couldn't be ignored and was not diminishing. Now it's not that Lex who incidentally plays drums in his band, the Lex Pistols. It's not that he is suddenly marching to the beat of a different drum. He is still the same humane lawyer who represented two Australian citizens who were executed as part of the Bally nine drug smuggling case.
Lex Lazrie was one of the Australian lawyers who spent a huge amount of time and effort and tears trying to help those guys and stop them from being executed, which I think is one of the things.
That has greatly affected his life.
So he's a humane person with good instincts, but doesn't mean he's always makes the right call on everything. But it's now clear to him that well meaning libertarians can no longer paper over the cracks in the justice system that daily and weekly let a procession of young offenders run free on bail because magistrates and judges are so reluctant to jail them. Now it might be that there
is no room for all these kids. There's all sorts of reasons for this, I guess, but I've heard it said in the last twenty four hours that the young fellow that Michael Voss grabbed, the one with the machete, allegedly the one who allegedly stolen Mercedes spends or was with the person who stole it and who rolled it and could have killed a family or anything. It's said that that young man has received bail. Now, what do
you have to do not to be bailed? You steel cars, you drive in a culpably dangerous fashion, and you are carrying a weapon that is both concealed and is big enough to kill somebody. If that is not a reason for denying bail, what is What.
Do you have to do?
Apparently you would have to actually kill somebody. Police are still cagey about commenting in this politically charged debate. They're still wary of criticism by crime deniers. Crime denies such as Victoria's Attorney General Jacqueline Symes, who last year, now get this. Last year, Jacqueline Simes scuppered changes to the youth's bail reforms that have been proposed and was openly dismissive when she was asked about it. She said this, I do not want a discussion about a youth crime
crisis that doesn't exist. That's what she said when she was asked about it by a reporter. She then refused to say anything else. She said, no, there is no youth crime crisis, and I'm not talking in the story. Thank you very much, missus Attorney general. With political masters like that, it's no wonder that police are careful what they say, but at least now their actions speak louder than words. Every night, every night, this is out there
in the suburbs in Melbourne, these police helicopters. I heard them last night where I lived. The choppers out there are the Dog Squad, Canine Unit, and up to seventy officers are tied up trying to catch teenage home invaders and car thieves before they actually kill another innocent person by running over them or maybe attacking them with a machete. These culpable driving fatalities, knife crime, and these paid arsons.
A lot of these arsons of tobacco shops are in fact committed by this same cohort of youth criminals because they are mad and bad and stupid and very easy to get hold of. And for the price of a pair of high end sneakers a few hundred bucks, they will steal a car, take a few letters of petrol, and go to a tobacco shop or any other venue and fire bombit for somebody higher up the organized crime chain.
That is another reason why it's important that the police have the backing and the tools and the judicial backing to grab these young offenders and get them locked up or off the street so that they aren't out there offending and reoffending and reoffending because they are doing very dangerous things lunatic high speed chases, armed.
Ready to fight or kill.
And committing firebombings that will inevitably kill innocent people. One of these firebombs is going to burn down a shop with an apartment above it, and we will see little children burnt to death because of this absolute terrible stuff. And undoubtedly when the police grabbed the person that lit the fire that kills the babies, which will happen one day, we will find that those people have been arrested before and have been.
Released on bail.
This is why this issue is important. Things have started to change a bit. The reality is so obvious now that the fashion has swung around a bit. Even the ABC, which in twenty eighteen was so painfully politically correct about this, is now starting to cover youth crime as guess what legitimate news and current affairs. It's only taken them a decade to get around to it. Meanwhile, the police are guarded in what they say, but determined in what they do.
One good point they make, and it's a good point, is that youth crime has become an equal opportunity pastime in twenty twenty four, Unlike ten years ago, young offenders come in all sizes, shapes and races, many of them in the same gangs. The fact is many offenders, regardless of where their parents might have come from, were born here. And there's one veteran cop out there, good friend of my colleague, Mark Butler, who is getting sick of demands
that young offenders be deported. You know, people say, oh, why don't they send them back to where they come from, and why don't you deport them and all this, and this old copper says, well, where do you want me to deport them to Casey Hospital because that's where most of them were born.
A lot of these kids that.
Are causing trouble in twenty twenty four were born right here.
So let's get used to it.
Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for true crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more, go to Heroldsun dot com dot au, forward slash Andrew Rule one word For advertising inquiries, go to news podcasts sold at news dot com dot au that is all one word news. Podcast's sold And if you want further information about this episode, links are in the description. E