Chapter 6: Conclusion: The Anatomy of a Law and Order Crisis

In 2015, there was a noticeable spike in violent crimes committed by a small number of young people in Melbourne (Victorian Ombudsman, 2017, p. 2).¹ Some of these young people were African Australian or of South Sudanese heritage, yet most were from a range of other national and ethnic backgrounds. An adequate investigation into these young people's offending patterns and the complex interplay of the proximate and distal factors driving them would require a book of its own. We have produced a very different book, which proceeds from the observation that, notwithstanding the ‘law and order crisis’ over ‘African gangs’, the face of violent crime in Melbourne remains overwhelmingly ‘non-African’, in that the majority of people charged with crimes against the person (including burglary, assault, robbery and affray) are Australian-born (Goldsworthy, 2018). The question, then, is how and why a relatively newly arrived group of Melburnians came to be identified as a unique threat to community safety?