The Victorian commissioner for children and young people says African-Australian youth are again the subject of “intense” media and police focus as the state responds to perceptions of a crime wave without working harder to identify the causes of offending.
Liana Buchanan, the principal commissioner of Victoria’s Commission for Children and Young People, said she was concerned that it did not appear any lessons had been learned from the “African gangs” furore, and implored the state government, police and the youth justice system not to respond in ways that would make the community less safe.
Buchanan spoke to Guardian Australia after an investigation into a botched homicide squad probe involving two South Sudanese-Australian teenagers, the victim and the accused.
She took on the role in 2016, right after the “Moomba riots”, and said more needed to be done to address an overrepresentation of South Sudanese-Australians in the youth justice system.
“What I saw then was several years of intense media focus, political focus and policing focus on so-called African gangs,” she said.
“We’re seeing that again now. I’ve seen, in that time, some periods where there are clearly very intense so-called proactive policing approaches to identify and tackle youth offending, and I’ve also seen some efforts in that period where there’s really positive attempts to identify young people and divert them away.
“But overall what I’ve heard from young South Sudanese-Australians is that their experience is they have become more closely monitored, more surveilled. They feel that they and their families have become increasingly targeted by police.”
Victoria police say it has dedicated proactive policing units in every division “designed solely to strengthen community connection and engagement”, including with members of the South Sudanese community.
Under Operation Alliance, a state-wide taskforce that police say is designed to keep youth out of street gangs, the force says it invests “significant energy into intercepting young people who are yet to become firmly embedded within gangs so we can divert them away from a life of crime”.
According to police figures from April, the force is “actively” monitoring 620 “youth gang members” across 43 gangs, a reduction of 127 youth gang members since September 2020.
Of these members, there are 249 recidivist offenders, including 59 who police have arrested more than 10 times in the past year.
“Our proactive police often attend the homes of at-risk youth – alongside youth workers and other social services – purely to better understand their issues, offer support and connect with parents and siblings,” a Victoria police spokesperson said.
“This holistic approach is almost always well-received by concerned parents and families as they want the best for their child.”
Buchanan is the deputy chair of the South Sudanese Australian Youth Justice Expert Working Group and has participated in five youth forums involving more than 250 youths of that background. She said it has became clear how insidious racism was in their lives and how little they trusted services and police.
“What I’m always really concerned about when I see community concern build and media narrative build, as it has been …[is] whether government is going to pursue … approaches that are not based on the evidence.
“What I haven’t seen is enough genuine effort to understand what are the drivers of offending, and given South Sudanese-Australians are so massively overrepresented in the justice system, what are the drivers for them … What is it about their experiences that are contributing to them coming into contact with police.
“As a community we’re very inclined to want to blame and punish, and some of that is very understandable when you are talking about individual victims and their families, but actually that drives responses that are against good policy and are not effective. It stops us from looking at what is really driving offending, and putting investment into what is tackling those drivers.”
Aside from racism and feeling excluded, Buchanan said that, from her experience, she believed those drivers were profound poverty in some South Sudanese-Australian families, intergenerational conflict between youths and parents, and unresolved trauma.
Youths also said they could not pursue other activities such as sport because their families could not afford or commit to it.
