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ShareEarlier this week, a mafia drug lord was gunned down in broad daylight in a Melbourne café. It was the 30th such inter-gang warfare slaying in Melbourne in seven years, and a stark exposure of the city's underbelly. Despite this and the pressing demands on his time, Victoria Police chief commissioner Simon Overland sat down for an exclusive interview with DNA in Melbourne to address issues relating to the recent wave of attacks on Indian students in Victoria. Exceprts:
The attacks on Indians have been going on for many months now. Why has the Victoria Police not been able to put an end to this?
The starting point is to put in a context, which is a shift in offending patterns, and around robberies. If you go back over the last 10 years, we have reduced the number of robberies and armed robberies in Victoria by about 50%. What we have seen over the last 18 months to two years is a slight increase in street robberies. That's a shift in the pattern of robberies.
If you go back 10 years, robberies were primarily armed robberies of banks and businesses. We have stopped that. They then moved from the 'hard targets' to 'softer targets' -- 711 stores, supermarkets, petrol stations... We stopped that, too. Now we are seeing a move to street-based robberies, and it's international students who have been caught out in those.
But it's only a slight increase -- about 3% over the last 12 months: but we have known that international students are over-represented as victims of these types of crimes -- for a number of reasons, but primarily because they are vulnerable, because of where they live, and because they rely on public transport, tend to move around late at night and often by themselves, and also because (since they are coming from universities) they are carrying quite a bit of gear with them -- laptops, phones... They are also perhaps unaware of some of the things happening around them, and they don't think about protecting themselves.
So we have seen this slight escalation in street-level robberies, which are primarily committed by groups of young men, who pick on an individual and rob them. That's the issue we have seen. We have been responding to that for about 18 months to two years. And it is taking us a while to get on top of it. But it's actually quite a challenging problem because it's quite dispersed, right across the metropolitan area. And out in the west (western suburbs of Melbourne), where we have been focussed on the longest, the numbers are actually decreasing over the last 12 months. The challenge is to have that happen right across the state.
You speak of 'overseas students' generally. But Indian students have been over-represented as victims of these street robberies. Why is that?
It's not just Indian students; even Chinese students are over-represented. But Indian students in particular are vulnerable for a number of reasons. Some of these attacks, undoubtedly, are motivated by racist elements. No question about that. There is some racism is in this. But a lot of it goes back to issues of vulnerability. Indian students tend to live in very poor areas because of housing issues and their need for low-cost housing. Many of them are struggling financially.
More than the other overseas students?
Yes, and they live in very poor areas. They are in situations where they need to study and work. So they are working casual jobs, which might take them late into the night. Again, more than other overseas students. We know that Indian students in particular are struggling economically. So that's another factor as to why they are more vulnerable. Because of where they live and the work that they are doing, the late hours... it's not a complete explanation, but it's another factor.
Initially, you rejected the notion that these were "racist" attacks, arguing that they were "opportunistic" in nature, but now you concede that some of them were indeed racist in nature. Did the facts change or did your perceptions about them change?
I've never rejected that. I've always said, when I was asked about it, that undoubtedly some of it is about racism, but equally a lot of them is opportunistic. But I've also made the point: it doesn't matter, it's wrong. Violence is wrong, and we need to stop it. That's what we have been trying to do.
Have the intensified patrolling measures you have now introduced in high-crime neighbourhoods restored the students' confidence?
Recognising the problem focussed on the robberies, we realised that international students (and Indian students in particular) were over-represented in the western suburbs. For well over the past 12 months and more, we have worked with colleges and universities out there to talk about crime prevention and go and talk to the students, make them aware there is a problem. We have also put in place some elements of law enforcement. We have doubled the size of a dedicated team that looks at street robberies. We have made a significant number of arrests, particularly in most of the high-profile cases, and charged them and put them before courts. We are continuing to do that.
We have also been going to the local high schools, from where many of the offenders come. Many of them are juvenile. We have been going to schools and telling the students not to do this, because when we catch them they will have a criminal history. We have been working at that level.
