Victoria Police has admitted Melbourne is home to 34 “youth gangs” with more than 600 members responsible for thousands of violent crimes, after once denying they existed and calling the concept “racist”.
The city has been plagued by mainly African gang violence for more than a decade, but police stopped releasing offender nationality data in 2018 when Sudanese were massively over-represented, claimed there were no gangs, and pressured the media to stop reporting on the issue despite community anger.
Then-Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton was accused of racism for highlighting Melbourne’s African crime problem, but since then ongoing gang activity, linked to dozens of killings and machete attacks, has resulted in African youth making up 50% of the young people in custody despite being 0.5% of the population.
But Victoria Police, under new Commissioner Mike Bush, on Thursday revealed they laid 4,300 charges against Melbourne youth gang members last year, including 400 for possessions of weapons including firearms and machetes, which were banned last year due to African gang violence.
There were 48 youth gang stabbings in 2025, and 69 gang members were charged with firearms offences, out 476 people arrested a total of 1,480 times.
As of January 1 police were actively monitoring 608 youth gang members across 34 gangs, and had arrested a “core group” of 208 offenders at least three times, with 58 arrested 10 times or more.
Gang members were most commonly charged with stealing cars (831), aggravated burglaries (601), robberies (421), weapons/firearms/ammunition offences (394), and assaults (385).
Police also said the alleged drive-by shooting murder of Sudanese teenager Ater Good in Fitzroy on January 3 was gang-related, and three Somalian males have been charged over the incident, which may be linked to an alleged New Year’s Eve machete attack.
In 2018 then-deputy police commissioner Shane Patton, who was later promoted to Chief Commissioner during the state’s draconian Covid lockdowns, said there was no African gang problem because “networked criminal offenders” were not technically “gangs”.
The crime statistics for the year ending in March that year showed that Sudan and South Sudan-born offenders were overrepresented in crime statistics by a factor of 10 – committing 1.1% of the offences despite being 0.1% of the Victorian population.
They also committed 3.8% of aggravated burglaries, 8.5% of aggravated robberies, 1.5% of car thefts, 1.2% of common assaults, 4.9% of riot and affray offences, 1.8% of serious assaults, and 0.7% of sexual offences in the state.
Header image: Left, the alleged New Year’s Eve machete attack. Right, an alleged African gang member with a machete (supplied).
