eeeeeeelp

Childintime wrote:

ShabbyMcCrabby wrote:

It's an invasion!!!

The Missus is seriously considering finding a job in Melbs after I graduate...

It’s melbs or Edinburgh by the looks of it, but you know...weather.

Yasssssssss! Do it!

Nash is giving me bedroom eyes.

Another driver appears to have run over a dozen pedestrians in Melbourne again. Arrested already, hopefully not a repeat of the last time.

Where's skezzers headphone thread?

Rectified. Outside of the obvious worst things about that kind of incident is the terror cries and racist filth that follows. He's not Aus born, as were nine of the people he hit. He's mentally ill, end of.

Any melbourne region people want to add their 2c worth on Dutton vs Sudanese? 

Reads to me like a couple of incidents have been over emphasised for importance because the LNP polling has shown it might help them win state and federal seats there. Murdoch "media" recent recipient of 30 million dollars of free taxpayer funds is running the line without question. 

It's really just about skin colour isn't it? No one is actually scared of going to restaurants are they?

Disclosure: lived in West Footscray once for a year and had no problems except for a loud cat one evening.

Nobody in Melbourne has any idea what the fuck Dutton, a Queensland resident who has rarely even set foot in Melbourne, is on about.

I've seen nothing, heard nothing, nobody I know has mentioned it.  FWIW

The short version is: yes, skin colour makes it all blow out of proportion. African is the latest “other” here. 

I keep saying that I recall the same shit with Asian “gangs” in the 90s. The Triad is an actual thing, sure, but a few 14 year old vietnamese kids in Springvale in oversize Country Road gear it is not. (Mentioning “Apex” on front pages is counter productive.)

I did a reasonable deep dive on the stats. There’s a lot of noise. Here’s a few take aways:

”SMH” wrote:

Deputy Commissioner Patton told a parliamentary inquiry on Wednesday the Apex gang, at its peak, consisted of about 130 people who "loosely claimed to be members", including youth from a range of backgrounds.

"Predominantly, a large cohort of that gang was in fact Australian-born offenders. It was a mixture of numerous ethnicities, nationalities."

Deputy Commissioner Patton said Victoria Police had done extensive work to get to the "root of the issue", including a summit that identified disengagement, unemployment, disadvantage and "feeling locked out from society" as key contributors to youth crime.

The way the media portrayed and "stereotyped" ethnic groups also contributed, Mr Patton said.

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/apex-gang-most-youth-crimes-committed-by-australianborn-police-say-20170412-gvj964.html


(For context, as of 2011, there were 20k South Sudanese in Australia, 6k in Vic.) That’ll have gone up, so the % of pop we’re talking about is small, however you slice it.)

Those root causes listed above ring true. The gist is basically that there are african kids getting into some shit, and there’s an “at risk” cohort, but it’s largely like any young folks in a bad socio-economic situation.

What doesn’t help is basically being a bunch of bigoted pricks to all African folks. Our players at Longhorns roll deep too when going on PT, they’re not all angels, but they’re rolling in a group because it’s safer, and the vast vast majority of them are awesome young folk. The tourney we run, which was on the same day as the airbnb incident and just after the st kilda beach thing, had 600 players, as well as between 1500 and 2000 spectators on the last day, apart from some rude folk who couldn’t get in, and a few guys trying to sneak in through a back door, everyone had a grand old time. As always. 

Here’s the thing I see: I had one player on my u16s squad who couldn’t play because he got locked up for getting into a brawl at a party, I know of a handful of younger guys we booted out for shoplifting at Highpoint, way prior to the recent incident, but I’ve literally lost track of the kids we’ve sent to the states to play ball. Over half of my u16s championship team from last year are OS. I wanna say we’ve sent over 20 in the last 2 years, maybe 30. And that’s not including the other SSANBA teams. I bring my daughter to training whenever I can for Longhorns, she’s safe as freakin houses. Every player has at least 3 other siblings, it’s like having 60 babysitters. Now, outside of the basketball context it’s messier, but the principle is the same. Tarring with the same brush is dumb.

http://www.policeaccountability.org.au/commentary/10-things-you-need-to-understand-about-the-media-and-crime-reporting/

These guys are around the corner from me. This is all spot on.

The worst riot in Victoria’s recent history occurred in March 2010 when about 5,000 young people smashed windows, threw flares at police, and overturned cars whilst protesting the cancellation of the EasterNats race meet, causing over $40,000 in damage to Bob Janes T-Mart and nearby businesses. The ethnicity of the rioters in this case was not mentioned in any article, nor were any ‘community leaders’ called up to comment or asked to explain why the overwhelmingly Caucasian youth were so violent. Ethnicity was deemed to be irrelevant to media coverage of that event.

In November 2017 a ‘wild brawl’ broke out at a Gippsland Bachelor and Spinsters Ball in Tooradin. A woman was king hit and ‘stomped on’ as she tried to resuscitate a man who’d been “almost killed”. Four people were hospitalized and police back-up had to be called in from 100km away.

There’s enough research on ‘Gangs, media representation and Moral Panics’ to fill a library or two. In Australia we’ve been here multiple times. In fact the moral panics over the knife wielding Bogies and Widgies youth gangs in the 1950’s and then the Sharpies in the ‘60’s and 70’s led front pages stories and featured iron bars, home made guns and bloody knife fights that make the Moomba brawl of 2016 seem very tame.

Victorian crimes statistics show a decrease in youth offending rates:

The proportion of incidents committed by alleged offenders under the age of 25 has fallen from half of all incidents recorded in 2007-2008 to 40% of all incidents in 2015-2016.

The number of young people in detention on sentence is also down: sentenced in Children’s Court halved since 2008–09 with only very small number receiving sentence of detention.

Victoria has the lowest rate of children (10-17) under justice supervision on an average day in Australia.

Evidence showed that migrant youth and newly arrived migrants are not involved in criminal activity with less than 10 per cent being overseas born offenders. The second-highest country, after Australia, of alleged offenders in Victoria is New Zealand (2.8 per cent of the total offenders), followed by Indian (1.5 per cent), Vietnamese and Sudanese (both 1.4 per cent).

Victorian Crime Statistics Agency clearly show that the vast majority of offenders in Victoria are Australian born and older than 25. Adults were predominantly the largest proportion of offenders, with 67 per cent over the age of 25. Of those Australian born offenders, a relatively small percentage was comprised of youth offenders: 10 per cent were aged 10 to 17 and 22 per cent were aged 18 to 24 years.

‘Over-representation’ is a data trick

To claim that current crime rates are being “driven by” any one group is utterly false.  What many are confusing us with is an old data trick.  An ‘over-representation’ within a small sub-set of figures. Because it’s a newly arrived community, Sudanese young people are ‘over-represented’ within their own tiny demographic, and they are therefore over-represented in some crime types.  But their proportion of overall offending remains very small; less than 2% of overall youth crime figures.  Sudanese young people not born in Australia make up an even smaller proportion. Aggravated burglaries are not ‘driven’ by the 4.8 percent who happen to be Sudanese.

The statistics show that young people born outside Australia commit a disproportionately low number of crimes. Data obtained from Victoria Police, for example, shows that from 2012–2016, the vast majority of young people aged 10-18 involved in crime were Australian-born. Likewise, a report by the Centre for Multicultural Youth used current police data to show that young people born overseas are less than half as likely to be alleged offenders compared with other young people. [ii]

https://theconversation.com/racist-reporting-still-rife-in-australian-media-88957

Half of all race-related opinion pieces in the Australian mainstream media are likely to contravene industry codes of conduct on racism.

In research released this week, the Who Watches the Media report found that of 124 race-related opinion pieces published between January and July this year, 62 were potentially in breach of one or more industry codes of conduct, because of racist content.

Despite multiple industry codes of conduct stipulating fair race-related reporting, racist reporting is a weekly phenomenon in Australia’s mainstream media.

We define racism as unjust covert or overt behaviour towards a person or a group on the basis of their racial background. This might be perpetrated by a person, a group, an organisation, or a system.

The research, conducted by not-for-profit group All Together Now and the University of Technology Sydney, focused on opinion-based pieces in the eight Australian newspapers and current affairs programs with the largest audiences, as determined by ratings agencies.

Slight tangent, but worth reading:

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2017/june/1496239200/helen-garner/why-she-broke

This is a gut wrenching piece. Tragic, but informative. Read it and read about the eldest daughter. Look at what these kids can go through and how much they achieve. It’s unbelievable. (Within a basketball context we see a lot of issues at a rep level with Rep teams struggling to accommodate South Sudanese players who can’t make every session etc etc. Rep and sport in general in Australia is a rich man’s game, and has a lot of parental support. You try making all your training sessions looking after 2+ of your younger siblings and getting to woop woop on PT.)

One final thing, re the St Kilda Beach incident.

That was described as “Involving up to 300 people of african appearance.”

Let’s compare to this:

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/fight-at-frankston-police-station-linked-to-seaford-brawl-20151222-gltpkz.html

This happened outside our last tourney in Frankston in 2015. The folks involved weren’t there for the tourney. They just showed up at the front to get into a brawl. (I’m a material witness, so maybe I can’t say much, oops.)

Note the description under the video: “A 23-year-old man suffers multiple stab wounds in a wild street brawl involving up to 100 people.” I saw other reports at the time that mentioned “hundreds” etc.

Then note how many folks actually got arrested. There were 20-30 max 20 something year olds fighting. The tourney was winding down and the rest of the folks were just witnesses standing minding their business in the carpark.

You can see in the video a bunch of young kids running. They were literally just running to watch, like teenagers do when a fight breaks out. 

This was a serious incident, for those actually involved. But do the math on it. There were literally hundreds of folks minding their business being awesome in the stadium. 

Anyway. Fuck Dutton.

Just read the article on Akon Guode. Good god, what a horrible time she had lived through. I can't say I'm surprised those details never came out public during the trial. I do find it concerning the legal statement about why some people commit infanticide with women compared to men, because a generalisation doesn't hold much room for nuance. Nuanced understanding is what this case obviously lacked. 

Thanks, Facewon for your thoughts on this general topic of Sudanese migrants. As I suspected it's a big media and LNP dog whistle campaign targeting a community of refugees and recent arrivals. It disappoints me for two reasons. First, they are people who have come from war torn places and seem to get insufficient support to adapt to a new life. We know from studies the world over that youth disengagement happens when new migrants are excluded from the community. A statistical blip in crime rates is then easy to use by racists as evidence against a whole cohort. 

The second reason I am disappointed is the discussion puts paid to the lie about Australia's alleged compassion for refugees. In particular non boat arrivals. The boat arrivals are painted as "queue jumpers" stealing places from "legitimate refugees". And here we have News Limited and the Immigration Minister painting legitimate refugees as a law and order problem. 

It's yet more evidence that Australia has an unacceptable and unacknowledged persistent problem with racism.

Sobering

hic

Anzac day is worse.

The trick is to be honest about history and not mythologise shit and get completely bent out of shape when someone points out something was obviously a bit shit, or not an unalloyed good.

We could do with being honest about our history with the OG owners, Turkey could do with being honest about the Armenian genocide. We could do with being honest about it too. And calling Gallipoli and our involvement what it was: being fodder for Royal Britania for bunch of reasons which don't involve "our freedom."

it's the equivalent of "supporting the troops" in the states.