We will identify and proactively target youth gangs who cause harm to our community using real time intelligence.
Intelligence is critical to our understanding, decisions, and actions to respond to the harms of youth gangs.
Victoria Police will invest and build upon our intelligence resourcing and technological capabilities to track the formation, movement, and activities of youth gangs.
We will create comprehensive intelligence holdings, so our organisation has accurate, timely and useable information filtered through the organisation to support resource allocation activities and rapid responses when incidents occur.
Prevention
Intelligence will help us prevent youth gangs and youth gang membership by providing us with greater insights into the motivations behind joining a youth gang and the potential risk factors.
Building our intelligence resourcing and capability will allow us to embed early detection tools to identify at-risk youth and undertake proactive intelligence scanning to detect youth gang members and reduce the harm they cause.
Detection
Detecting youth gangs and their activities is contingent on the implementation of sophisticated intelligence approaches.
We will focus on deepening our intelligence and analysis capability and on developing intelligence sharing procedures that are timely, reduce duplication of effort and enable targeting of inter-regional and inter-divisional offending by youth gangs.
These sophisticated intelligence approaches will strengthen Victoria Police’s capability to apprehend and arrest offenders and hold them to account.
Disruption
Building our intelligence holdings and sharing processes will enable the appropriate tasking and coordination discussions that build relationships across centralised commands and regions, and across regional boundaries.
Increasing our intelligence capability will support better connected and coordinated approaches to our disruption of youth gangs.
We will ensure that intelligence is shared readily to inform resource allocation of local and specialist resources as appropriate.
Case study
In July 2022 a series of aggravated burglaries occurred involving the theft of motor vehicles from across the southern and eastern Melbourne metropolitan suburbs. This series saw multiple offences occurring on the same nights, which placed unsuspecting residents at risk of a violent confrontation with any disturbed/detected offenders.
Intelligence holdings identified that local youth gang members were involved in different gangs across a broad geographical area. The gangs were offending together to steal multiple luxury vehicles, primarily for social status amongst their peers.
This response required a coordinated effort of police across multiple regions supported by specialist resources to locate the offenders and stop the offending. After working together to track and find the offenders, investigators moved in and apprehended six youth offenders in a stolen car.
These offenders had been involved earlier in a police ramming to avoid apprehension. Three offenders were remanded in custody, two were bailed and one was released pending further enquiries.
By actively working together to integrate intelligence, Victoria Police can create a multi-faceted response that disrupts youth gang-related activity.
Our role
- Delivering timely, thorough, and robust investigations: detecting offences, identifying offenders, detaining them and dismantling their networks.
- Proactive intelligence scanning to identify new enforceable actions or management opportunities.
- Utilising intelligence to identify areas of greatest harm and risk and ensuring investigations are targeted to those areas of harm/risk.
- Working with partner agencies to share data sources to build an in-depth understanding of identified youth gang members and affiliates.
What will success look like?
- Refined and streamlined multi-agency intelligence sharing allowing Victoria Police to identify emerging threats and target those involved in serious and violent youth gang-related crime.
- Increase in intelligence capability within Victoria Police to supplement proactive investigations of youth gangs.
- Streamlined intelligence sharing procedures within Victoria Police.
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