St Albans is the homicide capital of Victoria.
The growth area, where 1 per cent of the state’s population lives, recorded 16 homicides since 2012 or almost 5 per cent of all homicides in Victoria.
The police data obtained by Fairfax Media shows that postcode 3021, which takes in St Albans, Kealba and Kings Park, beat the CBD for murder and mayhem by five deaths. The neighbouring Sunshine area recorded seven.
Despite this, the vast majority of St Albans residents have never been touched by murder, and the statistics, experts warn, need to be treated with caution as homicide encompasses not just murder but other charges such as culpable driving and manslaughter.
But to those in St Albans who have been touched by murder the numbers are no surprise, and for some homicide seems to haunt them.
Take Paul, not his real name, for example. The law-abiding labourer has lived for 23 years in a nondescript street with well-manicured nature strips lined with growing gum trees. It was a street where everyone knew everyone, but in the last decade more renters have moved in and in May he and his neighbours were introduced to murder.
A 22-year-old who lived across the road from Paul was stabbed to death. Paul had never expected a crime like that to arrive on his doorstep, but the news of so much death in his suburb raised just a shrug of his paint-flecked shoulders.
“Not a surprise to me, no,” he said, taking a drag of his cigarette as he stood on the nature strip.
“What else can it be? Drugs.”
Five kilometres away is a family whose lives have been changed forever. Husband and wife Ben and Christine, not their real names, have lived in their home with their three sons and daughter for almost 10 years.
Last April a young mother, just 20, was shot dead in a bedroom of their home while they were out. The woman knew one of their sons and the young group were smoking the drug ice when they allegedly fooled around with a shotgun and it all went horribly wrong.
“We’re constantly reminded of it. It happened in that room,” Ben said, motioning behind him as he sat beside his wife at their kitchen table. A photo of the pretty young woman is framed and displayed nearby.
“She died in our home. We couldn’t protect her, and just packing up and running away, it’d be like we’re abandoning her. I can’t go a night without thinking of her and her family.”
When told their suburb has one of the worst rates for homicide the couple exchange glances.
“How many people do we know that have been murdered in the last two years?” Christine asked.
“There’s at least three,” Ben replied.
They call their suburb the “backwash” of a society that has been forgotten and they say murder in their suburb barely rates a mention in mainstream media any more. And they blame, without hesitation, ice.
“On both sides of it you’ve got families that suffer from it. A lot of these people are really, really nice people, but they’ve fallen into this trap where they’ve thrown their lives away,” Ben said.
It was a view that former veteran homicide squad Detective Senior Sergeant Ron Iddles almost mirrored. Now the Police Association secretary, he investigated 320 murders in his 25 years in the squad.
“People kill for a whole range of reasons; revenge, lust, sometimes financial gain and disputes over property or money. Most them are just like you and me, but they’ve made a bad choice in life. They’re not bad people, they’ve just made a bad choice,” he said.
Melbourne University social and political science senior fellow Stuart Ross warned against reading too much into the statistics, but noted the higher homicide rates in Melbourne’s growth corridors.
Dr Ross said those areas tended to be home to a higher proportion of younger people and young families, groups that were more likely to be involved in alcohol-related male-on-male homicides and domestic violence homicides than the typically older residents of the inner suburbs.
Analysis of the data also shows the areas with more homicides also have above-average rates of domestic violence and other crime.
But Deakin criminology lecturer Kate Fitz-Gibbon said that, without more detailed data on the nature of the homicides in each postcode, it would be difficult to determine how many of the deaths were domestic-violence related.
She said research had found domestic violence did not discriminate by postcode or socio-economic group.
Dr Fitz-Gibbon said the data highlighted the importance of targeting police resources to tackle the causes of violent crime in areas with higher victimisation rates.
This story first appeared in The Age
