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Crime makes headlines, sells books, carves political careers, frightens people and ruins lives. And if those headlines are to be believed we should be sitting at home armed to the teeth ready to repel African kids from coming down the chimney like Santa's helpers on crystal meth.
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The press says these gangs will beat you up, senior police say it is all a media beat-up, while social workers say we should chill out and just meet up.
What we do know is with the latest crime figures showing a rise of more than 13 per cent what we are doing isn't working. And little wonder because in many ways we are still using the same methods set up 45 years ago.
It was back in 1971 that the Victoria Police was dragged from the dark ages following a review of its operations by then senior British police officer Sir Eric St Johnston.
He said we had too many suburban police stations and recommended 33 should be closed (funny thing that, the last chief commissioner Ken Lay recommended the same thing a couple of years back and was howled down).
Victoria was broken into divisions, there were uniformed patrols, district detectives and specialist crime squads - just like now.
Today we have more police, who are better trained, more educated, better equipped and better supported. The courts are tougher, the laws stricter and the prisons fuller (In 1978 we had fewer than 1500 prisoners, now we have more than 6000). So why are we going backwards?
One reason is that Melbourne is a much different place to 1971 (although Hawthorn were reigning premiers as they remain until the date of this article).
Consider this: Melbourne had half the population, pubs closed at 10pm, televisions were black and white, immigrants were mostly white (the White Australia Policy had only recently been revoked) and shops shut on Sunday.
There was very little violent crime at night because most people were tucked up in bed. After-hours property crime centred on professional factory burglars and dock-workers who turned nocturnal thieving into an art form.
Policewomen carried handbags, there was no local terrorism, and Chinese beef chow mien brought home in a pot was considered exotic ethnic fare. Police cars were not rammed, cops could patrol one up and few crooks carried guns.
According to the 1979 crime figures there were 56 serious assaults on police. A 2015 Police Association survey reported 71 per cent of police and Protective Services Officers said they had been assaulted in the previous three years.
In 1979 there were 7723 reported assaults while in 2015-16 there were more than 40,000. (The murder rate bucks the trend and remains stable.)
We have to take into account that Victoria Police figures were notoriously rubbery, with many offences not recorded. Police called to domestic disputes often didn't bother to fill out crime reports, while family violence victims who once remained silent are now encouraged to report offences.
Now the figures are compiled by the independent Victoria Crime Statistics Agency and are closer to reality, which means it is fair to say there is more crime and the risks are greater.
But we persist with the flawed argument that an increase in crime is a police problem that requires a police solution. This is as logical as blaming the fire brigade for the electrical fault that burns your house down.
It is increasingly clear that if we look to an exclusive law enforcement answer we are asking the wrong questions. At the very time the US criminal justice system is concluding that mandatory sentencing, widespread imprisonment and paramilitary police don't work, we are heading down the same failed path.
As police are the first responders to crime we should first examine how they perform, and in many ways they have not moved with the times, with station rosters reflecting a Melbourne that no longer exists.
If we have about 200 police in 100 vehicles patrolling Melbourne in the early hours that is only 1.5 per cent of the police force, which means there are four times that number of people working on a busy night at Crown Casino. You can get a pizza or a stripper (possibly dressed as a police officer) at your front door quicker than you can get a cop in a real uniform.
Nightshift divisional van crews are routinely given 20 jobs on handover and never catch up. Where once they were seen as white knights, they now face angry victims frustrated they had to wait hours for assistance.
Tripe zero calls for police assistance in 2014-15 totalled 1,296,049, with police dispatched in 1,224,283 cases. So police are given more than 3300 jobs a day via the emergency call centre - are you kidding? Are we living in Beirut?
Police say at least 600 calls a day or about 220,000 a year are non urgent and just gum up the works, and Victoria is the only state that does not have a police advice line to deal with them.
For example, you come home from holiday and your house has been burgled sometime in the past three weeks. You are sunburned, jet lagged, annoyed and wearing a bad Hawaiian shirt and appalling check golf pants when you ring triple zero. Police turn up five hours later after you have polished off a duty free bottle of scotch and the pretzels you stole from the plane only for the officers to look around and tell you to do a stolen property list.
If referred to a police advice line you would secure the premises, go to bed, do a list and fill in some forms at your local station. It would provide a better service and allow police to respond faster to real emergencies.
Quite rightly police concentrate on family violence, which at night ties up units for about two hours a case. The increase in drug-related mentally ill suspects means police are off the road guarding these offenders in casualty departments.
This points to the need for a rethink on how police do their business. We need more general duties police working at night (which may require a penalty rate incentive) and need to free up at least 1000 Protective Services Officers twiddling their batons on railway stations.
But the reality is we are putting a bandage on a burst pipe and the time has come to have a rethink.
Maybe we just accept that Melbourne is a big city with big city crime problems and suck it up. Or maybe we should stop making policy on the run that only makes politicians look tough without having the slightest positive impact on core issues.
These changes invoke the law of unintended consequences such as:
- Mandatory sentencing (the flawed thinking that crimes in specific categories are the same) results in fewer guilty pleas, longer court delays and increased acquittal rates.
- The spate of home invasions and car jackings by underage offenders has resulted in a jump in juveniles remanded in custody. Those short-term inmates are not offered education and rehabilitation courses and are difficult to control - resulting in a jump in staff assaults.
- When politicians utter hard-line cliches about ethnic gangs, voters nod with approval, but cops on the street say they act as recruiting slogans for groups such as Apex. "They tell us they feel locked out from jobs and as they are treated as criminals they may as well be criminals," one senior policeman said.
- Toughening parole means more prisoners are doing full sentences, resulting in their release without supervision. Does anyone think that will end well?
We have to accept police and punishment are not the total answer. Police are locking up a record number of drug traffickers and yet there is no sign of a drop in drug use. As one wise ex-policeman says, "You can legislate to make something unlawful but you can't legislate to make it unpopular."
The first step to a fix is to admit what we have is, if not broken, in need of urgent repair.
How is it that if you are stabbed by some idiot on ice you will be treated in emergency immediately but if you are a drug addict looking to get clean it will take weeks to get treatment?
How is it we continue to increase the prison population with the certain knowledge that nearly half will return on release?
Law and order is always an election issue and fear of crime can bring down a government. But to break the cycle we need to look beyond the latest election cycle.
We build roads, schools and hospitals planning for a Melbourne in 25 years and yet we make laws designed for headlines that last 24 hours.
We need a bipartisan approach where everything is on the table, such as decriminalising drugs, diverting money from enforcement to treatment, building pathways for young offenders and investing in a workable parole system. It is called Justice Reinvestment, where money is channelled from enforcement and punishment to the underlying causes of crime.
Enforcement backed by education works – just think of how attitudes have changed to drink driving. This is not about being soft on crime but being smart on crime. We need to rewire the house before it busts into flames.