The Experts podcast - Season 3 Episode 5: Underage and under arrest - transcript

Vision from a violent knife fight on a Dandenong public bus in 2021 shocked even the most seasoned police officers. What made the near-deadly altercation even more confronting? The offenders and victims were all teenagers.

A pair of tenacious detectives share how they navigated the complexities of holding young people to account.

Listen to this episode and other episodes of Victoria Police's official podcast, Police Life: The Experts.

Transcript of Police Life: The Experts podcast, Season 3 Episode 5: Underage and under arrest

Voiceover: This podcast episode contains references to graphic violence and serious injury involving minors. Listener discretion is advised.

[Ominous music with traffic sounds]

Voiceover: Wednesday, April 7 2021, 10:15am, the Eastlink freeway in Melbourne.

A white Mazda 3 was broken down in the emergency lane. Five youths were getting in and out of the vehicle. It didn’t look right… so a member of the public called Triple Zero.

Detective Senior Constable Rebecca Kyle: The Mazda 3 that they were in had been stolen two days prior, and the plates on the car were also stolen from a separate Mazda. When we ran the plates, they didn't match. And that's why police attended and found what they found.

Voiceover: What police found in the vehicle was alarming – machetes and knives bearing human blood. A routine matter had just become the latest development in an investigation into a horrifying attack.

The outcome of that investigation would eventually make case law as police battled a surge in gang-related violence.

Det Sen Const Kyle: My name is Rebecca Kyle. I'm a detective senior constable. I currently work at Transit Crime Investigation Unit and I've been with Victoria Police for about nine years now.

At Transit CI, we don't do your typical crime shifts. We are on call for 24 hours straight, basically. So we come in, usually start around two o'clock. We'll work ‘til 10. We're then on call from 10pm to 8am. And then we work from 8am to 4pm with the handover at two.

[Suspenseful music]

So, 7th of April, 2021, about six o'clock in the morning, I had just gotten up to get ready for work when the crime phone rang. I'd only been in the office for a few months. It was the first time I'd been called overnight and was told, ‘Yep, there's a stabbing that's occurred in Dandenong. Not 100 per cent sure on the status of the victims, but they’re two victims, both being taken to hospital.’ And basically, ‘Here it is, it's your job.’

Detective Sergeant Lisa Herbert: She was very junior. She was very junior at the time, and I was surprised that she, without any disrespect, I was surprised she was but, you know, these are the members that are on crime for the day So, she proved herself in spades.

My name is Lisa Herbert, I'm a detective sergeant at Stonnington CIU and I've been in the job 19 years.

Voiceover: In 2021, Lisa Herbert was Bec Kyle’s boss at Transit CIU. The quietly-spoken, efficient young detective had only been on Lisa’s crew for four months. Her skills and tenacity were about to be put to the test.

Det Sgt Herbert: There's more senior members in the office, maybe more suited to it. However, she just rose to the challenge and showed herself to be an absolutely outstanding investigator.

Det Sen Const Kyle: I moved here from Queensland, only ever wanted to live down here and work down here so moved here and joined up and within a year I was in.

I think I've just always wanted to, it's always appealed the thought of being a police officer, working within the law, investigating jobs, it’s what I've always wanted to do.

[Ominous music]

[Recreated audio from radio news bulletin]

Newsreader: Two teenagers have been viciously stabbed during a brawl in Dandenong. It’s believed two 17-year-olds were chased onto a bus and assaulted after a fight broke out at a nearby park. They were taken to hospital with serious stab wounds. Their attackers remain on the run.

[Recreated audio ends]

Voiceover: The early hours of an investigation like this are always critical, and with a heightened awareness in the public over violent youth crime, this job was going to attract media attention.

Det Sen Const Kyle: Getting the call for this job, the things running through my mind is the seriousness of the offence. I had no idea what the injuries to the victims were. I didn't know if it was life threatening. I didn’t know anything really about them.

So, I spoke to the members who were on scene, which was Dandenong CI. They were managing the scene but they had no one to go with the victims who were heading into hospital in the city. So, they were happy to deal with the scene, I called my offsider and we started making our way into the hospital.

I knew there were multiple offenders but at this stage no one had any idea who they were. They'd left the scene and I knew that there was a significant scene that was being processed by locals so there’s the scene in Dandenong to deal with, there were victims in the city at hospital to deal with and at this stage it was just me and my one offsider. And this was the biggest job I'd received since being in the office.

Det Sgt Herbert: That was the first time we worked together. She was that new.

Det Sen Const Kyle: Yeah, so it was just, one, understanding how to run this job that I hadn't really had to deal with before. All my temps were at a local CI where everything's close to home and I wasn't the senior member.

[Ominous music]

Det Sen Const Kyle: So, I got to hospital and one of the victims were already in surgery, which is when we found out that he had a perforated bowel and partially severed finger, so he had the worst injuries at this stage.

My biggest priority was getting in contact with the parents to let them know their sons weren't at home and that they were actually in hospital in the city. I think it's every parent's worst nightmare to receive a phone call from police at six o'clock in the morning to say, ‘We're with your children, we're at hospital.’

So, my first thought was, one, was reassuring they're OK, they are injured but they're alive and, yeah, just making sure they knew where we were, who I was so that they could contact me. And just to let them know exactly what was happening with their boys.

They were pretty distraught, which I think any parent would be. All they cared about at that stage was the health and safety of their boys. They had no idea they weren't even at home. Their initial thought was, ‘No, they're at home in bed. What would they be doing in the city?’

Voiceover: The victims were twin brothers aged 16. With one brother in surgery, Bec interviewed the other.

Det Sen Const Kyle: He'd had a few stab wounds himself and needed some stitches, but his twin brother got the worst of it.

And we quickly found out that it was a pre-arranged meet. It was supposed to be a one-on-one fist fight. But four offenders turned up with machetes and it didn't end up being what the victims thought it would be.

So, the brother I was initially speaking to, he was quite cooperative. He allowed us to have a look at his phone, which had messages with the offender arranging a pre-arranged fight at the Dandenong Railway Station.

The brothers turned up, we have them on CCTV footage at the Dandenong Railway Station and one of them was carrying a baseball bat and the other was carrying a plastic kitchen knife. I would say significantly under-equipped and under-prepared for what exactly they were walking into.

So, I believe a couple of them were known to Transit CI before this happened, not me personally. Like I said, I was fairly new to the office, but they had had a couple of dealings here and there, which is very typical in our office. So many planned meetups between gangs from different areas or just retaliation, retribution, all that kind of stuff.

A lot of it does happen on public transport, especially with youths given the fact that that's usually how they get around.

Voiceover: In the four years since this job, Bec has become acutely aware that knives, machetes and other edged weapons are a feature of this youth-related violence. This can turn minor altercations into life-threatening situations.

Det Sen Const Kyle: Offending involving knives and sharps and all the rest of it at the minute is just prolific. We would get jobs daily for, if it's not a stabbing it would be an armed robbery where a knife's produced and threatened.

Not only have you got offenders using them but you've got victims who have started to carry them and they're just saying it's just for protection. It's a massive concern and you see it day in, day out.

Voiceover: Bec’s first task was to establish who these offenders were. One of the brothers told Bec their attackers were from a gang based in Melbourne’s western suburbs.

Det Sen Const Kyle: One of the first steps in trying to identify the offenders at this stage is just making contact with the office. At this point, people had started arriving for their day shifts, which includes a TIO, which is a Tactical Intelligence Officer. So we have two within our office and it's just notifying them of the gangs that are involved and them just making inquiries into memberships of those gangs.

As part of the investigation, even just initially trying to figure out how they were associated and prior dealings and whatnot with police, with these particular offenders, given that they were from the western suburbs, I reached out to the Alliance crew out there.

Voiceover: Operation Alliance is Victoria Police’s targeted response to gang-related youth crime. Under the Alliance umbrella, police taskforces in areas of youth gang activity monitor offenders and stop them causing harm.

Many of these offenders hail from Melbourne’s west, where about 20 youth gangs operate, meaning detectives in this patch have plenty of intel for police colleagues around Victoria.

Detective Acting Sergeant Ryan Balzer: My name's Ryan Balzer and I'm an acting detective sergeant with the Westgate Alliance Taskforce and I've been with Victoria Police for 14 years now.

Last year, in 2024, our unit alone made for over 220 arrests in that calendar year, which was about, I think from memory, about 28 per cent of all offenders within that Westgate area.

Voiceover: Westgate covers the western region of Melbourne but gangs do not respect police boundaries, so Ryan and his colleagues keep a close eye on gang activity across the state.

Det A/Sgt Balzer: We will monitor what kind of jobs happen on a regular basis so we can be proactive in going, ‘Oh, this might be an MO that our offenders are doing at the moment,’ and touch base and say, ‘Hey, what have you got? Is there any way that we can assist? Maybe you've got some footage that we could help ID. Hey, this person looks like they might be from out your way,’ because there might be some other information that's available to them and we can assist in that way as well.

So, it is a two-way street that we operate. We believe that if we're proactive with identifying where our offenders are offending, that it'll pay dividends in relation to, you know, progressing investigations or putting these offenders before the court.

[Ominous music]

Voiceover: While the Westgate Alliance crew would prove pivotal during the investigation phase, it was a chance sighting in the community that gave Bec the break she needed. A vehicle with a flat tyre on Eastlink at 10:15 that morning would kick the case into high gear.

Det Sen Const Kyle: So, not long after, I've left the hospital and I've gotten back to the office when we received a call to the office saying, ‘Hey, a member of the public's called through.’ The car that we suspect’s involved in the stabbing from this morning is broken down on the Eastlink and uniformed members had already attended. So, at that stage, uniform called us to say, ‘We've located machetes and knives in the car that still have blood on them. The clothing they were wearing matched the description of the clothing from the stabbing in Dandenong that morning, and we strongly believe that these were the offenders from that stabbing.’

From that stage, they put all five from that car under arrest. So, the offenders were taken back to Dandenong Police Station where me and my offsider had planned to meet them, and my office were getting crews together to come out and assist with processing them and the scene and all the rest of it.

We were aware heading out to Dandenong that we had five in custody. We were mindful that only four had been involved in the stabbing. And when we got to Dandenong Police Station, one of the local members from Dandenong CI had already obtained the bus footage.

So, prior to us going in to do any interviews, we were able to watch the footage to see who was involved and what exactly occurred and were able to confirm, yeah, these are the same people that had committed the stabbing, that were then arrested in the car a few hours later. And they were all in the same clothing they were wearing in the CCTV footage, which obviously made our jobs a lot easier.

The CCTV on the bus was actually quite difficult for a lot of members to watch. It was incredibly violent, it was incredibly confronting, and it was quite shocking even for some of the senior police who saw what happened.

It had audio and visual, so you could hear the victims screaming, you could hear the victims screaming for help. At one point, one of them screamed, ‘I'm gonna die.’ You could hear the laughter of the offenders. And I think what stood out too was just the absolute silence from, there were about 10, 10 people on that bus who all sat there and frozen in their seats who had to witness what had happened.

So, one of the offenders had blocked the door and the two victims were cornered near the front of the bus and they were, for lack of a better word, just hacked at with machetes and knives and one of them, while he was being stabbed in the stomach was also being stabbed at the back at the same time by two offenders in the back.

Watching the footage it was quite shocking to believe that the worst they got was a perforated bowel and a severed finger and some stab wounds that just somehow missed major arteries and major organs because there wasn't any thought into where they were stabbing, it was just they were hacking at them. So, I think the victims were incredibly lucky to get out with the injuries they got because there was every chance that that could have been a murder.

[Mysterious music]

Voiceover: As his brother’s life hung in the balance, the other victim helped police to understand the background to the attack.

Det Sen Const Kyle: The offenders were part of a western suburbs gang, which is [BEEP], and friends of theirs were in [BEEP], which is a eastern gang at the time, and these people had beaten up a friend of theirs from [BEEP] and that's where the pre-arranged fight came into play.

Voiceover: Victoria Police has for years chosen not to publicly name gangs to avoid giving them notoriety.

With five suspects in custody, all under the age of 18, it was time to carry out interviews. Two teams of officers were assigned that task.

Det Sgt Herbert: When you're talking about children in custody, we have to have independent people present for that. They have to be afforded the opportunity of natural justice. They need to be represented, be able to speak to someone prior to being interviewed.

We'll make sure that they're comfortable, that they've slept enough, that they are looked after with their welfare. Because we can't be seen to be trying to get admissions out of them or anything like that that is not voluntary or coming straight from their recount.

Det Sen Const Kyle: We really had to be mindful of the fact that, one, they were all under 18. So, they needed someone there, whether it was an independent person, whether it was a parent or guardian. And we also had to be mindful of the fact they'd been out all night, they hadn't slept, they probably hadn't eaten.

And it's also just about building some rapport with them. So, we offered them food, water. We did end up having to seize their clothes, but we offered them an alternative, which is just like a zip up suit to wear so that they were still covered. If they were cold, you offer blankets.

Something to be mindful of, given who you're interviewing, is to understand their background. Have they been interviewed before? Is it their first time in custody? For this example, with all five of these, they had all been in contact with police before. They're very well aware of how police can get people to talk, whether it's building rapport.

Yeah, with these particular youths we just found it was best and easiest to be very direct and very upfront. This is why you're in custody, tell us what happened. The majority of them gave ‘no comment’ interviews which is very usual for anyone who'd spent a significant amount of time either in custody or being interviewed by police. They understand how it works, they know that they don't have to speak, which is something that we do make sure they're aware of prior to the interview starting that they don't have to speak.

When someone's had a lot more involvement with police, they're very mindful of not giving anything away and just ‘no commenting’ everything, which is pretty much what happened here.

[Urgent music]

Voiceover: It was now 2pm, seven hours after the attack and Lisa Herbert was on duty. She was overseeing Bec’s interviews of the suspects and helping out where she could, as sergeants do.

Det Sgt Herbert: If a job like this comes about, it's all hands on deck and getting it done during the day. It could be a double shift or more, but the real work starts afterwards. This is just one day, this is just day one, this is the evidence collection, this is the fact collection, and this is putting them before the court in the first instance to see what the disposition's gonna be. Now the real works starts after this, for the informant.

Voiceover: It’s a high-pressure environment and the sergeant’s job is to ensure that all is done correctly. Mistakes in these early stages can come back to haunt investigators in the court phase.

Det Sgt Herbert: I personally sat in on one of the interviews as a corroborator and upon showing him the injuries, he sniggered. You know, it's very hard to keep yourself contained sometimes when you've watched that footage and you've seen these injuries and these young persons are sniggering at what they've done.

It’s just important to ensure that you're checking on your members. We can suspend interviews, you can take breaks. If it's becoming overwhelming, you know, we're encouraged to step out and talk to each other and, you know, let's put someone else in there if things aren't going too well or if rapport is not very good.

Of course there used to be sayings about throwing the book at people and things like that, but we're working within the judicial system. There are certain steps that have got to be taken for everything to be admissible. And, you know, we can only work within what we've got. It's our job as detectives to produce the best facts to the court.

Det Sen Const Kyle: We believed that there was going to be some sort of evidence on their phones. We'd already had messages on the victim's phone between him and one of the offenders, we weren't sure at this stage who. It was a different name, not the name of anyone in particular. So, we knew that there is going to be some sort evidence on the phones.

Four out of the five were happy to hand over their PINs which meant that we were able to get into the phones. And in the instances of one of them he'd actually recorded the entire thing on his phone, so he had videos of everything they'd done from chasing the victims, from first approaching them, chasing them through the parkland, onto the bus and then hacking at them, and then them running away as well, which included them laughing about it and calling the victims names.

And yeah, they'd given ‘no comment’ interviews, but their phones spoke volumes. A lot of it was recorded through Snapchat. So, Snapchat usually deletes videos after a certain amount of time unless you've saved them, which they'd saved them but, yeah, didn't realise that we'd still be able access them.

Voiceover: Meanwhile, there was good news from the hospital about the condition of the most seriously injured victim.

Det Sen Const Kyle: While we were processing at Dandenong later in the evening, received an update from the hospital that the victim’s injuries were no longer life-threatening, that the surgery was successful, that they would probably require some further surgeries, whether it's plastic surgery to repair the damage to hands and tendons and all the rest of it, but they were no longer life-threatening.

So, all of them were charged and remanded in custody that day. Given the seriousness of the offending, the injuries to the victims, we made applications to have them all that night and were successful with all five remands.

[Intense music]

Voiceover: The five gang members were initially charged with intentionally and recklessly causing serious injury. And also public affray, which meant all the people on the bus had to be interviewed.

Det Sgt Herbert: And look they need to be managed for trauma as well. In watching that footage, we're talking about people who were actually cowering into the corners of the buses, getting out of their seats and trying to move away. I can only imagine catching a bus at 5:50 in the morning, going to work quietly with your headphones in and suddenly a minute later you're watching a young person, you know, be stabbed opposite you in a seat. I couldn't imagine what that's like to actually watch that unfold.

So, you know, we need to make sure that people that we're getting statements from are well looked after as well. There's a lot of trauma involved in that as well and I can only imagine how difficult that would have been for those people watching that.

Voiceover: Given the severity of the attack there was room to consider higher level charges – charges that would need to be heard in a higher court.

Det Sen Const Kyle: Upon speaking with Prosecutions, they suggested we look at laying a charge of intentionally cause serious injury in circumstances of gross violence. And those charges are what we call hand up to the County Court as opposed to just being heard in the Magistrate's Court.

So, upon laying those charges, it bumped up the seriousness of the offence essentially. It bumped it up into the next court. The charge of intentionally cause serious injury in circumstances of gross violence is essentially the last step before you lead into manslaughter, murder charges.

And it wasn't until after laying those charges that one of the defence solicitors for this particular young person produced documentation from this young person's family that said no, he's not 15, he’s actually 13.

Voiceover: This revelation, if true, could have resulted in the offender being deemed doli incapax by the court.

Det Sgt Herbert: So doli incapax is a presumption of innocence to a young person under the age of 14 at the time. Now that presumption means that they can't be found guilty of a crime or they don't have the mens rea capacity to commit the crime.

We received documentation from his family to suggest that he was under that age and the burden was then on us to prove otherwise. The process for doing that became quite a lengthy one. We needed to get a professional report from an expert to put everything that's been in place for him together to suggest that he was the age that he presents as and has presented as since he's been living in Australia.

So, the process included putting together school records, other times in custody, youth justice records, any prison records, anything like that, where he has been through the process as a 15-year-old, was all given to this expert to make analysis of and put a report in.

Det Sen Const Kyle: And even though our records have shown that he had been giving the date of birth as 15, he said he was 15 in all prior communications with police. And even at school was listed as 15 and in the correct grade as well. So, it was just identifying how we get around this or how we disprove an age, which, yeah, wasn't particularly common at that stage.

I think in this particular scenario, you know, sometimes when you hear doli incapax, there are circumstances where it is absolutely appropriate. However, with this particular investigation, and I'd seen the CCTV footage, I'd seen the videos on the phones at this stage.

Doli incapax is a principle that basically says that this young person did not know what they doing was wrong. Not merely naughty but morally wrong and the impact that it has on victims and that they didn't understand that, which was quite difficult to hear personally having seen firsthand the impacts this has on the victims, the victim's family, the witnesses on the bus, all the rest of it.

So, it was really about putting those personal feelings aside and going, alright, well, what do we need to do to disprove, to prove that he is doli capax as opposed to doli incapax and what steps we need to take.

This was the person that filmed everything from when they met up with the victims to running off laughing. This was the person that repeatedly stabbed one of victims in the back while he was being stabbed in the guts by another offender. He played a very active role in the offending, he wasn't merely an onlooker, he wasn't merely hanging around, he played an active role in this offence.

Det Sgt Herbert: This wasn't a random attack on someone through a moment in time. This was pre-planned.

Det Sen Const Kyle: He was actually also the one who arranged the fight with the victims. He was the one that we identified in those Snapchat messages with the victims as the person who had set this up.

It does get a little bit difficult in this job, is having to accept some outcomes at court that probably aren't what you initially wanted or what you initially planned for. And just knowing that was a possibility was something that we had to accept, but also just move past to be able to do the job.

Det Sgt Herbert: Yeah, it's just the tenacity of the investigator and the relentlessness to push on and make sure that we can beat this hurdle as well. Bec was faced with so many hurdles during this, given that they're children, it does present a lot more difficulty with regards to bail applications and the like from court.

Det Sen Const Kyle: Yeah, so I spent a significant amount of time in court for this file. So after the age determination hearing, we were unsuccessful. We had to move through the doli incapax hearing. So, that required getting as much information as I possibly could.

So, we subpoenaed youth justice for all of their records, for all his time in custody he'd spent. I did warrants at the school for all his school records, and then got all of the police interviews and the prior police briefs for any prior charges or interactions with police. That was all sent to an independent forensic psychologist whose role basically was to go through all of this evidence and they did a report to decide if they deemed he was doli incapax or doli capax.

So defence had their own psychologist who did their report who said he's doli incapax. And we were fortunate enough to be able to prove in our report that this independent forensic psychologist deemed he was doli capax, that he understood purely based on all of his previous interactions with police, all the consequences of his actions that he's already had, showed that he knew what he did was morally wrong, not just naughty but morally wrong.

And this ended up being essentially a battle of the psychs in court. So we spent multiple days in court with both psychs giving evidence and at the end of that we were incredibly fortunate to have won that argument. So he was deemed doli capax which then started the ball rolling on the next court case which was the actual offending itself and the charges in relation to that now that all of the other arguments had been sorted in court.

Det Sgt Herbert: The outcome in favour of that was heavily influenced by the investigation conducted by Bec and the outcome is of such significance to Victoria Police. It gives a form of positive case law for us now and, you know, when that gets raised by defence this is something that can be now brought up.

Det Sen Const Kyle: I have had a few incidents where people have come to me going, ‘Hey we understand that you've been successful with doli, what did you do exactly, how did you go about it, who did you use?’ So, it has been a valuable resource, not just for my office but for others within the organisation as well.

[Purposeful music]

Voiceover: Bec says that the assistance of the Westgate Alliance Taskforce was critical.

Det Sen Const Kyle: Majority of the dealings with these offenders had been through this crew, so they were ones that I used to get all of the previous interviews from to prove doli capax. And they were pivotal in their information and their assistance in proving doli capax and just their interactions with this particular offender prior to my involvement and my job were crucial in proving that.

Voiceover: The Alliance crew also helped Bec understand how these youth gang members were sourcing their weapons.

Det Sen Const Kyle: The Alliance crew, they were in constant communication with the offenders and their families. And they had a report from the mother of one of the accused where she contacted them to say that there had been machetes delivered to the house, and we received intel from them that they had been purchasing them online and just having it delivered to their house. So it was as easy as that for them to get their hands on them.

Voiceover: Bec’s investigation continued to progress in the months after the arrests, but the court process would prove to be anything but straightforward.

Det Sgt Herbert: In some respects we had five offenders in custody, it's just going to be a remand hearing tonight and, yeah, you'll just go to court in the future you'll do five briefs. But once the evidence came in and we saw what actually happened and started putting it together and it got uplifted to the County Court level, yeah, things changed pretty quickly.

Det Sen Const Kyle: I feel like it snowballed.

Det Sgt Herbert: It did, it really snowballed into a huge investigation and then from there, with the doli incapax, it just turned into something different altogether.

Det Sen Const Kyle: So the initial pleas with all of this were being contested. The only one who was talking about making a plea was the main offender, who was first on the bus, who had the machete, and who was doing the initial stabbing and hacking. They were making noise about pleas, but at this stage, that hadn't been entered.

We were still in the midst of doing bail app after bail app, which some were successful and some were released and then some were unsuccessful or, we had in some circumstances, they were released and they contacted victims so we had to re-arrest and re-remand over more concerns for victim safety and welfare. So, there was a lot of moving parts happening in court at this stage.

At the end of it, majority of them pled up. There was one who was the driver who contested all charges, under their basis that they weren't present when the stabbings occurred therefore they're not held complicit.

However, there is law that basically says that they acted in concert with the others. They drove them there. They knew that this was gonna happen. We had videos on their phone of them with the machetes in the car driving around looking for the victims in Dandenong, which really went towards our case. So, that ended up being a full contested hearing where we were required to give evidence in court. And that was battled out in court and we were successful in that. So, he was found guilty even though he didn't do any of the stabbings. He was found to be guilty of all the same charges as everyone else was.

Det Sgt Herbert: All five of the offenders were convicted of the charge of intentionally cause serious injury in the circumstances of gross violence. And they all served youth detention.

So, it was a really good result to actually have an outcome like that for Bec. Well, she spent a total of 865 hours investigating the matter, which is 108 shifts. So it just shows to that first day that we spend, you know, 10, 12, 14, 20 hours doing all the initial action on the job, the real work comes afterwards. 865 hours it was, and that's just the hours that Bec recorded on it, not anyone else, not myself, and hours that she spent at home, so significant.

Well, when you look at it, you know, the 108 eight-hour shifts, and Bec's still investigating all her other investigations at the same time. This is one job. Recently, on my crew, for my four members, we had 97 jobs running. So to put that much time and effort into one job is significant in itself, but at the same to be on a general crime crew at a CIU, which is state-wide covering the transport system, you can imagine how this weighs down on our members and how important it is to look after their welfare, how important it is keep the motivation up. And just the type of investigator that Bec obviously is to be able to do that and during some really trying times for her as well.

Voiceover: There is little time to rest on past successes at the Transit CIU. It’s a unit that deals with the safety and security of the million-plus people per month who use public transport in Melbourne.

Det Sgt Herbert: We're a little fortunate at Transit CIU that a lot of it is captured on CCTV and there's a lot people around. It's usually high-volume passenger areas, a lot of the public in the area, so we do get a lot assistance from that. That definitely helps with the turnover in jobs and the good rate, as well as the members being really well trained. It goes up and down, but we aim around 95 per cent for clearance rate.

Voiceover: For Operation Alliance, transport hubs are just part of dealing with youth crime as they seek to counter the growth of gangs in Melbourne.

Det A/Sgt Balzer: It's not solely dependent on, you know, a transport hub or a shopping centre. We do find that that is part of their offending and it depends on what they're trying to achieve. We find that a lot of our street robberies might occur at transit hubs and shopping centres because we've got a large amount of people coming together. Can see an increase maybe during school holidays where we've got young persons going there that might be considered a soft target for offenders.

Their offending isn't isolated to any of those. They still offend in the community. We still see them stealing cars or car keys from houses and then stealing the cars subsequently. So, yeah, it's not isolated to those hubs but we do see some offending occur in those places.

Voiceover: In the 12 months to April 2025, Operation Alliance has led to the arrest of 473 youth gang members a combined 1731 times. More than 4400 charges have been laid in relation to these matters.

But Operation Alliance does not measure its success solely on arrests but how many young people they can deter from committing crime. Communication with families is key to that.

Det A/Sgt Balzer: I think we find that most of these families don't want their kids involved in what they're involved in. And they want help us, you know, keep an eye on them.

[Serious music]

Det A/Sgt Balzer: And generally speaking, if we need to speak to them, we're comfortable most of the time to be able to ring the parents and say, ‘Hey, we need so and so to come in. We need to speak to them about something.’

We also have a care for these families to get through what is a troubling time for them as well, so we do make sure that we put in any referrals that we can to support the family through whatever it is that they need.

Voiceover: Nearly 700 youth gang members are currently being monitored by Victoria Police.

Most of the harm has been caused by a core group of 221 repeat offenders, including 60 who police have arrested more than ten times in the past year.

Police know who they associate with, the locations they frequent, and their offending habits.

Det A/Sgt Balzer: We try and manage these offenders in a sense of, I suppose, monitoring what their activity is like, both criminally and outside of what other interests they might have, that may assist us with any investigations.

There are a number of tools that we have that are available to us and one of those, particularly, is performing bail checks. So, when our youth gang members are on bail and they've got curfews, we actively go and check to see if they're home and make sure that they're complying with their bail.

And then beyond that, you know, making sure that if they miss court and they get a warrant, well, we go and an action that. You know, as quick as possible. So, if any of them ever have an enforceable action that is available to us, we'll make sure that we go and acquit that to make sure that we’re, one, engaging with that person and making sure that they're held accountable for anything that may be required.

Voiceover: The machete attack that Bec worked on at Dandenong is part of the development of skills across Victoria Police to tackle youth gangs. The intel gathered also contributed to solving later jobs.

While four years have now passed since that attack at Dandenong Train Station, the lessons Bec learned still serve her well today.

Det Sen Const Kyle: So, this job, even though it was incredibly trying at times, I have learned so much from this job. As much as I hate hearing the words doli incapax now, just the learnings from that as well.

Yeah, it's been really, really helpful and I feel like it's just made me a better detective.

And these sort of cases, obviously, especially when it comes to young persons who are offending, you would love for this to be a turning point for them, for them to go, ‘OK, maybe this isn't the direction I want my life to head in.’ And I think that's almost just as rewarding. Having a young person who's been charged, who turns their life around and says, ‘It's not for me,’ is just as rewarding as having a good result in court.

Voiceover: You can make a report to Crime Stoppers by phoning 1800 333 000 or online at crimestoppersvic.com.au. And a reminder that if any of the themes in this episode have had an impact on you, please call Lifeline on 13 11 14. If life is in danger, call Triple Zero (000).

Voiceover: Police Life: The Experts is a Victoria Police production.

Your host is Belinda Batty.

It was written by Adam Shand.

It was produced by Adam Shand, Jesse Wray-McCann, and Cassandra Stanghi.

The senior producer was Ros Jaguar.

Audio production and original music by Mat Dwyer.

Theme song by Veaceslav Draganov.

Executive produced by Beck Angel.

This podcast was created by the Media, Communications and Engagement Department at Victoria Police.

To learn more about the work of Victoria Police, go to police.vic.gov.au.