Violence on the train to Camberwell

Rebellious subjects, enemies to peace,
Profaners of this neighbour-stained steel,
Will they not hear? What, ho! you men, you beasts,
That quench the fire of your pernicious rage
With purple fountains issuing from your veins,
On pain of torture, from those bloody hands
Throw your mistemper’d weapons to the ground,
And hear the sentence of your moved prince.
If ever you disturb our streets again,
Your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace.

What I am going to do about this and how you can help

In the meantime, I’m going to stop whinging and do something about it myself. Sadly, the days when you could put together a posse and deliver a bit of vigilante justice to criminal pariahs are gone.

However, as a citizen, I can do something for increasing the profile and the accountability of this issue.

What I am going to do is map publicly reported incidents of racial violence in Melbourne on this public map.

I’m then, to the best of my ability and using public sources of information, going to track the police and judicial response to these crimes i.e. whether an offender is charged and if so the outcome of this charge. I also want to go back 12 months and map and track previous offences. There have already been community led examples of this in the United Kingdom so I can’t claim originality here.

Unfortunately I have my own job and personal responsibilities so I don’t have the time to do the Police’s job for them. This is where you come in - if you care about this issue very small amounts of your time would make this task so much easier.

You can help by:

• publicising this note and the Facebook Group “Help Map and Track Incidents of Racial Violence in Melbourne” among your friends;
• email me public reporting of incidents of racial violence in Melbourne, or even better post them as links in the Facebook Group.

In particular, legally trained friends, especially those of you working in the criminal justice system, if you can assist with tracking down the results of investigations of racial violence this would be particularly useful. As anyone will tell you, I’m not a real lawyer.

I don’t know if doing any of this will actually achieve anything. We’ll see. But hopefully it will make me feel better about myself and what I’ve done in response to this. Maybe if you help, it will make you feel better about yourself too.