“If you are an African offender, and certainly if you’re an African youth of South Sudanese background from the western suburbs of Melbourne, rest assured your case will be reported upon,” he told the ABC.

“The media choose to report upon those cases. That creates an impression that we, that our work, a very significant proportion of our work is taken up with African youths from the western suburbs of Melbourne. That’s a false impression.”

Monica Deng is from a South Sudanese refugee family and came to Australia with her mother in 2004.

She is a Melbourne pharmacist and a director of the South Sudanese Australian Youth United, a grassroots group that works with South Sudanese youth. Deng says the media coverage and politics around African gangs was “unfair and unjust” and often made no sense.

“The effects are very, very damaging even in the longer term,” she says. “A lot of us feel very marginalised. Media vilification can have negative consequences such as lowering the self-esteem of young people.”

Before the 2018 election he tried repeatedly to explain to politicians and journalists that the racialising of crime was damaging his community and the wider Victorian public.
“Families were rejected for rental properties. People were becoming homeless ... and there was a big increase in the suicide rate. It became something everyone in the community was talking about,” he says.

"We have certainly seen it happening more in recent times where people [are] not actually clearly seeing who's involved, but because of all the media attention they have jumped to the conclusion it's African offenders," she told Four Corners.

"It's unfair that I have to go the extra mile just to be a normal person." Awak Kongor

Young Sudanese males are over-represented in certain violent crimes — allegedly committing close to 10 per cent of all aggravated robberies.

"We do know that they're responsible disproportionally for some of those high-crime or high-harm offences, particularly aggravated burglaries and robberies. So that's concerning for us, and that's the issue that we've been dealing with for a couple of years now," said Stuart Bateson, the commander of the Priorities Taskforce.

"In terms of overall numbers for that high-impact crime, the numbers are quite small. That doesn't lessen the damage of course that they do to victims and the community, but in terms of overall numbers, it's quite small."

Victoria has the largest South Sudanese population in Australia, with approximately 9,000 people.

"The Sudanese population is overwhelmingly young, significantly younger than the general Australian population, so we know that youth offend between the ages of 15 and 24, that's the peak age of offending for any particular group, whether it be an ethnic minority, or Australian born," said Dr Rebecca Wickes from Monash University.

South Sudanese community leader and lawyer Nyadol Nyuon says with some of the media and political commentary around the issue, it's no wonder.

"The public is being told that there's a crisis, that they live in a state that is becoming lawless," she said.

"You owe the African Australian community an apology…being a young migrant nation, the misconceptions about Africans in Australia already exist without your help. It is insulting to the Australian community at large to spread fake news in an attempt to retain political power."