“I have to keep an eye out because if I hear screaming I need to shut the door,” she said. “People are scared to come because they don’t feel safe.”
Ngo’s feelings are echoed by other business owners in the heart of Footscray,who said they feared for their safety as a result of escalating violence and crime gripping the suburb.
Police have launched a series of proactive initiatives to tackle the problem,but data from the Crime Statistics Agency shows the move has failed to curb offending,with crime rates at their highest level since 2017.
Assaults in the suburb have soared to a nine-year high. Property damage and drug offences have also spiked. Robberies are one of the few offences that have significantly dropped. Burglaries are also down,but not by much.
Some traders have hired private security or rostered additional staff to deal with substance-affected people,while others have stashed weapons,such as metal barbecue skewers,under the counter to fend off prospective attackers.
Littlefoot Bar owner Stuart Lucca-Pope said Footscray was on a meteoric rise until COVID-19,but that the economic fallout of the pandemic caused more anti-social behaviour and crime and stunted the growth of the suburb’s buzzing hospitality industry. At least one venue in nearby Chambers Street,Baby Snakes Bar,has decided to shut shop after a series of violent attacks on its owner,Mark Nelson,and the bar staff.
Cem Cayrak,who has owned a butcher shop on Nicholson Street for almost two decades,said his customers were too scared to come to the street and were choosing to have orders delivered instead.
Fellow butcher Saddique Ahmed,who runs a shop a few hundred metres up the road from Cayrak on Nicholson Street,said delivery drivers refused to offload orders early in the morning,fearing potential attacks. Ahmed said he and his son were forced to stand guard outside the shop to reassure drivers.
“A lot of customers have left my shop because of this situation. They don’t feel secure,” Ahmed said. “Especially in the last six to nine months,the situation has become much worse.”
WhenThe Age visited the suburb several times over the past four weeks,it inadvertently stumbled upon a drug deal in broad daylight. Large groups of people yelled and drank in Maddern Square,a notorious drug-scoring spot,and a man with a broken arm urinated in one of the laneways nearby.
Ahmed,who migrated to Melbourne from Bangladesh,said he never expected to feel unsafe in Australia.
Ngan Tran and her husband Vu Lam opened a bottle shop in Footscray after moving to Melbourne four years ago. They said they felt let down by the police.
Speaking through her daughter Daisy,Tran said drug-affected people tried to steal from the shop daily. In March,a man charged at and punched Lam in the face after he caught him stealing for the second day in a row.
Police came to the shop and spoke to the family after the incident,but Tran said nothing appeared to have been done to apprehend the man.
The couple now rosters two staff members each night,one to serve customers and another to keep watch at the door. But they worry that won’t be enough to protect themselves from another attack. “We are immigrants … we just want to run our business and have a good life,” she said.
They want additional police officers in the area to deter criminal activity – a view supported by most traders who spoke toThe Age – and a streamlined process to report crime,particularly for those with limited English skills.
Inspector Paul Morgan,the area commander for Maribyrnong,said detectives from the local crime investigation unit had executed more than 30 warrants and arrested more than 60 people since October.
“Our uniform police are patrolling the Footscray CBD at all hours. Our proactive police are visiting schools almost every day. Our detectives are conducting a variety of operations and arresting offenders weekly,” he said.
Hall,the local member,acknowledged the increase in crime and community concerns about safety. Hall said she had met with Police Minister Anthony Carbines and local traders in September to devise a combined police and mental health strategy to reduce crime in the new year. However,for traders like Lam,Tran,Ahmed and Cayrak,help can’t come soon enough.
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Filling the gap with hope for the future
Inside a commercial kitchen in Albert Street,staff pull steaming trays of cinnamon scrolls and pastries out of a large oven.
To the untrained eye,Nan’s Bakehouse might look like one of myriad trendy cafes that have popped up in the suburb. But those who have met owner Phil Gaby know the small,busy bakery does much more than serve lattes – it fills a gap in the community Footscray is desperately screaming out for.
In addition to selling baked goods to customers,the business provides food and support to struggling families and rough sleepers. The cafe also employs young people who are on the autism spectrum and struggling with mental illness.
Gaby was looking to get out of the hospitality business when he had a vision for Nan’s Bakehouse. The business was inspired by his deceased mother,who used to take in and feed people doing it tough without making a fuss about it.
“She would just help people and that was the whole concept that we had to do this business,” Gaby said. “It was to help people,and it couldn’t be monetary,which is the opposite of what they tell you to do in business.”
The cafe is now helping hundreds of families and individuals a week.
Efforts like his might be the key to helping Footscray modernise for the future without leaving too much of the past behind.
Gaby believes he is filling a void left by the state government,the local council and the police,who he claims have lost sight of how to forge relationships with people on the streets and provide effective support.
It hasn’t always been smooth sailing. Gaby,who grew up in Footscray,comes to work most days to find faeces and syringes scattered on the front step and has had to remove drug dealers too. But his efforts to build trust have paid off. When he forgot to lock the business one night,a rough sleeper who regularly came for help guarded the premises to ensure no one broke in.
“Council was more concerned about what we were doing here with a wall and outdoor furniture than what they were doing with the homeless and crime problem in the local area,” he said. “You can’t just come and arrest people – you have to actually have a relationship.”
Footscray residents might already be helping shape the suburb’s destiny – at the polls. At the last Victorian election,incumbent Hall held off a 13.9 per cent swing to the Greens candidate Elena Pereyra.
The historically safe Labor seat is,for the first time in 100 years,back in play.
Pereyra,who hopes to run in the next state election on the issues of housing affordability and maintaining Footscray’s cultural and socioeconomic diversity,said young voters could help her flip the seat Green.
“I think it’s really exciting for people of the west that it’s not[a] safe[seat],” she said.
At a local government level,Maribyrnong City Council has had its own shift. Its first Victorian Socialist candidate,Jorge Jorquera,was elected in 2020. The council also has two Greens councillors and the remaining four councillors including the mayor are Labor members.
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Long-time resident,community advocate and Greens member Pierre Vairo said he would be running in the October 2024 council elections asking for more bike paths,sustainability measures and affordable housing stock in the area. “The area has really changed and it’s been taken for granted for too long,” he said.
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