N I G N I N I RE D R A WAYW S R E D N E F F O TRUE CRIME
WHEN OPERATION WAYWARD STARTED CRACKING DOWN ON YOUTH STREET GANGS IN TWO POLICE DIVISIONS IN THE WESTERN SUBURBS, IT WAS SO SUCCESSFUL IT WAS EXPANDED ACROSS THE ENTIRE NORTH WEST METRO REGION.
Insp Bentley said many of the street gangs were targeting vulnerable victims, such as students who were robbed while walking home alone from the train station.
Not only has the operation resulted in hundreds of arrests in just a few short years, but it has even set a precedent for how courts deal with young offenders.
“There was a certain element of fear across the community and we were all conscious of that fact and wanted to help put an end to it.”
Operation Wayward was established in March 2017 and involved police units in the Brimbank and Hobsons Bay areas targeting teenagers committing crimes such as home invasions, car jackings and street robberies. In its first 21 months across these two divisions, Operation Wayward investigated 78 home invasions, five carjackings, 74 armed robberies and 84 robberies, and made 285 arrests. The decision was then made in March 2019 to centralise the operation under the Regional Crime Squad (RCS) so this model of managing street gang crime could operate across all five divisions in North West Metro. Inspector Darren Bentley and Senior Sergeant Marnie Sheehy oversaw the RCS and assigned three of its five crews to crack down on street gangs through Operation Wayward.
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POLICE LIFE | SUMMER 2020-21
“They would also terrorise families by breaking into their homes to steal higher-end cars and would then go on to commit further crimes with the stolen vehicles,” Insp Bentley said.
The three tenacious RCS crews, consisting of five officers each, started at and maintained a break-neck speed in tracking down, arresting and charging the youth offenders. Every day, when any of the five divisions would respond to such crimes, they would hand them over to the RCS to investigate. “There was never a moment where our investigators were sitting there with nothing to do,” Sen Sgt Sheehy said. “Our officers were at court almost every day and we were executing multiple search warrants on a weekly basis at the very minimum.” The handpicked crews were made up of detectives and officers who were already equipped with the all-important local knowledge of young offenders across the five divisions.
“When Operation Wayward was originally set up, it was difficult for the local investigative units to track the identity of offenders if they fled back into a division where the operation wasn’t running and where the officers didn’t know who was who in youth offending,” Insp Bentley said. “But once it was centralised, the local knowledge of our officers who had worked in those divisions started to sift them out extremely quickly.” The RCS’s two tactical intelligence officers established an effective intel model for the operation, which made particular use of monitoring social media, through which a lot of the street gangs networked.
During its seven months under the RCS, Operation Wayward investigated 167 incidents, resulting in 139 arrests and 124 search warrants being executed. “Those kinds of results they achieved were remarkable,” Insp Bentley said. “We look back and think, ‘How did they manage that?’ But they did and it was phenomenal.” Operation Wayward’s impact wasn’t limited to the western and northern suburbs, the RCS held daily meetings with their Southern Metro Region counterparts when offenders would cross over the regional border.
