Another luxury outlet has targeted in an overnight ram-raid incident in Melbourne’s CBD as the city’s crime crisis continues.
The Burberry store in Collins Street was attacked just before dawn on Wednesday morning when a vehicle smashed through the shopfront windows, startling early-morning office workers and other onlookers.
According to Victoria Police, a grey Toyota Hilux crashed into the store at around 6:00 am, with the offenders believed to have fled soon afterwards in a grey BMW. No one was inside the store at the time and it is not known if anything was stolen. The investigation remains ongoing.
The incident is the sixth ram-raid on high-end outlets in the city this year alone, with the current spate of attacks beginning on March 6 when a nearby Dior boutique was ram-raided by a black sedan, with the offenders fleeing with an unknown quantity of items.
The same Dior store was struck again two weeks later when a ute smashed through the shopfront at around 4:00 am on March 21. Another attack occurred two days later when the Louis Vuitton store at the Crown Casino complex was targeted on March 23. Melbourne’s David Jones and Fendi outlets have also been the sites of near-identical incidents.
These car-based attacks are just the latest ripples in an ongoing crime wave that has inundated the city. As the owner of the Burberry building told Channel Nine’s Today: “[There is] obviously a law and order issue in the whole of Melbourne”.
The owner said residents now “wake up every morning expecting something to happen…whether it’s, you know, these sort of issues or graffiti”, and added “there’s just a general law and order issue”.
“It’s an indictment on the city and the judicial system where the most vibrant street in the CBD is easily attacked on a constant basis without anything being done,” he said.
These ram-raid attacks on property come after a number of car attacks on people, with at least three “hostile-vehicle” events, as they are described by the government occurring in Melbourne since 2017.
In that year alone two separate vehicle-based attacks killed a total of seven people and injured over forty others. James Gargasoulas fatally rammed six people and injured 28 more in January 2017, while Saeed Noori struck and killed one person and injured 18 others in December.
The victims included children and both Australian and foreign nationals, and the spate of incidents led to the “bollardisation” of Melbourne in response.
Melbourne’s rising crime rates and overall sense of lawlessness come at the same time as the Victorian capital’s population explodes via mass immigration and the city becomes increasingly diverse.
By 2050 Melbourne is projected to grow from its present population of 5 million to around 8 million, during which time the city’s Anglo-European majority will be reduced to a minority.
All this occurs amid a massive drop in support for Victorian ALP Premier Jacinta Allan, and a widespread backlash against her government’s plans to install apartment towers across Melbourne and further demographically diversify and densify the city.
Header image: The aftermath of the latest ram raid (9 News).
