SYDNEY, April 13 (Xinhua) -- Victoria Police has declared the violent Apex youth crime gang as a "non-entity."
Speaking to a Parliamentary Inquiry into Migrant Settlement Outcomes, Deputy Commissioner Shane Patton said at its peak the gang, which was reported to be made up of mostly teenagers, was made up of 130 people who claimed to be members.
He said that gang was now in recession and was never made up of one or two ethnicities, but from a range of backgrounds.
"Predominantly, a large cohort of that gang was in fact Australian-born offenders," Patton told the inquiry, as reported by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on Thursday.
"Over 50 per cent of them are Australians."
Apex rose to prominence in 2016, when a group of youths went on a crime spree through Melbourne's four-day Moomba festival.
Victoria Police now believe they have "broken the back" of the gang which was linked to hundreds of car thefts across Melbourne since 2016.
"We have charged the leaders of that gang and imprisoned them," Patton said.
Patton added that despite the decreasing number of youth offenders in recent years, a group of "network offenders" were committing violent crimes at a high rate.
"The offending we're seeing is remarkably different to the offending we've seen in the past," he said.
"We're not seeing any gradual escalation, it's more violent and it's more risk-taking."
Jason Wood, a Victorian MP for the opposition Liberal party and chairman of the committee, said he was comfortable with deporting migrant offenders provided they had a safe place to return to.
