{"id":95895,"date":"2025-08-26T00:27:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-26T00:27:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/95895\/"},"modified":"2025-08-26T00:27:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-26T00:27:11","slug":"family-employ-security-guard-after-being-targeted-five-times-by-thieves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/95895\/","title":{"rendered":"Family employ security guard after being targeted five times by thieves"},"content":{"rendered":"

One Melbourne family’s home has been targeted by thieves five times this year.<\/p>\n

Families are in the grip of a crime crisis in Melbourne’s bayside suburbs, as well as across the city.<\/p>\n

They’re wondering if tonight it will be their house broken into, their cars stolen or worse, their family attacked.<\/p>\n

One Melbourne family’s home has been targeted by thieves five times this year. (A Current Affair)<\/p>\n

The Gair family has been targeted five times since Easter, with the gang after their family cars.<\/p>\n

Maddy and Ben Gair say “they’re living in fear”.<\/p>\n

“It’s really scary to know that while I slept someone was walking through my house, especially because we have young kids,” Maddy said.<\/p>\n

Ben said he woke up to a “fairly large guy standing in the bedroom door in our house, who I chased out of the house with his mate”.<\/p>\n

“You sort of have a fight or flight reaction. And when you got your wife and two young kids in the house, you get pretty upset pretty quickly. It’s not nice to go through,” he said.<\/p>\n

They’ve beefed up security at their home in Melbourne’s south-east, even going as far as hiring a private security guard.<\/p>\n

“Every night, we check the doors, we double check, we triple check,” Maddy said.<\/p>\n

Maddy and Ben Gair say they’re “living in fear”. (A Current Affair)<\/p>\n

“I’m constantly checking that my car is locked, but I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and just look out the windows and just watch the cameras on my phone, which is, it’s a pretty terrible sleep at night.”<\/p>\n

Maddy and Ben are fed up.<\/p>\n

“Eventually something’s going to break.<\/p>\n

“One of us might get hurt. One of them might get hurt. One of the, you know, the members of the public might get hurt when they do steal a car and it’s a horrible thing to think,” Ben said.<\/p>\n

Criminal Psychologist Tim Watson Monroe said he’s “alarmed” at what’s going on.”I’ve worked in this space for four decades,” he said.<\/p>\n

“[Offenders] don’t care about consequences, because there doesn’t seem to be any consequences.<\/p>\n

“So I’ve spoken to police who’ve gone to places in Melbourne where there’s crime gangs.<\/p>\n

Maddy and Ben are fed up. (A Current Affair)<\/p>\n

They get arrested and they’re laughed at.<\/p>\n

“The police are laughed at with these offenders saying, ‘Well, so what?<\/p>\n

“We’ll be back later today. We’ll inevitably get bail’. And as we know they do, inevitably get bail.”<\/p>\n

“There’s the thrill, there’s the adrenaline rush. there’s being caught up in the power of the group.<\/p>\n

“I think we can’t overstate the impact of social media and how that can groom people, how it can desensitise people to the nature and severity of the crimes they’re doing.”<\/p>\n

Crime in Victoria is up 18.1 per cent from last year.<\/p>\n

Theft has skyrocketed with more than 240,000 offences recorded.<\/p>\n

In 2024 ,almost 19,000 cars were stolen across the state.<\/p>\n

That figure jumped to more than 27,000 in 2025 and it’s only August.<\/p>\n

And the criminals are getting younger.<\/p>\n

More than 7000 crimes were committed by children, some as young as 10.<\/p>\n

Premier Jacinta Allan is under immense pressure.<\/p>\n

She’s already brought forward a ban on machetes and tabled what she’s calling the toughest bail laws in the country.<\/p>\n

A Current Affair requested an interview with her, which was declined.<\/p>\n

Opposition leader Brad Battin wants police officers to have more powers and self defence laws reviewed to protect the victims, not the crooks.”<\/p>\n

Victorians are less safe today than they’ve ever been in our history,” he said<\/p>\n

.”When I was a police officer back in the early 2000s we saw an aggravated burglary like five times in my career. Now we’re seeing up to 20 a day.<\/p>\n

“Return the powers back to the Victoria Police. They want them.”<\/p>\n

Chris Lacey from the Les Twentyman Foundation says locking kids up isn’t the solution.<\/p>\n

“We need to invest in early intervention programmes,” he said.”It’s as simple as that. Costs half a million dollars a year to lock a kid up in prison.<\/p>\n

“For that figure, I can employ three full time youth workers and work with hundreds of kids in that year.”<\/p>\n

Other states have brought in ‘adult crime adult time’ laws and seen a drop in offending.<\/p>\n

“There’s an unkind of spoken agenda of we don’t lock up kids, then there’s no consequences, and the crime continues,” Watson Monroe said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One Melbourne family’s home has been targeted by thieves five times this year. Families are in the grip…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":95896,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-95895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95895\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}