How Bendigo's Crime Problem Got Here: A Decade of Drift and Delayed Action

Bendigo recorded 1,847 criminal incidents in the Loddon Mallee region in the 2024–25 financial year, according to Crime Statistics Agency data—a figure that represents a 14 per cent rise over the previous five-year average and one that has quietly alarmed police command at the Bendigo Police Service Area headquarters on Barnard Street. The number did not arrive suddenly. It accumulated through a series of decisions, funding gaps and demographic shifts stretching back to at least 2015.

This matters now because the pressure has become visible. Bendigo Health's emergency department on Lucan Street logged a record number of presentations linked to alcohol and drug-related assaults in the 2025 calendar year, straining triage capacity at a facility already managing a $650 million capital expansion. Simultaneously, Victoria Police's Bendigo division has operated below its authorised sworn-officer headcount for three of the past four years, a staffing shortfall that local community groups have raised repeatedly with the Mount Alexander and Bendigo council areas. With the Albanese government's May 2026 budget delivering nothing specifically earmarked for regional policing infrastructure, the responsibility has fallen almost entirely to the state.

The Decisions That Compounded the Pressure

The roots run through several distinct policy moments. The closure of the Bendigo Assessment and Referral Court diversion program in 2018—which channelled low-level offenders toward treatment rather than the Bendigo Magistrates' Court on Hargreaves Street—removed a critical pipeline. Recidivism among participants had run at roughly 22 per cent, well below the state average of 39 per cent for comparable cohorts at the time. Once that program ended, those same individuals cycled back through conventional prosecution with no treatment component attached.

Mitchell Street and the Hargreaves Mall precinct became flashpoints by the early 2020s. Business owners in the mall—Bendigo's main retail spine—began reporting a sustained increase in after-hours vandalism and daytime confrontations from around 2021. Latrobe University's Bendigo campus on Edwards Road noted internal security incidents creeping upward across the same period, though the university declined to release specific figures. The common thread, acknowledged in a 2023 Loddon Campaspe Community Safety Plan, was inadequate transitional housing for people leaving the Bendigo remand centre on Gaol Road combined with thin outreach capacity from services like the Bendigo Community Health Services network.

Housing stress accelerated everything. Victoria's median regional rent rose 31 per cent between 2020 and 2025, and Bendigo tracked that trend closely. Rough sleeping counts conducted by Launch Housing in central Bendigo reached 67 individuals on a single night in June 2024—double the 2019 figure. People sleeping rough in the View Street arts precinct and around the Rosalind Park area became a focal point of community anxiety and, at times, of exaggerated public fear that made nuanced policy responses politically harder to sell.

What Comes Next for Local Services

Victoria Police finalised a Bendigo-specific local safety strategy in March 2026, committing to a new youth engagement officer attached to the Bendigo Police Service Area and a renewed partnership with the Bendigo and District Aboriginal Co-operative on culturally appropriate diversion. The co-operative, based on Mundy Street, has argued since at least 2022 that First Nations community members are disproportionately represented in custody statistics and that early intervention must precede enforcement if the trend is to reverse.

The Bendigo Safe City CCTV network is also scheduled for a $2.1 million upgrade by December 2026, expanding camera coverage from 48 to 71 monitored locations across the CBD. Police acknowledge that surveillance alone does not reduce crime rates—it displaces some and deters little without complementary services. The harder work, as every report since the 2023 community safety plan has concluded, lies in housing, mental health triage and sustained youth diversion funding. Those require state budget commitments that, so far, have not materialised at the scale local services say they need.

Residents with safety concerns can contact Bendigo Police on 5440 2510 or attend the next Bendigo Community Forum, scheduled for August 12 at the Bendigo Town Hall on Hargreaves Street.