The first email landed just after 1:30pm on the final day of May last year.

"I want to provide the feedback that the language, tone, and imagery of the second presentation this morning was very racist," it read.

"I assume formal feedback will be provided to Victoria Police but wanted to flag my concerns."

The internal email from Victoria's justice department was about a recent presentation by police, which had been pitched as a "really impactful" look at the youth gang landscape in Victoria.?In the aftermath, attendees complained they should have been warned beforehand they would see "someone get stabbed to death".

Warning: This story contains references to racial slurs.

The presentation followed?a three-day conference on gangs which had attracted law enforcement officers from America, England, Italy and New Zealand.

Dozens of public servants?from the Department of Justice and some from the premier's department had been invited to take part.

The two-and-a-half-hour session started well, with police staff outlining details of the?state's 47 youth gangs and 607 known members and their approach to disrupting them.

But the second half left staff "disturbed", "upset" and "extremely affected", according to more than 200 pages of internal departmental documents obtained by the ABC under Freedom of Information laws.

Police later apologised for the presentation, but denied it was racist.

'Very graphic and violent footage'

The day before the presentation, an email went out warning that Victoria Police had advised there would be "graphic footage that some attendees may find confronting" and that people might want to "excuse themselves" if they found it distressing.

In the aftermath, multiple staff said the warning was insufficient for what was shown.

One staff member said to put it "bluntly", police "should have said, 'We are about to show you someone get stabbed to death.'"

Victoria Police told the ABC its warnings gave people "ample opportunity" to leave the presentation.

Internal emails from the justice department said "explicit videos and even CCTV footage of a murder was shown", along with "very graphic and violent footage" from a "range of serious violent incidents including stabbings and still images involving young people and adults allegedly involved both as victims and perpetrators".

On eight separate occasions in the documents, the word "gratuitous" is used to describe the graphic content shown.

In one person's handwritten notes from the session, they questioned why they were watching a murder.?The attendee wrote: "Unclear purpose of showing [this] video is."?

Among the audience were people who knew both victims and offenders.

"Some of those in attendance are also members of our vibrant African and South Sudanese Australian communities, including those who personally knew the victims of serious assaults and who were shown video in the presentation of these assaults," one email said.

While several people acknowledged the "traumatic experiences" officers faced, and the need for policy makers to "understand the practical and operational realities" of frontline police work, they didn't think the presentation helped achieve this.

One person commented they were "disturbed" by "the casual way the violent imagery was discussed" and another said the commentary was "upsetting … flippant, and racist in several points."

It is unclear how many of the attendees complained based on the consolidated feedback provided in the emails, but the secretary of the department described it as "significant staff concerns".

Victoria Police says it received "a combination of both positive and negative feedback" following the presentation.

'Utterance of racial slurs' and a focus on 'African gangs'

It wasn't just the graphic videos and photos that left people "disturbed".

Department emails said the second presentation "focused almost exclusively on offending by African background Australian young people and adults", without "any explanation or evidence as to why".

Attendees contrasted that with the first presentation delivered during the same session, which also referenced Caucasian and Afghan-Australian offenders.

One attendee recalled a slide in the second presentation that featured pictures of two young men of African background handcuffed on the ground.

"The presenter went on to say that one of these men had been found to not be involved in the incident at all," they said.

"I question why the image of this person's face was kept in the presentation."

Multiple attendees complained that the presenter referred to a 13-year-old as an "offender for life", laughed "inappropriately" when identifying people in prison, made comments "trivialising family violence", and used the 'n-word'.

The slur was reportedly used by the presenter when reading a social media post that wasn't on the screen, "meaning there was a deliberate decision to use that word which would otherwise not have been seen/heard by the audience," one attendee said.

One staff member's notes of the presentation said, "'n-word'… completely gratuitous" and the photos were "all POC [people of colour], no blurred faces" including one of a "bloody wound to face" and one of someone "in a pool of blood".

Police said, "with hindsight" it accepted that "reading out social media posts from gang members containing certain words may have been offensive to a number of individuals and this was not our intent."

Members of the department's South Sudanese Australian Youth Justice Expert Working Group, who were at the session, said the "utterance of racial slurs" needed to be denounced and that the focus on people of African background should be "called out as racist or, at the very least, noted that it was received as racism by many members of the audience".

The Department of Justice refused a request from the ABC to speak with the chair of the working group.

That the presentation was "solely focused on African gangs" was raised during the session, according to one person who emailed their managers.

"One person posted a question asking whether 'youth gangs is an African young people issue only or was this presentation designed to focus on one group.' This question was not answered," another attendee wrote.?

Another person's notes of the session disagreed, they said the presenter acknowledged white gang members, but said "memberships of non-Caucasians is over represented".

A third person said it "bordered on racial profiling" and lamented a lack of awareness "that ethnicity is not the true common denominator".

"We expect that the longer?term corporate memory of Victoria Police provides ample evidence that the common denominator is poverty, marginalisation, pre?existing trauma and/or cultural barriers," they wrote.

"Accordingly, it is not a surprise that offending may be temporarily elevated amongst ethnic groups associated with recent mass migration trends."

Victoria's Crime Statistics Agency data shows the number of offenders under 24 who were born in Sudan and South Sudan has fallen in the past few years, from 508 in 2020/21 to 258 in 2022/23.

That's compared to the 13,973 youth offenders who were born in Australia.

However, nearly 18 per cent of youth offenders did not have their country of birth recorded, and data on the? ethnic identity of known offenders is not available .

The new chair of the South Sudanese Community Association in Victoria, Andrew Ohide, said he could not comment on the presentation but that it was difficult for young people who were unfairly judged by police or members of the public when they were with a group of friends, saying it was "rubbish" and "not helpful".

"For a community to be safe, we need to look to each other and see all of us as Australian," he said.

He said if people did the wrong thing, he expected police to act, but he worried the public and the media often focused on offenders from an African background.

Acting chief commissioner apologised to department secretary, documents show

Just after 6pm on the day of the presentation, senior justice department staff were emailed a summary of concerns and complaints regarding the presentation.

One deputy secretary replied that it was "disappointing and shocking".

Another wrote: "It seems a massive backward step by VicPol. A response is clearly warranted."

They emailed staff who had attended, "to acknowledge and apologise for the distress, anger, and disappointment that the presentation has caused" and tell them the material "did not reflect [the department's] values".

Two days after the presentation, justice department secretary Kate Houghton and then-acting police chief commissioner Neil Paterson had "a few conversations".

If the secretary stuck to the speaking notes prepared for the call, she raised concerns about gratuitous use of graphic and violent footage, unacceptable language and commentary, racial profiling, and the potential misuse of CCTV footage from correctional facilities.

A follow-up email went out to attendees that afternoon saying: "The Acting Chief Commissioner has apologised and confirmed that action will be taken to address the concerns raised. The Secretary would like to thank you for having the courage to raise that this presentation was not acceptable."

Then-acting chief commissioner Neil Paterson also made an apology to a member of the South Sudanese Australian Youth Justice Expertise Working Group, which one working group member described as "both sincere and assuring".

"He apologised on behalf of the VicPol and asked me to convey his apologies to the team," the group member wrote in an email, adding Mr Paterson "said it was inappropriate to give such a graphic presentation" particularly "to those who might know some of those young [people]".

Victoria Police declined an interview with the ABC, but did respond to a series of questions in a statement.

It said the footage was not "shown to be gratuitous but rather to demonstrate the factual reality" of what "police are confronting on a regular basis".

The statement pushed back against allegations of racism or racial profiling.

"To be clear, there was no racism in the presentation, nor did Victoria Police employees focus on any specific ethnicity or group but rather criminal offending examples."

The Chair of Criminology at the University of Melbourne, Associate Professor Diana Johns said she wasn't surprised to hear about the presentation and the concerns that were raised.

"These are not the everyday things that most of us live with, they're exceptions.

"Yet, the world of policing, very often there's a focus on violence and a normalisation of the things that police see each day, in their working day, that normalises both the violence and the violent response to violence," she said.

She claimed "every city in the world, policing is racialised" and said the community needed to listen to the experiences of young people of colour.

"Police accountability is absolutely critical ? police accountability in terms of having independent oversight, in terms of having mechanisms for police to be held accountable when they do the wrong thing, but also to be accountable to their communities they're serving."

Attendees question motivation for presentation

The documents obtained by the ABC suggest some attendees interpreted the presentation as a "scare campaign" attempting to dissuade department staff from supporting a rise in the minimum age of criminal responsibility or bail reforms.

One person was typing notes while the police session was underway.

They started out detailed, but during the second presentation they had largely descended into a serious of questions, including: "What do these phrases mean?", "Rubbish family violence thing?", "Know your audience?", "Bit propaganda-ish?".

The notes finish with one final thought: "What is the purpose of your presooooo"

Another attendee said "there was no constructive discussion of what tools/levers police were lacking other than that we shouldn't be making their lives harder by changing bail, raising the age etc".

The invitation to the session was targeted at people working on raising the minimum age of criminal responsibility, which is currently 10, but is set to increase to 12 by the end of the year.

Victoria Police said the presentation was requested by some Justice Department staff who had attended the international gangs conference.

"The purpose was to give employees an insight into the youth gang environment, including some of the challenges police face, impacts on community, and the considerable efforts being made to manage, engage and divert these young people before they escalate into more serious offending," its statement said.

You can read a letter of complaint to the Acting Chief Commissioner below: