Patches ban: how will gangs respond?

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

Getting tough on gangs is popular with the public and in the face of escalating gang membership and gang violence, driven in part by an influx of 501 deportees from Australia, National and its coalition partners campaigned on and won a mandate at last year’s election to crack down on them.

The headline-grabber is a ban on gang patches in public spaces, which the Government expects to have in place by the end of this year — even if it is found to breach the Bill of Rights, which protects freedom of expression.

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith’s response to this last week was that “people have also got the right to be able to live peacefully in a society without being intimidated and harassed”. Parliament had the ability to make a judgement and then ultimately the Government was held accountable at the ballot box, he said.

Police Association president Chris Cahill told RNZ he anticipated challenges in the courts, but his organisation was broadly in favour of the coalition’s gang policies — although police wouldn’t be able to enforce them everywhere, all the time.

“When you’ve had gang members double in a very short period of time, I think you’ve got to try and do something,” said Cahill.

The question then becomes what gangs will do in response, and as sociologist and gang historian Dr Jarrod Gilbert said in a column in the NZ Herald yesterday — he doesn’t know what they will do, police don’t know, and politicians don’t know.

One outcome could be a boon for drug dealing and organised crime. He noted that without the prominent back patches, gangs would be forced underground by default — creating problems for police surveillance and intelligence gathering. Asian organised crime and other large independent operators did not attract half the busts that they would “if they were as obviously marked as the patch-wearing hooligans”.

Gilbert also pointed out that after gang patches became prominent on the streets in the 1970s, prisons banned any type of gang insignia; the outcome was the adoption of gang facial tattoos — “a powerful form of social control that inhibits gang exit”.

But there was a more obvious problem on the immediate horizon, which Cahill also alluded to: how will a local cop in a small community, with little or no back-up, enforce a patch ban in the face of hostile gang members?

Gilbert also labelled the ban an attack on the principles of the Bill of Rights, while knowing that would lose him the sympathy of most readers.

“It’s always on people we don’t like that we are tested” on the principles of democracy and rights, and their universality; “who gets to choose who has rights?”