Senior Sergeant Swann is of the view that those who witness an incident such as this and do nothing to stop it, or worse, add to its repercussions by allowing others to 'enjoy' it, also offend, against the victim and against their community.
Just how many people agree with him will be revealed by the response to his appeal for witnesses to come forward. There was certainly no shortage of them, including a bus full of school children, but one would hope that it is their elders who stand up in defence of a better standard of behaviour than this.
This sort of incident is always disturbing, but it's a blessing in this case that even more damage wasn't done to the victim. It is believed that she escaped without serious physical injury but was understandably traumatised. Knowing that anyone who had access to the internet could see what was done to her will have added enormously to her distress.
It's a shame though that this happened in a community that has struggled at times to present and maintain a positive image. The Far North in general tends to attract national attention only for the wrong reasons, and this has added another chapter to that sorry story.
Too often we are held up before the country as an egregious example of the social issues that confront us as a nation, and incidents like this do not help in changing the perception that we would be doing the rest of the country a favour if we physically severed ourselves and drifted off into the Pacific.
It wasn't always like this. The Far North once epitomised much of what was seen as making this God's Own Country, qualities like resilience, honesty, self-sufficiency, stoicism. Now we are regarded by many, encouraged by the media, as one step removed from the Wild West, where the great mass of the population is stoned, unemployed, uneducated, badly behaved, badly housed and sick. Images from the Far North are routinely used by television to illustrate stories about social deprivation. In some quarters the name Far North has become synonymous with all that is wrong in this country.
Last week's appalling display of gratuitous violence will have reinforced that view, and detracted once more from the reputation this place actually deserves. Kaikohe is hardly unique in having hosted what Brian Swann properly describes as thuggish behaviour. Our problem is that this is what some people expect of us, and that every time we meet those expectations we damage our reputation even more.
That has an impact on people's enthusiasm for coming here, to visit, to live, to work or to invest. Every time we add to the negative perception we make life more difficult for ourselves, more difficult to address some of the negative features of life in the Far North that we actually share with many other communities but which many see as ours exclusively.
The greatest shame, perhaps, is that even if Kaikohe accepts Brian Swann's invitation to take a stand against this sort of behaviour, few in the wider New Zealand community will notice.
Certainly the media outside the Far North won't. The community's response, however positive and effective that response might be, won't be anywhere near as newsworthy as the event that gave rise to it. Kaikohe's bus stop brawl will disappear from the national consciousness as quickly as a crowd disperses when the cops arrive, but the negative perception will remain.
The Northland Age learned that lesson many years ago, when a Far North team became the first from outside the US to win a trophy at the world problem-solving finals. Team coach Pam Scahill let this newspaper know what the youngsters had achieved on a Thursday, and asked us to spread the word. We did so, on the following Monday (to retain some semblance of exclusivity), fingers crossed all the while that word wouldn't leak out. We need not have worried. Not one newspaper or television current affairs host outside Northland was remotely interested.
The NZ Herald described as a "nice little local story," but not the sort of thing it was interested in. It would have been different no doubt if one of the kids had beaten up another at a bus stop.
The reality is that positive stuff doesn't interest an audience that is increasingly addicted to the negative. An audience that gets its kicks out of other people's misfortunes, an audience that is more interested in the phenomenon that is reality television than in the good things that real people are doing in their own society. Vicarious thrills and the chance to feel superior are the new fix, and last week's attack in Kaikohe fed both needs.
The reality is that the Far North, deprived as it might be in terms of a whole range of statistics, is, as most of us know, a special place. The vast majority of its people are good and decent, many of them innovative, many of them caring, many of them eschewing the outward trappings of success that might be attainable elsewhere.
That, unfortunately, is not always how we portray ourselves. Too often we behave in a manner that vindicates the negative perception that others have of us. We have a serious image problem, and changing that is going to take a very long time.
That is no excuse for not getting started though, and Kaikohe has a golden opportunity to take the first step by standing by Senior Sergeant Brian Swann in not only deploring the actions of one teenager last week, and the lamentable response of some who witnessed it, but by resolving to demand a much better standard of behaviour on the part of all who live here.
