While Auckland councillors struggle to come up with a polite way of moving beggars off downtown pavements, the much larger problem of drunken youths staggering about the bottom of town remains firmly parked in the too-hard basket. A cynic would suggest even the police are in retreat, recently fleeing their Fort St station in the middle of Party Central for the headquarters in Cook St.
A report to next week's Auckland Council community safety forum gives a new snapshot of this ongoing problem. In March, the council, in partnership with the Accident Compensation Corporation, St John Ambulance and the police, set up a "safe zone" Portacabin outside the Britomart train station "to provide a place of safety and triage service for minor medical treatment".
It was staffed from 10pm to 7am on Fridays and Saturdays over four weekends. In that time, 88 people were medically treated - of whom 16 would normally have been transported to a hospital emergency department. A further 700 or so "visited the zone for social support".
The main reasons for attendance were excessive consumption of alcohol or drugs (57 per cent), the need for practical advice (36 per cent) and medical treatment.
As anyone who has ventured into the badlands of the most liveable city in the world after dark will tell you, the 100 or more drunken youths who staggered into the "safe zone" for help on each of those nights in March were just the tip of a social problem that makes downtown Auckland "exciting" in all the ways Mayor Len Brown didn't mean when he set up his task force a year ago to create a "safe, friendly, clean and exciting" city centre.
