KEY POINTS:
When Nick Tuitasi started as a police youth aid officer in Mt Roskill in 1991, he quickly found that about 80 per cent of the youth offending in the area was being committed by just six families.
Chasing the offenders alone, he realised, was not enough. In 1994 he set up the first police-based trust to take a "community approach", working not just with offenders but with their whole families.
Twelve years on, 29 community-based programmes operate throughout the country - seven of them partnerships between police and local trusts and 22 others using sworn and unsworn police staff only.
An evaluation of the first 14 programmes in 2002 found that all except one of them reduced the offending by the youngsters involved.
In the original Mt Roskill programme, social work team leader Agnes Temoni says: "Community Approach's objective was to reduce juvenile recidivist offending. We have gone beyond that and we have actually stopped it."
It's a bold boast for an area where some streets were recently labelled by National Party leader John Key as "dead ends ... where helplessness has become ingrained".
For 16 years now, Tuitasi and his team have been doing something about it. And it seems to be working.
In a chapter of Pursuing Social Justice in New Zealand, a Maxim Institute book launched by the Governor-General at the Auckland Town Hall last night, Tuitasi says he visited the home of one 14-year-old offender and found 13 people living in a three-bedroom state house.
Simon (not his real name), aged 14, slept with his younger brother in the lounge, where his insomniac mother often watched television into the early hours. At other times, she would walk around the house in erratic moods carrying a meat cleaver.
His dad was physically ill, at home on a sickness benefit, with "no mana or control over his teenage boys".
In one room, Simon's older sister lived with her two preschool children. Her husband was in Paremoremo prison, and she had built up $1600 in fines driving the kids to visit him in their unregistered and unwarranted car. She did not have a driver's licence and, on a benefit, couldn't afford to fix the car.
In another room, another sister who was the leader of a local Black Power gang lived with her partner, an illegal immigrant, and their two preschoolers.
"Simon was effectively living on the streets because he had no space of his own," Tuitasi writes.
His team offered to help the whole family with their problems, one at a time. "We helped the first sister to pass her driving test," he says. "An elderly lady who's heard about our work made a substantial donation. That helped pay for a local mechanic to fix and certify the car while a local church paid the $1600 of fines, with options for repayment."
The team asked Housing NZ to find the young family a flat of their own nearby, and asked the Lions Club and others to help smarten up their existing house to strengthen their case. When they got a flat, a charity called Lovelink provided the furniture.
The team helped the second sister's partner to get New Zealand residency, so he could get a job and a flat for his family.
They took the mother to a culturally appropriate medical clinic which prescribed the right medication to improve her moods and insomnia.
And, with fewer people in the house, the boys got their own bedrooms. Simon got a property maintenance job in the Keith Hay Group, one of the programme's key supporters.
"The things that had been factors in Simon's offending, such as boredom and spending too much time with unhelpful friends, were now gone," Tuitasi says.
It's a far more intensive programme than anything that state agencies are normally involved with. Tuitasi, 43, born in Auckland of Samoan-born parents, gets away with it partly because of its independence. Only two of the seven-person team are sworn police officers, and funding comes from a mix of the police and private donors.
The team works with 15 families at a time. There is no time limit. "We walk with a family for as long as it takes," says Temoni, 57, an experienced social worker of Te Arawa and Ngai Tahu origin.
Surprisingly, Tuitasi says that of the hundreds of families who have been offered help since the programme started, only two have ever said no.
A grandmother, who came into the programme last October after her 14-year-old grandson shot someone with an air pistol, says she accepted help because she wanted her grandson to pay the consequences of his crime.
She has had guardianship of Kelly (not his real name) since he was 8. Kelly sometimes sees his mother, the grandmother's daughter, but has no contact with his dad, who is considered a bad influence. The grandmother, whom the boy calls Nan, brought him up on Waiheke Island.
Trouble began when they moved into Tuitasi's city patch last year. "It was the gang thing - I didn't realise how bad that was," Nan says. "Also my hours of work - I was working two late shifts a week so I wasn't getting home till 10.30pm."
After the airgun incident, a Niuean man on the Community Approach team, Lifi Ikiua, was assigned to Kelly, and kept in constant contact as Nan battled with her grandson.
"His attitude was awful," she says. "He would go off in a huff. Sometimes I feared for his safety, so I would be on the phone to Lifi to ask for his advice, knowing full well that Lifi had a family too. He was never ever backward in coming forward." Kelly wanted to leave because he didn't like Nan's rules, but Lifi explained that rules were "a fact of life". Finally, in the last few weeks, Kelly's attitude has changed and he now looks after his grandmother, cycling up to meet her when she gets off the bus late at night.
"We got a lot of support from our family, but they are mostly female," Nan says. "He had no male role models. Lifi was a role model. Even if Kelly didn't want to talk to him, Lifi would ring and make an appointment to meet him after school. It just means that Kelly knows he has to be accountable." He also taught Nan not to worry about "the little battles" such as Kelly's hair.
"If he wants to have long hair, fair enough. I have learnt to stand back and not to yell as I used to."
A former social worker for Child, Youth and Family Services (CYFS) who chairs the Community Approach Trust, Sarah Bartlett, says the trust can achieve changes in families that CYFS workers with huge workloads can only dream of.
"It's not a statutory agency coming in whether they are wanted or not. These families are engaged and choose to actually accept the programme," she says.
"Also, the workers have a very low caseload and they have time to really walk beside the families."
Tuitasi draws lessons for both schools and community agencies. He believes schools are too ready to simply expel troubled kids to alternative education.
"In alternative education you get a whole lot of these misfits who start problems," he says.
"I believe schools can still do more to hold on to these kids.
"They need to employ staff who can address the problems culturally, with empathy, such as more social workers in schools.
"And they need to make sure there is a system in the school which actually has a destiny for these kids. I've heard of some schools which say, 'You have a choice of A or B. If the kid wants to do C, you can't.'
"Most schools need to address the fact that some kids want to do something a little bit different."
He thinks schools need the resources to look "beyond the school gates" into their pupils' homes, bringing in agencies like his early "to address the anger problem of the kids, to address the broken families".
"If you get in early enough, the family might not break up," he says. "You'd be surprised how many parents break up over kids that get naughty."
And he believes agencies need to break out of their "silo thinking" where health, education, housing and social agencies each take responsibility only for bits of someone's life.
A holistic approach is needed.
"The government departments need to see what's working and say, 'Let's back it'."
