KEY POINTS:
The decision to station police in a number of South Auckland secondary schools may seem a drastic response to youth crime, but only to those fortunate to live in parts of the city where children in their early teens are less exposed to criminal pressures.
The decision will be welcomed by those in places, by no means confined to South Auckland, where streets, parks, even school playgrounds are recruiting grounds for serious trouble.
Community constables should be already well acquainted with the trouble-makers and gang elements lurking in the streets and parks, pushing drugs on younger teens and inducing them to commit robberies and assaults for acceptance in bad company. The decision to base officers in schools as well gives police a chance to influence the youngsters before they drift into truancy and drop beneath the radar.
The decision is another sign that a new determination has developed this year to do something about youth crime. The spate of incidents last month, especially the killing of a 15-year-old graffiti tagger and gratuitous gang assaults on the North Shore, have not brought the usual fulminations of frustration and demands for vindictive penalties.
Instead, there has been some serious thinking about what might be effective.
It began with the National Party leader's first speech of the year, suggesting a range of remedial programmes, not just Army training.
Police Minister Annette King went to South Auckland for meetings with the new Mayor of Manukau City, where the council has been pressing for effective measures for a long while.
When Parliament resumed, the Government announced steps to try to tackle the graffiti scourge and now the police have indicated they will move into schools.
They know what they are doing.
They put a constable in Manurewa's James Cook High in 1999 on a trial basis but like many of these "pilot" programmes, success did not ensure its survival.
The revived programme will put an officer in the schools for 15 hours a week, presumably three hours a day, during which he or she will try to get to know the pupils, take part in sports and other activities, and pick up any signs or sounds of trouble among the young and their wider networks.
The office at James Cook was reportedly so popular with pupils it brought a rush of applications for a police career.
That fizzled when the officer was called away temporarily and never returned.
The revived programme promises not to call on school-based personnel to beef up urgent operations, a pledge that may be hard to keep.
It is to the credit of the schools, as well as the police, that this programme has taken off. No organisation wants to accept that it needs uniformed police on its premises and many, perhaps all, of the schools involved probably do not need them for their own wellbeing. But their students do.
A few need the police to keep them from going off the rails, the rest stand to enjoy a safer community if the few are diverted from criminal inclinations.
Truancy is probably the key. Schools already employ truancy officers but could always use more. The police officer on site should be fully engaged in that daily task.
Persistent absentees may already be accustomed to a police escort to school but their persistence might be less if the police officer was in a position to follow their fortunes at school.
This is the sort of initiative that can be contemplated in a country of New Zealand's size. We do not need to live with youth crime, even "nuisance crime" like graffiti. And young people everywhere in the country can be helped to avoid the pitfalls of unsavoury peer pressure. This programme is for them.
