KEY POINTS:
It's a sunny afternoon, one of those crisp winter days where the sun still has a bit of warmth before the temperature plunges with the night and, deservedly or not, the fear factor rises.
Turn off Porchester St in Manurewa into Riverton Drive and there are lines of tidy, newish, brick and tile homes all looking pretty much the same in their various shades of brown; modest but groomed, lawns freshly mown, each little garden providing a splash of colour.
This is the good end of Riverton Drive, an innocent-sounding street name, now synonymous with one of those murders described in the slang of the local kids as "random".
In other words, pointless, strange and inexplicable.
A little further on is the first sighting of graffiti, just a tiny bit on a road sign, someone's illegible signature. Then a small cluster of shops. This is where Riverton Drive changes.
The shops _ two takeaways and a dairy with a liquor store sandwiched between _ are graffitied, the roller doors which lock the contents in at night are also covered in tags.
There is graffiti on the sides of the shops, too, despite the big gates locking access to the driveways on either side.
Shops in many other suburbs of Auckland have yet to give in to such heavy security. It is typical for parts of South Auckland, though. Mind you, the people who live in the various suburbs of South Auckland hate their sprawling habitats of haves and have-nots to be lumped together as South Auckland.
People will tell you they do not live in South Auckland and this newspaper will likely receive angry letters spelling that out.
Out on the kerb in front of the shops is a big sign, one side advertising 18 bottles of Ice lager for $20.99, the other 15 bottles of Lion Red for $20.88.
It's a shrine now. Flowers have been placed around the perimeter and even a few empties, all in the memory of Navtej Singh, the Indian shopkeeper gunned down at his liquor store around 9pm last Saturday, apparently for alcohol and a paltry sum of money.
Alcohol is what a lot of people do around here. If you carry on down Riverton Drive you soon hit Shifnal Drive, which runs parallel to the motorway to Hamilton.
The houses still all look pretty much the same but now they are little boxes, piled on top of each other.
It's Tuesday, about 2pm, and the arrests of the murder accused have yet to be made. Rihanna thumps out Umbrella in the sunshine and some bros come to a fence line with their beers to see what we want.
Sure, they'll talk to us, these 20-somethings say, though they refuse to say whether they belong to any of the area's notorious youth gangs.
Singh was an awesome shopkeeper, one says, "he was like one of the bros".
"He was cool," he says. Another says, "Those mother******* aren't from around here, I know that. None of us would do that."
They're pissed off that the nice man from their liquor shop, where they are regulars, is dead. They're also peeved the shop is closed for now, "cause that's where we get our piss from".
The next nearest bottle store is at Southmall in the Manurewa shops, but that's a car trip away across over the motorway bridge. They like the Riverton Drive liquor shop because they can walk there.
Singh was a great guy, they say. Sometimes, if they were short of a dollar or two, he'd say not to worry.
The whole thing is sad, they say. If they knew who did it, they probably wouldn't tell the police. "We'd bash them ourselves."
"They should have just done the robbery and left. They didn't have to shoot him."
Go down to Trimdom St and see if they know who did it, they say, "because it wasn't us".
Trimdom is around the corner, with a different gang. Sometimes they fight a bit. But "just cause we fight a little it doesn't make us murderers."
Besides, you don't shit in your own hood, they say. By now we've moved inside the fence to an outdoor table and there a quite a few empties building up.
As we drive off, another carload of mates arrive for a drinking session.
In a nearby street, an elderly Sikh man in a bright blue turban mows his lawn. He's grinning and friendly but speaks no English, though he keeps repeating the word "India".
A Sikh woman with a baby walks nearby and says she feels safe, but in a way that shows she doesn't really mean it.
Sometimes it's scary. "Liquor shop and what happened," she says in broken English. "Especially at night."
A Muslim woman from Iraq is out walking with her little boy. She came here as a refugee and says it's safe, that it's nice and very quiet.
But she says she wasn't surprised to hear what happened.
Back at the shops, school is out. Randwick Park School is on Riverton Drive and the kids in their smart turquoise sweatshirts and navy shorts, some barefooted, head for the shops and the mobile police station parked by the kerb.
They crowd around, watching the big-screen television built into the side of the station which is streaming the video footage of the killing over and over in the hope someone will recognise the robbers.
A middle-aged man is also watching. He lives nearby and tells how he closes up his house at 7pm and doesn't come out.
There's a lot of trouble around here, he says. Youths congregate and drink, smash bottles, get into fights and, of course, tag anything they can.
It's intimidating. The street light outside his house had been out for a few weeks and was finally fixed the other day.
That same night, four youths came past the house, put the boot into the lamppost and broke the light.
"We used to get our place tagged every night, cause we've got a long fence," he says.
It hasn't happened lately, "not since that fella got killed, the one that was tagging".
He feels like getting a gun himself and shooting anyone who trespasses, he says.
He's not sorry the liquor shop is closed, for now at least. It's the young ones who are the problem, the 15 and 16-year-olds. They got their liquor from the shop. "He didn't sell it to them but he sold it to adults so the adults give it to the children. That liquor store is bad, it's a no-no. That's your problem, your liquor store."
Opening hours at the Riverton Drive liquor store are 10am to 10pm Mondays and Tuesdays and 10am to 11am for the rest of the week, including Sundays.
Dick Quax has come to Riverton Drive today, the former Olympic runner-turned-city councillor and mayoral hopeful.
Though he lives in Pakuranga, he's here in his capacity as Manukau City Council's portfolio leader for community safety.
He'd asked for the graffiti to be cleaned away and even though it still covers the shops, the tags on the fencing in Randwick Park next door have gone.
Quax is hot on tagging but says the liquor laws are a problem.
Manurewa has far too many liquor stores, he says.
A study on the number of liquor stores in Counties Manukau a couple of years ago found the more socially and financially deprived areas also had the most liquor stores.
They don't have supermarkets though _ Quax says supermarkets don't come to these areas.
He wants, he says, the many good people who live in this area to reclaim it.
Councils can help a little bit and they can lead to some extent, "but at the end of the day it's the community who've got to want to take back this community and reclaim it as their own".
It does not send a good signal that people lock themselves into their homes at night because they're being intimidated by "scum".
Social and financial deprivation is no excuse for tagging and committing crime, he says.
To be fair, 90 per cent of the people here are the good guys, he says, but they have been intimidated.
His advice: Get to know your neighbours, get to know your community and if there are issues, act as a united front. Set up a crime patrol, set up a neighbourhood support system so you can call on your neighbours to help.
He'd also like to see more police around. The whole region is light on police numbers and resources.
He's not fearful in Pakuranga, he says, "but I certainly have a sense of foreboding for people who live in these areas, that they're scared, they feel isolated, they don't feel attached to their community".
Asked how cleaning up the graffiti stops anti-social behaviour, he says it makes people feel safer in their community and, perhaps, there will be less crime.
Senior sergeant Richard Wilkie arrives, wearing his stab-resistant vest. The head of the
mobile police station, Wilkie is all for Quax's anti-graffiti stance. Just as peeping toms move on to rape, studies show small time crims such as taggers can move on to burglary, then robbery, then murder.
"As Dick says, we work in with, try to get a zero tolerance on the little things, because if you get your little things in order, they don't progress further on to the bigger things.
"Tagging actually says `come here because nobody's doing anything about it, you can get away with tagging and if you can get away with tagging you can get away with a little bit more and a little bit more', you just keep pushing the envelope."
Wilkie says closing down shops is not the way to reclaim communities. To do so impacts on people's livelihoods, making them double victims.
"Unfortunately, people drink alcohol. If they don't get it from here, they've been drinking and driving, they get out on the road and they kill somebody, it's a terrible, double-edged sword. We've got to think about other ways of resolving it."
Little things can help, such as street lighting. There are only a couple of small lights outside these shops _ "you need plenty of lighting because these rodents don't like coming out and being spotlighted".
Wilkie doesn't like calling the area South Auckland. This has connotations of south Los Angeles and we're 15 or 20 years away from that, he says.
Counties Manukau is a multi-cultural society made up of mostly good people, who even in the rough areas do care and who will come forward to the mobile police station with information, probably under the cover of darkness.
As darkness falls in Manurewa, on the other side of the motorway bridge, past the railway tracks, a lonely dairy is lit up against the black.
It's cold, dark and isolated at the end of a long street and an Indian man stands just outside the door.
It turns out he's guarding his shop. Pravin Dahya has been robbed seven or eight times in the past 11 years.
He points to his nose. Knife? Screwdriver, he says. He had to have 17 stitches after a youth wanting cigarettes stabbed him in the face with a screwdriver.
Dahya breaks all the police rules. He says he chases the robbers every time and catches them. He's been threatened with knives and his wife, Keyuri, with a gun.
Asked whether his isolated dairy with its double roller doors makes him a target, he says it does.
"But we have to do something for the living, better than to go on the benefit."
Why don't you just hand over the money?
"No, no, no, that's my hardworking money, why should I give it to them?"
Because they might kill you?
Maybe, but it doesn't matter, says the Hindu. God gave him life and only God can take it.
"So I'm not scared of anyone."
He has tried to rob-proof his shop, going inside to show us the security camera monitor where he can see who is coming and going.
He made his counter higher so people can't vault over it, and if they do try to jump, he has time to hit one of many panic buttons which alert not only a security firm but also the neighbours.
He's put in a big gate at the end of the counter which can be locked, keeps a baseball bat nearby and has a guard dog out back.
He wouldn't mind a gun, a machine gun. It's not a great way to live, he says, but his family came to New Zealand for a better life and they are still trying to find it.
He blames not the police but the Government _ they won't make the tough laws, he says. Human rights are always on the side of the criminal, not the victim.
He shuts early these days because its safer and as we leave, the rumble of the roller doors shuts the family in for the night.
In the same road lives Luella Linaker and her husband Graeme.
Born and raised in Manurewa, the couple say it was once a relatively safe community where people knew each other and children walked or cycled to school.
It's different now. Linaker left for 17 years, returning two years ago. She has come back to a dilapidated family shopping mall which now has a topless bar on site, a proliferation of liquor, gambling and fast-food outlets, prostitution, graffiti, youth gangs and a far more marked east-west split between the haves and the have nots.
And random murder.
It's like Manurewa has been left to rot, she says. This why she has written a submission to the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance.
Though she works as a strategic policy adviser for the ARC, she stresses this is a personal submission from a Manurewa resident.
The problems in Manurewa are not all down to the council, but some are, she says, such as the numerous liquor licences which see liquor outlets in residential areas such as Riverton Drive.
She thinks the amalgamation of Howick and Papatoetoe into Manukau City Council in 1989 contributed to the problem, because in this now super-size council, Manurewa and its concerns are forgotten or simply put aside.
The 80,000 people who live in Manurewa are grossly under-represented on Manukau City Council, she says. The ratio has one community board member for every 13,000 people in Manurewa yet Otara, the smallest ward, has one per 7000 people and Botany and Clevedon combined have one per 4500.
Further amalgamation into a larger city will lessen the voice of Manurewa even more, she fears.
Linaker compares Manurewa with Papakura, which wasn't amalgamated into Manukau City Council in the 1989 reforms. This district has fewer problems and more community spirit, people are impassioned about what happens there, and local rates are spent locally, she says.
Pre-1989, Papakura was the poor cousin to Manurewa. In those days, people from there would come to Manurewa to shop because Manurewa was the place to be.
The rates spend angers her, that Manurewa generates a lot of money in rates but appears to have so little spent on it. It's the poor giving to the rich, she says. Local democracy, people feeling they can make a difference, would go a long way. What she wants is Manurewa to have an autonomous community council within a larger regional council.
A community council could strike local rates, where money raised in Manurewa could be spent there.
Linaker says when she presented the submission to the community board she almost had a standing ovation.
Other factors have had an impact on Manurewa, such as property investors who have bought up low-cost housing sending prices skyrocketing. As a result there are more renters, more transients and less community spirit.
Though the couple don't quite barricade themselves inside at night, Graeme Linaker, who has lived in Manurewa all his 39 years, knows of pensioners who do, frightened by the youths who roam outside their flats at night, all this just five minutes from the police station _ which closes at 4pm.
He speaks of seeing fighting in the street near his daughter's school where adults were smashing beer bottles on each other, mid-afternoon. He speaks of a traffic accident where the victim was lying on the street and people were stealing his shoes and the stereo from his car.
Manurewa, Luella Linaker says, is now one of the worst places in Auckland, probably in New Zealand, for drinking, violence and crime. When she asked someone [at the council] about decreasing the number of liquor outlets, she was told this was up to the market to determine.
She scoffs. Closing down the bars and liquor outlets, leaving just a few, would be a step forward because the impact of alcohol on the community is "ridiculous".
This couple loves Manurewa _ it's a great place to live, they say. Well, it used to be.
A VOICE IN MANUREWA'S CORNER
Colleen Brown calls herself the Pollyanna of Manurewa.
What the Manukau City Councillor for the Manurewa ward means, is that she is the one who will rave about the good points of the area in which she has lived for 24 years.
She acknowledges awful things have happened, but she also knows the wonderful people of Manurewa and says though there is utter grief at the slaying of Navtej Singh, there is also anger at media coverage which once again highlights the bad.
"I'm very proud and passionate. It's not that I'm blind to the situation," she says.
"We've had some exceptional things happen here and they've been bad; it's really hard as a community leader to keep on pulling up a community when [they do] happen."
Brown, a staunch opponent of a topless bar at the mall in the area's main shops, concedes there are issues with liquor outlets. But she says outlets have sprung up, often in poorer areas, since the Government deregulated the alcohol industry and lowered the drinking age.
Brown maintains there's not a lot the council can do, besides restricting opening hours and raising questions if concerned about who is running the premises.
And even if they do raise questions, these then go to Wellington where decisions are made, "so we're pretty toothless".
The council's alcohol strategy bans liquor in public places. It runs education campaigns and has removed advertising from council property. She also notes that the council has imposed a sinking lid on gambling, which means no new gaming outlets can be opened in Manukau.
