Police propose targeting 9 to 12-year-olds for social investment to prevent future criminal behaviour.
The initiative aims to reduce youth crime by supporting children exposed to hardship and disadvantage.
Police Minister Mark Mitchell supports the idea but details on implementation remain unclear.
Police want “at risk” children as young as 9 to be targeted for social investment to prevent them becoming criminals.
It is one of two ideas nominated by police for inclusion in the Government’s social investment work programme, ministerial documents released to RNZ under the Official Information Act show.
In a May briefing to Police Minister Mark Mitchell, police floated the idea of “targeted prevention support to 9 to 12-year-olds to prevent them entering the youth justice system”.
Social investment involves using data and evidence to identify people with the greatest needs and was first championed in 2015 by former Prime Minister Bill English, who believed early intervention could save the Government money over a person’s lifetime.
The idea is now back on the agenda, driven by Finance and Social Investment Minister Nicola Willis, who once worked for English.
The briefing, ahead of the first “social investment ministers group” meeting on May 22, said three-quarters of youth crime was carried out by the “10% of young people who have the greatest exposure to hardship and disadvantage”.
These children were most likely to have been exposed to family violence, poverty, had contact with Oranga Tamariki, and have parents who had experienced drug or alcohol addiction, poor mental health, or had been in prison, the paper said.
“We propose targeting support to 9 to 12-year-old children experiencing hardship and disadvantage to ensure they are on track to succeed and prevent them entering the youth justice system in the next five years.”
Police could identify these children through family harm incidents they attended, or because they were siblings of children and young people who had already offended, the paper said.
It suggested targeted support could reduce the likelihood of offending, increase school attendance, improve long-term outcomes and reduce long-term social costs such as “justice system cost and benefit dependence”.
Police themselves would not implement such a programme – that would be left up to another government agency – but could support the approach by identifying and referring children they thought would benefit, NZ Police said in a statement.
Police Minister Mark Mitchell (front left) says he supports an idea from police to target 9 to 12-year-olds for social investment to prevent future criminal behaviour. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Mitchell said he supported the idea.
“We definitely need to look at how we support our kids, 9 to 12-year-olds who are participating in aggravated robberies and serious violent offending,” he told RNZ.
“We have to find a way to support them and stop them from actually carrying on that offending. A big part of that work that social investment will do is identifying, as a government, where we make that investment and how we have the biggest impact.”
Mitchell would not be drawn, however, on whether the idea was being progressed by ministers, or how it might work.
“The Social Investment Agency will be looking at children that are newborns right through to people that come into the criminal justice system, to figure out where we need to target that investment and where we’re going to get the best return on that investment for us as a country.”
A second social investment initiative proposed by police in May was to improve its “non-emergency” response to family harm. This appeared to be at odds with an earlier proposal to pull back from responding to such incidents.
Further advice relating to this second proposal was redacted from documents provided to RNZ.
Mitchell again would not confirm if this was something that was being actively considered or progressed.
“Police will always have a role to play in family violence incidents … but the one thing we’re doing is making sure that we triage those calls to ensure we’re getting the right people to attend those incidents,” he said.
“Because sometimes it’s not always a law enforcement approach, sometimes it’s not a police officer being there – in fact, sometimes that can inflame a situation. So we’re really committed as a Government to get that right.”
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