Anyone dismissing voters’ concerns about crime as just another election-year moral panic is making a mistake. The frustration is valid.
Some of the light sentences judges are handing down are inexplicable.
Eighteen-year-old Jayden Meyer raped four 15-year-old girls and sexually assaulted another one and only got nine months’ homedetention.
Luke Stainton groomed and then had sex with a 15-year-old girl. He was originally sentenced to two years and three months in prison. On appeal, another judge quashed his prison sentence and replaced it with four months’ home detention, saying the original judge should have made a discount for his relatively young age and particular immaturity. He was 25.
Jayden Meyer raped four 15-year-old girls and sexually assaulted another one and only got nine months of home detention. Photo / NZME
Tyreece Kohe-Davis broke into a pregnant woman’s house, assaulted and robbed her and then went on to assault and kidnap two men. He had already been given a 50 per cent reduction for youth and a guilty plea among a range of things, and sentenced to four years and three months in prison. He appealed. The High Court judge knocked a further 10 months off his sentence because of his cultural report.
It’s not just a bunch of angry commentators and uninformed rednecks who don’t like what judges are doing. The Police Commissioner also seems frustrated. Five weeks ago on Newstalk ZB Drive he said, “Police is doing everything it can” but “we don’t get to choose the outcomes that come from the justice system”.
If even the Police Commissioner sounds frustrated, there is clearly something very wrong. So, despite the pooh-poohing from commentators, there may actually be some merit in considering National’s proposal this week to limit judges’ ability to discount sentences to no more than 40 per cent.
On Monday in Christchurch a group of tradies chased a thief out of a motorcycle store and pinned him to the ground. They called 111 but were told to let him go. Police were too busy.
Two weeks ago there were more gang members in Ōpōtiki than police officers. Five times more. The police couldn’t crack down on lawbreaking. They would’ve been overwhelmed. Their solution was to punish the law-abiding citizens instead by shutting down the main drag of Ōhope for 2.5 hours. Motorists waited while watching police waved the Mongrel Mob through like a bunch of VIPs.
A motorcycle procession for the tangi of Mongrel Mob Barbarians president Steven Rota Taiatini caused traffic chaos in Ōhope and Whakatāne. Photo / Andrew Warner
Police will tell you they’re following up afterwards. So far they’ve issued those 500 Mobsters with a grand total of 19 infringement notices.
People - especially in Auckland - seem to be genuinely afraid that the crime they’re reading about will walk in through their backdoor one night.
Retailers are at their wits’ end. They are going to make this an election issue. Foodstuffs has already said publicly that retail crime is the “worst it’s ever been” and released footage of armed men in one of its stores. Expect more of that from other retailers. They’re doing it deliberately to put pressure on the Government to do something a little more useful than pretending fog cannons and a crime-reporting app have solved the problem.
If you prefer numbers to anecdotes, data released recently puts in numbers how the public feels about crime. It’s the second biggest issue behind cost of living in the Ipsos Monitor. Forty per cent of Kiwis named it in their top three concerns. It was less than half of that early last year.
In the police survey of public perceptions released on Wednesday, confidence in police fell again, for the fifth year in a row. It’s now at 69 per cent, down from 79 per cent in 2018. That’ll happen when the public watches police officers doing traffic management for the Mongrel Mob.
Of course, it’s true that it’s an election year. And it’s true that National and Act will - as right-of-centre parties always do - make crime an election-year issue. And they will, predictably, promise to solve that by cracking down hard.
But they’ll find people are listening because it is an actual and not an imagined issue.
Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive, Newstalk ZB, 4pm-7pm, weekdays.
