KEY POINTS:
Any time race and crime are mentioned in the same breath, you can be sure that a point is being made.
I wondered what that point was when reports of a previous weekend's fatal stabbing revealed that the man arrested for the murders is an Iraqi national, his girlfriend, who escaped unharmed, is Asian, and the two dead men were Welsh and Indonesian.
It was easier to work out the significance of a Herald headline in the same weekend which left readers in no doubt about the ethnicity of the man arrested for the kidnapping of a 5-year-old Chinese girl: "Xin Xin safe and well, Chinese man charged."
What made the emphasis on ethnicity highly relevant were the events of the previous month: three high-profile murders in one ugly week in South Auckland in which the ethnicity of the victims (Asian) and that of the perpetrators (allegedly Pacific Islanders or Maori) became the focus.
After the third death, Close Up asked if Asians were being targeted by an underclass ("underclass" being a proxy for Maori or Pacific Islanders).
In his Dominion Post column, Chris Trotter seemed in no doubt at all when he declared unequivocally that these were "race killings". "Homicides fuelled by the intense feelings of racial animosity that will almost inevitably be generated in communities where socio-economic status and function become aligned with radically distinct minority cultures operating in close proximity to an impoverished and envious majority."
Trotter claimed the members of the Sikh, Hindu, Chinese and Islamic communities - the "Jews" of the South Pacific, as he called them - were "distinguished from the locals not only by their languages, their traditional costumes and their non-Christian religious faiths but also by their work ethic, love of education and extremely supportive extended families".
He concluded: "Only when South Auckland's Maori and Pasifika youth understand that aspiration and effort have always paid higher dividends than resentment and envy will its racially motivated crime-wave come to an end."
I'm not sure how three unrelated incidents (one of which remains unresolved) adds up to a "racially motivated crime-wave". There's no denying that tensions exist in the impoverished communities of South Auckland and that these have flared from time to time, fuelled by a combination of boredom and frustration, testosterone, alcohol and now P. But to paraphrase a Clinton staffer, it's the economics, stupid. It doesn't take much insight to conclude that victims with money (especially those known to carry large sums of it in their handbags) provide richer pickings for thieves than the hard-up "locals".
In any case, crime and safety surveys have consistently shown that Maori, and to a lesser extent Pacific people, are most at risk of being victims of crime for much the same reasons they also have higher rates of offending. Ethnicity happens to intersect with other high risks for victimisation: living in the most deprived neighbourhoods, for example, being beneficiaries, being young (15-24) or being renters. In fact, if, as the surveys suggest, violence by people well known to victims is more common than violence by strangers (around half the murders committed in New Zealand, for example, are domestic violence-related), then Asians have more to fear from those nearest them than any other group. Still, the idea that Asian people are being targeted by an envious and dangerous underclass is difficult to shift.
About 10,000 people had caught the wave of fear when they marched through Manukau demanding harsher treatment of criminals and longer sentences, led by the excitable Peter Low, whose Asian Anti-Crime Group was prepared to "use every means we have to protect ourselves", including bringing in triads if the Government didn't get "tough on crime".
Would it be gratuitous to say that Mr Low hails from Singapore, where, "tough on crime" tends to mean, according to Amnesty International, trials that "fall short of international human rights standards due to mandatory death sentences and presumptions of guilt", 37 suspected Islamic militants being held without charge or trial, the death penalty for drug-related offences and kidnapping, and restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly? Mr Low isn't the only one calling for the introduction of Singapore-style justice; another ex-Singaporean thinks we need an Alcatraz.
I'd like to think our politicians are more sensible (and John Key did seem to baulk at the suggestion), but the fact is that Labour has largely bowed to calls for a tougher justice system, including longer prison sentences, despite international research showing it doesn't reduce crime.
Winston Peters points to the double stabbing and kidnapping as evidence that our flawed immigration policy is responsible for an Auckland crime wave with "racial and ethnic undertones".
That's stretching a very long bow, even for Peters. Race and ethnicity aren't the problem, even though they'll continue to divert us.
If we have anything at all to fear from immigration, it's not the failures of a tiny minority of immigrants which it is impossible to completely screen out, no matter how we stack the entry requirements. It's the threat to some of our hard-won freedoms posed by those who think like Mr Low.
* Tapu.Misa@gmail.com
