KEY POINTS:
One Friday, 20 or so years ago, I spent an uncomfortable afternoon at the Black Power's fortressed headquarters in South Auckland facing a group of unhappy gang women.
I'd promised to show them the draft of a story I'd written about them, which as most journalists will tell you is a no-no. But it was the deal we'd struck before they'd let me spend a couple of weeks with them, chronicling their sad, often violent stories as gang women.
I'd wanted them to trust me, to feel they had some control over their stories. But as they read, they became more and more agitated, and I wondered if I'd made a mistake.
Their first reaction was to refuse to let me publish any of it. Not because I'd got their stories wrong, but because they hadn't realised how exposing it would be, even with their anonymity guaranteed.
Several tense hours later, the cover story salvaged and relationships intact, I returned to the office to find my editor waiting anxiously for me, convinced the women had turned violent on me.
Maybe I was naive, but I'd never once felt threatened. Even in the gang's bar, at night, surrounded by patched members, I'd been treated respectfully. I had no illusions about these men being angels, but most of them looked less like monsters than shy, socially dependent men with little schooling.
Anyway, Black Power seemed then to be a gang in control of its affairs. Whatever else went on beneath the surface, they looked much like any other legitimate business, taking advantage of government money to run employment schemes, and gaining a measure of respectability in their community.
Their leaders seemed to be settling into tame middle age, with no appetite for violent confrontations or prison. Even the women talked about their men growing up and away from crime, becoming more involved fathers who wanted better for their children.
I imagined gangs going quietly into retirement, most evolving into kin-based groups looking after their own. But the two decades since has instead produced a new crop of gangsters - a more hardened generation, apparently, who deal in P and refuse to listen to their elders.
After the weekend's stupid, tragic shooting of a toddler, allegedly by Mongrel Mob members in Wanganui, it's easy to understand why some people feel gang activity and intimidation is once again out of control in some communities.
So, National MP for Whanganui Chester Borrows proposes a bill to ban gang patches and regalia from public places, which seems sensible if not new. Plenty of publicans did it 20 years ago.
The Police Association wants a commission of inquiry, to find out the extent of gang activity though I'm still not sure why an intensive police investigation couldn't do the same thing.
And NZ First MP Ron Mark just wants to legislate gangs out of existence. Which has a certain simplistic appeal.
The tough-talking Mark, a former army major, accuses politicians of being soft on gangs. He'd throw every gang member in jail, even if it meant building 10 new jails (never mind that building even one new prison is an expensive and tortuous process).
Even if this was remotely realistic, we seem tough enough already. Police say they've made 100 gang arrests in Wanganui over the last 12 months, on charges ranging from firearms offences to intimidation. We've also had, since 2002, legislation that makes it illegal to be part of a criminal group, though so far only about 10 per cent of charges laid have resulted in convictions.
The Government even has a bill in the pipeline, aimed at depriving criminal groups of their ill-gotten gains.
Research here and overseas shows that gangs flourish in economically depressed communities, where parents are either too busy or too depressed to engage with their children, much less keep an eye on them, and adult mentors and father figures are rare.
Gangs offer excitement, protection, material rewards, and most of all, a proxy family unit that provides the kind of support and love many kids don't get from their families.
Counties-Manukau, which combines the country's highest proportion of youth with some of the country's poorest areas, is a fertile breeding ground.
I'm as much a fan of tough love as the next army major, but with the tough has to come a little love.
So I like the suggestion made by a former gang member that it would do more good to send a thousand more sports coaches into troubled areas than a thousand more police officers (though both wouldn't do any harm).
At a Papatoetoe sports stadium, where my boys play basketball, the kids come in their hundreds, hungry to be coached, to have their enthusiasm and raw talent turned into disciplined, skilled play. But there's a desperate shortage of coaches.
According to the cross-government group set up in response to last year's outbreaks of youth gang violence in south Auckland, youth gangs and youth crime are the product of "multiple and interrelated adverse social, economic and family conditions". They should demand multiple and interrelated solutions.
So, let's, by all means, outlaw gangs. Let's legislate them out of existence, and pretend we don't have a problem any more. But we might want to outlaw poverty and bad parenting first. That seems just as achievable.
