As we say goodbye to 2022 and welcome in 2023, it’s a good time to catch up on the very best of the Herald columnists we enjoyed reading over the last 12 months. From politics to sport, from business to entertainment and lifestyle, these are the voices and views our
Jarrod Gilbert: New Zealand faces a significant crime issue, and it’s not gangs
By Jarrod Gilbert
NZ Herald·
7 mins to read
On average, one child is killed in their home every five weeks in New Zealand.
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Furthermore, for each of those innocent children killed, there are scores who survive their wretched existences knowingly only abuse and no love. So often those kids grow up just to populate our prisons and, indeed, our gangs.
Family violence is without question the most significant and consequential problem in crime and justice. And unlike the kneejerk reactionism and simplistic “tough on crime” rhetoric often employed, family violence is being addressed in ways that have a longer-term outlook and a better chance of success.
Let’s leave cold cases to the experts - November 14
Recently, I started flicking through a huge collection of old newspaper clippings, carefully collected over the best part of four decades and glued into a big bundle of scrapbooks. They were the handiwork of retired professor Greg Newbold.
Each of the scrapbooks covered different topics over many years, but I was drawn to the ones with ‘Arthur Allan Thomas’ written on the front. Four scrapbooks, in all. Like it has for many New Zealanders, the case has always held a fascination for me.
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Seeing the Thomas case unfold page by page in these old scrapbooks as the 1970s progressed was as interesting as you’d expect, but then I noticed an article covering the insights of a psychic. Some pages later, I saw another, and so I started keeping an eye out for them – and there were a bunch.
It was easy for me to write this off as folly of the past until somebody in my office mentioned two words: Sensing Murder.
Sensing Murder was a shameful act of television that laughingly said it would help solve cold-case murders in New Zealand. In reality, it gave terrible hope or trauma to victims’ families and raised the profile of – and enriched – three people I consider utter charlatans who starred in the show.
Needless to say, Sensing Murder never led to anything that assisted in any case, let alone come even close to solving one.
Lessons for bikers from the Will Smith Oscars saga - April 4
A member of the Hells Angels once said to me that the world becomes more polite when there is a threat of violence. We were at a pub talking about keyboard warriors: “People don’t say as much offensive stuff to each other when there’s a genuine chance they’ll get punched in the face.”
And that’s true. People wouldn’t say half of the things they say on social media if they were face-to-face with a person, let alone if they thought that person might crack them around the skull. This seems like a good thing then, right?
Let’s look at the incident at the Oscars when Chris Rock targeted a joke at Jada Pinkett Smith. Her husband Will Smith jumped up and slapped the comedian an absolute cracker. Rock did well to keep his feet.
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And here’s where my patch-wearing philosopher comes a little unstuck. The threat of violence needs the act of violence to be effective, meaning people need to get bashed for the threat to hold up. We have to accept that violence is an answer, and all of a sudden things start to get tricky.
What we can learn from 90s gang clashes before the election - May 2
Like any good story, this one starts dramatically. It starts with gangs. It’s 1996 and guns are being fired. In Christchurch, a new chapter of the Road Knights is shooting at the Epitaph Riders, and the Epitaph Riders are shooting back. After one shooting, a gang member turns up at the hospital but he says nothing. The gangs are at war.
An election is looming. The first MMP election. The Labour Party were in opposition, and they kicked it off. Attacking the Government for being too soft and saying more needed to be done about the gangs.
The Government was forced to act, and they did so by hastily proposing a swathe of laws to tackle the gang issue. The gang laws were the most significant legislative thrust targeting gangs in New Zealand’s history. They came about with massive political fanfare, and they had very few critics.
With the support of the New Zealand Law Foundation, I have examined the outcomes of those laws using more than 20 years of data, and the findings are remarkable. Not least because those small number of critics at the time were proven to be remarkably correct.
A number of the laws proved to be unworkable, others have simply not been used, and those that have been used have only hit gang-affiliated people as a small minority.
In my opinion, it’s important we learn from this.
Government’s law change a political response - but the right one - July 13
The gang laws announced today were winners not so much in what they will do - but in what they won’t. Let me explain.
Make no bones about it, the gang proposals are a political response to a problem the Government feared was doing them damage.
The gangs are in a period of growth and a string of high-profile violent events – including a gang war – have raised concern, and a response was assured.
Police had already acted by establishing operations Tauwhiro and Cobalt to strongly target the gangs involved.
The last time we saw events play out like this – in the mid 1990s – the situation was reversed and Labour was in opposition and National in government.
In the 1990s the response was average, if not awful. It resulted in laws being introduced that were not used or used against non-gang members more than the gang members they were targeting.
So what has the Government done this time? Well, they have proposed five measures ... [that] give every indication of avoiding the politicised mistakes we have seen in the past. And, frankly, the mistakes I feared would occur.
