Jarrod Gilbert: We need a strong but careful approach to gang violence

Police sting on a convoy of gang members in Bethlehem. Photo / Andrew Warner

Opinion

In May 2007, a toddler named Jhia Te Tua was shot and killed while she was sleeping on a couch that came under gang attack. With so many bullets flying into houses last week raising the likelihood of another such tragedy, the community has every right to feel concerned.

I have frequently urged caution over kneejerk reactions to the gang issue, and that holds, even now. Nevertheless, strong action has been required in the past, and strong action is currently required.

But that action needs to be undertaken well to be effective.

The first thing is to define the immediate problem clearly. If you define the issue too broadly, then police will simply not have the resources to tackle it and the acute issue causing community concern will have a diluted response.

The issue is gun violence undertaken by warring gangs in Auckland, which has spilled over to the Far North. But even in just those locales, it's not all gangs or gang chapters that are at war. It's very specific groups. The response, then, needs to be strategically targeted at them.

And while an effective use of resources is the obvious reason for this, it's not the only reason. Far from it, in fact.

What an effective response will achieve is behaviour modification. By targeting and heavily policing just those groups involved, police can put a firebreak in the escalating tit-for-tat violence, and that pressure also shows the gangs what happens when their behaviour goes beyond what the community is prepared to tolerate. This means the groups will begin to police themselves and wiser heads will keep their reckless colleagues in check. This can and does happen.

But that's not just a lesson learned by those groups being targeted. Others gangs outside of the specific focus also see the consequences of that acute police pressure and that influences their behaviour in a positive ways, too.

Armed police respond to a gang shooting incident in Glen Eden. Photo / Dean Purcell

Police are ahead of this, and have created Operation Cobalt to address these types of issues. While this will undoubtedly be pleasing for the public of those communities most affected, these measures are, in reality, Band-Aids, and not the solution to the issues over the longer term.

Gangs are a complex phenomenon and therefore will defy simple solutions. Unfortunately, simple solutions are really all we've ever tried. Hence the community is having exactly the same concerns and discussions they have had periodically for decades.

Not only my research, but also research from around the world, has identified the contributing factors to gang formation and maturation. These are the same general societal malaise that keep our prisons occupied.

We know the issues that drive them, but we aren't great at addressing them.

Even down to the very basic understanding that gangs provide functions for their membership; this elementary idea needs to be part of the conversation.

For the longest time gangs primarily provided two functions: whanau support, and a sense of status. The whānau support – what the gangs call "brotherhood" – is ostensibly the basic emotional and practical supports that most people get from their families, very often because of the terrible dysfunction they experienced in their own families growing up.

The sense of status is the feeling or worth a member gains from putting on the patch, that feeling of belonging to something important. The gang is often the one place where people with fewer options can achieve that.

In more recent times, we can add a third function of the gangs: employment. Greater gang moves into organised crime has meant many people see the gangs as a way of making money. Often that's not all that it's cracked up to be, but that's certainly the perception of increasingly more people who are seeking membership.

Unless we look for ways to substitute these benefits, there's not much point saying "don't join". Because, without alternatives, the decision to join may be perfectly rational.

For all of the seemingly continuous talk about gangs, many of these basics are constantly overlooked. Yet, if we don't seek to address the drivers of gang membership and provide alternatives, it's a bit rich to be surprised they exist. If you have all of the ingredients in a baking pan and put it in an oven, you get a cake. Gangs aren't an anomaly of an otherwise healthy society, they are an outcome of various social and economic conditions. This is a community issue that needs a community response.

But regardless of long-term strategies, it's likely that in one form or another gangs will always be in certain communities. And given that they will periodically create acute community concerns. Now is one such time, and short-term measures aren't just necessary, they're desirable – so long as they're done well.

• Dr Jarrod Gilbert is a sociologist at the University of Canterbury and the Director of Independent Research Solutions. He is the author of Patched: the history of gangs in New Zealand.