This proposed ban on gang patches is underpinned by an attack on the principles of the Bill of Rights. Photo / Tracey Grant
This proposed ban on gang patches is underpinned by an attack on the principles of the Bill of Rights. Photo / Tracey Grant
Opinion
OPINION
I don’t know. The police don’t know. The politicians don’t know, what on Earth is going to happen when the Government bans gang patches.
I think we can accept it won’t impact on crime rates – after all, you don’t change the present when you remove the wrapping –but how the policy itself will play out is far more vexing. It is a simple policy, so you’d think the result should be simple to predict. History tells us otherwise.
When patches first became prominent on the streets in the 1970s, they had an impact in many places. But notably in the country’s prisons.
The strong inmate culture dictated that informal rules gave way to gang rules, and violence between gangs in prisons became significant.
The prisons responded simply and rationally; they banned any type of insignia that identified a gang, with the thinking being it would help create a less intimidating and hostile environment. So far so good.
The outcome, however, was the adoption of gang facial tattoos. So, while one problem went regrettably unsolved, another one entirely was created.
Gang tattoos, particularly on the face, are a powerful form of social control that inhibits gang exit. Where you can take off a vest with a patch on it, it’s much harder to take a tattoo off your face.
In this way, they are no small matter and contribute, in part, to long-term – perhaps intergenerational – gang membership.
But what about a patch ban on the street? More tattoos? Some other form of substitution we can’t yet imagine? Who knows.
In response to similar laws in Australia, the outlaw clubs formed councils that brought all of the groups together. This created a politicisation of members, their friends and families.
What would this look like in a New Zealand context? How will the predominantly Māori gangs – and Māori make up around three-quarters of all gang members – respond?
In the late 1970s, there were concerns that gangs would become politicised and be used by radical groups to commit violence against the state. It was a far-flung idea then. Is it far-flung now? Probably.
Underworld drug networks will be forged between old foes brought together against a common enemy. Without the prominent back patches, gangs will naturally be forced underground rather by default. That would create some problems for police surveillance and intelligence gathering.
Police conduct breath tests as a gang funeral takes place. Photo / Laura Smith
A patch ban may well prove to be a boon for drug dealing and organised crime. Asian organised crime or other large independent operators do not attract half the busts that they would if they were as obviously marked as the patch wearing hooligans.
But there will be more obvious problems on the immediate horizons around the implementation of any patch ban in New Zealand.
I spent a lot of time in small communities with the gangs, and in scores of those places they outnumber the local police officers by many times. How a local cop, with little or no back-up, will enforce the ban in the face of hostile gang members, is an unenviable prospect. I certainly don’t envy the cops whose job it will be to try.
Not because the police can’t – or can’t figure out how to – solve that issue, but because it will be seen by the gangs as an unjust attack.
If a person is not doing anything wrong, being targeted simply for what he is wearing, perhaps in front of his family of his friends, will feel like an unfair overreach by the state, so the response will inevitably sometimes be hostile. And arguably, an overreach is exactly what it is. We will be making a crime of simply wearing particular motifs.
And that’s the elephant in the room.
This proposed ban is underpinned by an attack on the principles of the Bill of Rights. If I haven’t already, at this point, I will lose the sympathies of most of you, and gain the outright hostilities of many. But I’m unapologetic.
As an academic who thinks about the importance of the principles of democracy, I am a defender of rights. And it’s always on people we don’t like that we are tested on these things. That’s the very principle at play. Universality.
Say one party doesn’t like gangs, one doesn’t like unions, one doesn’t like trans people, one doesn’t like certain businesses or the rich, who gets to choose who has rights?
Police Association president Chris Cahill. Photo / Kevin Stent
While that should be at the top of our minds, the minds of the Government are already made up. The law will be drafted and it will be passed.
Given that, it will all be about how the gangs respond. I don’t know, the police don’t know, and neither do the politicians.
On this, I completely share the sentiments expressed by the Police Association president Chris Cahill, who told RNZ last week, “It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out.”
· Dr Jarrod Gilbert is a sociologist at the University of Canterbury and the author of Patched: the History of Gangs in New Zealand.
