Young people haven’t garnered the best reputation in the past year.
Youth crime captured the public’s eye back in October 2021 and it escalated from there.
Auckland and much of the North Island had a proliferation of ram raids, stolen cars driven through shopping malls and police led on wild goose chases across the motorway.
In the South Island, youth seemed to grow aggressive in Christchurch as they attacked teenagers in the streets, innocent kids at bus stops and racked up ridiculous numbers of charges.
While statistics released earlier this year showed youth crime has generally decreased from the year prior, youth crime in four police districts climbed again in the year to October 2022.
South Auckland had the heaviest increase in crime between November 2021 and October 2022. Counties Manukau police made 1715 arrests of offenders aged 10 to 17.
Coming in second was Canterbury police, which made 1221 arrests of young people of the same age, 291 more than the year prior.
And there are reasons for it.
Jono Campbell oversees Te Ora Hou, a youth agency that receives referrals from Oranga Tamariki after teenagers have fallen foul of the law.
Sitting across from teenagers who might have ploughed a stolen car into a local dairy, he can link the crime escalation’s start to the Covid-19 pandemic.
In the first lockdown in April 2020, everybody was locked down together, but Te Ora Hou saw many kids who had been left alone during the second lockdown in August 2021.
“We took key stuff like boundaries, consistency and teachers away, many kids were left alone with nobody around them but other young people and social media.”
Campbell said young people need opportunities to find identity and belonging - but within controlled environments.
“These kids find there’s more push and pull factors for anti-social places of belonging, as they don’t have any other draw factors around them.”
As this behaviour began to take hold, Campbell said certain aspects of offending have been influenced strongly by social media.
But he also holds spaces like shopping malls to account.
Christchurch’s Westfield Riccarton became a “teen gang” hotspot where young people were chased and beaten up by groups of offenders in 2022.
Christ’s College ended up banning its students from visiting the mall, Westfield said in November they were working on a community plan which involved close partnerships with local authorities, including Police, to address and respond to the issues.
“Most recently, this has included enhancing police presence throughout our centre in peak periods,” a statement from the mall read.
Campbell said the mall spaces aren’t set up for “social cohesion”, which is why youth crime rapidly worsened at places like Westfield.
He pointed to the age-old theme of “every kid in a hoodie is a threat”.
“Shopkeepers will see kids as a threat, so the barriers are already there and kids can read that,” he said.
“Then you have kids coming out of school, with no adults around, it’s young people with young people. And security guards will often antagonise and escalate the situation.”
Adding fuel to the fire has been the media’s constant publication of the young offenders’ antics, Campbell said they’re “100 per cent aware of it”.
“It’s similar to the late ‘90s with youth gangs, where ‘if that’s how you see me, that’s how I’ll behave’. So it escalates and kids think we hate them.”
The result of this thinking has been more acts of senseless acts of offending, as well as more risk-driven offending. Campbell said this was also common in the late 1990s during economic hardship.
“Rather than two kids getting in a scrap over something, it’s more random.”
Youth worker Amanda Smith will either mentor or arrange mentors for teens guilty of offending.
She said most young offenders feel rejected by society and long for a sense of connection, but will meet like-minded people and commit crimes to feel part of something.
But there’s another issue at play, particularly with recent cases of teen offending.
“Neurodiversity is a big issue,” she said.
“Many young people we get referred, their family have a history of substance abuse and many kids go undiagnosed with learning difficulties.”
She said teaching young people how not to offend has been approached like teaching a 5-year-old how a car works, most information can’t be rationalised by the person alone.
The warped nature of many young offenders’ thought patterns means they consider offending to be normal and Smith said they couldn’t comprehend how their offending hurts others.
“A 14-year-old we had was on an ankle bracelet, she didn’t understand the concept of it coming with conditions, so she cut it off to go on a bender.
“She ended up beating up a kid over a pair of shoes and she thought it was funny, I had to tell her it’s not normal behaviour - that she’s acting like a psycho.”
Because of the learning challenges at play, Smith has to work to build a relationship with the young people with empathy and patience.
Oranga Tamariki’s Ben Hannifin said neuro-diverse issues are only just beginning to be diagnosed in young offenders, now agencies are more aware of it.
He also pointed to kids with “brain and head injuries”, which he said puts them right behind the starting line.
“It’s not an excuse for committing offences, but it helps you understand why they take those risks and make dangerous decisions,” he said.
Smith spoke of a young man she was on a panel with, who had committed offences and was required to meet with the probation officer at 1pm every day.
The offender wasn’t showing up and was threatened by a court judge to be locked up for not committing, yet the young man was adamant he’d been showing up.
“It wasn’t until a social worker asked him what one o’clock meant to him, he couldn’t tell the time.”
Smith said these offenders have fallen away from education systems, which she called “broken in a sense”.
“Teachers are trying their best, but they have up to 40 students in a class. The truth is, these [offenders] don’t understand they’re in trouble and have no relationship with the people who want to help.”
The Government has approached tackling youth crime in a variety of ways over the past year.
In September, it announced a $53 million package, called Better Pathways, to tackle the youth crime spike, including $23m for the Youth Guarantee programme that supported 16 to 24-year-olds with low or no qualifications to re-engage with education or get into employment.
Meanwhile, National proposed a young-offender military academy to rehabilitate repeat offenders aged between 15 to 17.
But perhaps the most evident example of successfully tackling the issue was found at Christchurch’s Northlands Mall, where fights were breaking out among young people on a constant basis during this year.
Violence was common, and nearby schools in Papanui had expressed concern towards the issue and approached youth agencies to step in.
Smith also brought up the mall’s security guards, who she said were intensifying the problem.
“It’s not trying to diminish the role, they’re employees for a certain purpose - they just don’t have the training. So they end up antagonising these teens, making the problem worse.”
The determined approach was a “mall patrol”, involving youth workers like Smith who already had relationships with a number of the offenders.
Volunteers, several of them unpaid, stepped in and walked around the mall after school for a number of months.
“You’d walk around the mall and you’d just talk to them, I’d say to them ‘because you guys can’t sort your stuff out, I have to walk around the mall for a couple of hours’.
“There was the issue, we would de-escalate it.”
The patrol has since finished, and the number of attacks involving young people at the mall dropped to zero.
Smith said the country needs to take responsibility for the various spikes in youth offending over the last year; the buck stops with each member of society.
“Everybody is trying their best but we don’t work well together.
“If there’s a need in the community then why aren’t you helping? Our communities aren’t communities any more, we’re just individuals that live next to each other.”
She says the youth sector is full of people who “absolutely try their best”, but lack the right skill set to work with young offenders.
The relevant agencies lack training, and the processes many agencies follow don’t always work for young offenders who feel “rejected by society”.
“I’m upset when I see people bagging young people, police, they look for someone to blame. New Zealand is to blame. If you have an answer or solution, come be a part of that.”
As the year draws to a close, Waikato Herald is taking stock of 2024.