A week after the killing of a worker in the course of a burglary at a convenience store in Auckland, the government is scrambling to put together a coherent crime prevention policy to salvage its waning credibility in the public eye.

But offering subsidies to small businesses to purchase security apparatus to better protect themselves in the event of a burglary cannot be dressed up to look like a policy decision.

That appears to be the case in the Labour government’s announcement of November 29 granting dairy owners a subsidy of $ 4000 to buy fog cannons for their stores to ward off would-be thieves.

 That move speaks more to the absence of effective measures in the crime prevention arsenal of law enforcement agencies than to actually thwarting crime.

Janak Patel, the fatality in last week’s Sandringham dairy robbery, has emerged as a grim totem for interest groups to hold aloft and rally around.

With an election year looming and a by-election under way, the snowballing issue is forcing Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her party to get their optics right, with Ardern attending the victim’s funeral even as small businesses began mobilising on the streets to converge at a planned rally at Aotea Square in Central Auckland on December 4.

Yet, rampant youth crime and the perception of impunity for offenders notwithstanding, Ardern looked more wronged than wrong while complaining to media that some protestors were claiming the government was “preferencing the criminal.”

But harsher penalties for retail crime lies at the heart of the protests by angry business owners up and down the country, which neither Labour’s augmented crime prevention fund nor National’s proposed boot camp for youth offenders, answers.

The government is prioritising rehabilitation over punishment and is committed to providing wraparound support to young offenders aimed at weaning them away from a life of crime.

But this laudable approach is also long drawn and evolutionary in terms of results. Victims of retail crime want to be able to run their businesses safely and are looking to the government for crime deterrence here and now.

They see harsh punishment as an effective deterrent to youth crime.

But harsher penalties would require a change in the laws protecting youth offenders from harsher prosecution, which is a question New Zealand lawmakers like to approach with kid gloves.

 A uniform code of compliance with existing laws binds parties across the political spectrum in an unspoken pact on the floor of Parliament, which guarantees protection from incarceration to underaged offenders for the foreseeable future.

This means the Labour government can at most make cosmetic rule changes, such as raising the funding for crime prevention or reviewing laws to allow police to chase offenders fleeing in cars, while opposition National must be content with rehashing tired old policies.

But for small business owners protesting under the slogan of harsher punishment for youth offenders, their goal remains just that – a slogan.