The abrupt spurt in retail crime, combining all its vicious variants from smash-and-grab to ram raids, witnessed in Auckland and the Waikato region in recent days has left business owners and the wider community reeling in shock and disbelief.
The spike in violent crime comes close on the heels of a nationwide protest over the killing of dairy worker Janak Patel in Sandringham on November 23, with dairies and businesses downing their shutters and protestors taking to the streets in Auckland, Hamilton and Christchurch.
In a bizarre aftermath to these protest actions, the crime spree that followed is at once a slap on the face of the bereaved family of the slain dairy worker, the wider community as well as to the law enforcement agencies.
The clarion call of the protestors for harsher penalties for the offenders, mostly young going by precedence, would appear to be vindicated from the standpoint of the victims of crime.
But, given the ground reality, that is an untranslatable demand. The political establishment, across party lines, will not rally around the notion of incarcerating young offenders, particularly if their socio-economic status is seen to be among the drivers of crime.
The talk about militarised solutions such as boot camps for young ram raiders, and ankle bracelets, must be seen as rhetoric inspired by an approaching election year.
While the adult stakeholders faced with managing the problem are scratching their heads to find an appropriate course of action to stem the rot, long in the making, the Labour government has moved with alacrity to table a solution in keeping with its much-vaunted soft approach, founded on the conventional wisdom that shackling the young will turn them into adult criminals.
Instead, the government proposes to fast-track the rehabilitation of recidivist youth offenders by mothering them with attention from various social welfare agencies.
It is hoped this hot focus will set the young on the path of righteousness and disincentivise them to the spoils of crime.
The youth crime package, leaked to select media, targets 10 to 13- year-olds drawn from the regions of Auckland, Waikato, Northland and the Bay of Plenty.
The package aims literally to nip crime in the bud by funding “locally-led solutions” to reduce youth crime.
The package will cover youth offenders up to 17 years of age in the case of Auckland, the perceived epicentre of youth crime.
The agencies will galvanise to action within 24 hours of an offender being identified, and include Oranga Tamariki and police, alongside education, health and social development representatives.
Local iwi and community organisations will also play a vital role in the rehabilitation process.
This package is up against two obstacles. One, while it satisfies the target group of recidivist youth and their adult minders, the victims of retail crime and their families are not addressed.
Business owners have no guarantee of being able to run their businesses safely.
To that extent, the package references the offender, and not the victim.
Next, this package suffers from the same infirmity as its ancestor, the Better Pathways youth crime package.
The results are slow in coming.
There is also the uphill task of surmounting adverse statistics.
Data published by the police shows that youth crime spiked post- 2021 lockdown. But national data also shows youth crime has fallen since 2014, especially among 15 to 19-year-old offenders.
But the trend was upward in 2022 with the number of teenage car-borne offenders going up.
The number of ram raids by youth had increased from 6 in June 2020 to 21 in January 2022, and fell to 10 in June 2022, as per information released by the police under OIA. Court cases fell from 43.6 per cent in July 2014 to 38.4 per cent in July 2022.
In all, 347 young people were charged in Auckland and Waikato for crimes involving ram raids and smash and grabs since May 2022.
The overall trend is a drop-off since 2014.
While these figures might fuel optimism among status quoists, the victims of crime are impervious to them.
They are gripped by the raw emotion of fear and the inconsolable grief of losing a loved one to violent crime.
