Does this bloke have a shop in the wrong place, or is NZ crime as bad as this article makes out? Seems a long way from my naive view that a hooligan broken window in Auckland makes the front page of the local newspapers?
‘I thought New Zealand was safe, but kids are ram-raiding my shop’
Binu Thomas emigrated from east London to New Zealand to provide a better life for his family. “I thought New Zealand was the safest country in the world, but I was wrong,” he said.
The 36-year-old took over a convenience store 18 months ago selling everything from milk to vapes and fried chicken.
It sits on the esplanade of Napier, a small beachside city in the Hawke’s Bay region on the North Island, known for its warm climate, fine wine and art deco architecture.
Thomas’s shop has become a regular target for teenage thieves desperate to get their hands on vapes and NZ$40 (£19) packets of cigarettes. It has been hit by three ram-raids over the past year and ten separate break-ins, all in the middle of the night, with criminals as young as 11 using stolen vehicles to smash into his premises.
“I wake up constantly to check the CCTV cameras and wait for the alarm to go off,” said Thomas, who has a pregnant wife and two young children. “Our family life, everything, has been spoilt.”
Now, as New Zealanders prepare for a general election on October 14, rising crime has become a potentially decisive concern, alongside high inflation, a recession, a lack of affordable housing, and a shortage of doctors and nurses.
Liquor shops and dairies — the New Zealand term for convenience stores – have borne the brunt of a rise in crime, blamed on surging largely Maori gang membership, a flood of methamphetamine from China, and a social media craze for copycat ram-raids and car thefts.
Last November Janak Patel, an Indian immigrant, was fatally stabbed during a robbery in Auckland, prompting a national outcry and increasing pressure on Chris Hipkins’s government to do more to combat the problem.
Coalitions led by the Labour Party emerged victorious from the last two elections under Hipkins’s charismatic predecessor Jacinda Ardern. But she quit in January saying that she “no longer had enough in the tank” to run again.
Labour was trailing in the polls at the time following a backlash over her Covid policy, which included border closures and strict lockdowns. Polls suggest that the opposition National Party and its junior partner, Act, have edged further ahead and are now on course to form a conservative government next month.
The opposition coalition partners have both made tackling crime a priority, alongside cutting taxes and reducing spending. National’s leader Christopher Luxon, a former boss of Air New Zealand, has pledged to hand police new powers to ban gangs from wearing their “patches” and colours in public and to issue dispersal notices to break up gatherings, emulating a crackdown that has swept much of Australia. He has also promised tougher punishments for criminals and to make gang membership an aggravating factor in sentencing.
“Crime is out of control,” Luxon told The Sunday Times, after travelling to Hawke’s Bay for the first stop on an election campaign which officially began last Saturday. “We’ve seen gang members trying to say they are community organisations and yet they are driving the drugs trade and organised crime in New Zealand, and peddling misery across this country.”
The Hawke’s Bay region, where Labour is seeking to win back both parliamentary seats, seems at first to be an unlikely location for a law and order pitch.
t is a major exporter of apples, fruit, lamb and sheep and produces 90 per cent of New Zealand’s syrah, cabernets and merlot.
Tourists and affluent second-home owners from Auckland and Wellington are drawn to its cafés and art galleries, vineyards and beautiful hills overlooking the Pacific.
But in the broader Eastern District, which encompasses Hawke’s Bay, the number of people on the police gangs register has risen by 71 per cent in six years and the ratio of gang members to police officers is the highest in the country, at 2.5.
Violent crime is up by 35 per cent since the end of 2017, according to official police data, while retail crime such as theft and ram-raids has jumped 43 per cent.
Labour says the statistics are misleading and that more victims of crime, particularly domestic abuse, are reporting it. The party denies in general that it has been soft on gangs.
Hipkins has pledged to put more police officers on the beat, crack down on gang convoys and introduce a new criminal offence for ram-raiders with a maximum ten-year jail sentence. He has also said his government would explore making stalking a criminal offence, following the murder of an Auckland University student, Farzana Yaqubi, by her stalker in December.
But one of its longstanding flagship policies to reduce the prison population by 30 per cent, focusing on rehabilitating offenders, has been cited by National as evidence that it is soft on crime.
There has been criticism of New Zealand’s police commissioner, Andrew Coster, who was appointed by Ardern in 2020.
He has been labelled “cuddles Coster” for focusing on “policing by consent” and stamping out unconscious bias in the police force against Maori people.
National was provided further ammunition last week when it emerged that the number of gang members breaking rules on home detention had increased by 60 per cent in six years and they are now involved in one in six breaches.
A leaked internal police report revealed that criminals are “regularly” exploiting a “significant vulnerability” by wrapping tinfoil around their ankle bracelets and going on to reoffend.
Richard Harman, founder of the political website Politik, said law and order had shot up the agenda.
“Over the last decade or so gangs have morphed from violent recreational outfits hat largely kept to themselves into big criminal drug distribution companies. They have heaps of money, which is attracting young potential recruits. The stakes are also higher, so we’re seeing turf wars, firearms being used more often and people being murdered.”
The spiral of violence has been blamed in part on Australia’s decision to deport hundreds of hardened criminals to New Zealand, including prominent members of outlaw motorcycle gangs including the Commancheros and the Rebels.
The Napier suburb of Maraenui is one of New Zealand’s most deprived areas and home to the country’s largest street gang, the Mongrel Mob.
Their local clubhouse, complete with its British bulldog logo painted in the gang’s red and blue colours, peers over a deserted playground.
Their main rival is Black Power, which controls the bleak suburb of Flaxmere, in the nearby town of Hastings.
The two gangs, both largely made up of Maoris, are at the heart of the drugs trade and crime in the area.
Violent clashes flare up between rival members, occasionally spilling on to the streets.
A 27-year-old member of the Mongrel Mob was shot dead last month in broad daylight in Palmerston North, around 90 miles southwest from Napier, following a brawl. Police believe the shooting was gang-related and seized firearms and other weapons from Black Power members.
I met Mane Adams, president of the Hawke’s Bay chapter of Black Power, and life member Denis O’Reilly, not far from their stronghold in Taradale, another suburb of Napier.
O’Reilly, 70, wanted to become a Catholic priest as a young man and now devotes much of his time to putting a positive spin on gangs, with leaders such as himself and Adams campaigning against drug abuse and domestic violence.
But he said the flaunting of wealth on social media is partly to blame for the rise in membership, while the massive increase in meth being smuggled into New Zealand is generating demand for new recruits to traffic drugs, and fuelling violent crime.
