What is your solution to the gang violence of late?

[Conquiztador]

I will be at the walk from Flaxmere to Hastings tomorrow. "Enough is Enough"

http://www.hbtoday.co.nz/localnews/s...ondsubsection=

http://www.3news.co.nz/Couplelefttra...ult.aspx#video

[Patrick]

send the SAS after them, im sure they would get rid of them quick enough. aqnd it would make great tv

Oh no - not another reality show... Hang on... This one would be fantastic!!!!!! What channel???????

Tim Shadbolts right - if the army sleep in tents, why cant convicted prisoners? Then everyone can stop whinging about the cost of prison and get stuck in with the consequences and start to turn this shit around.

[QUOTE=Swoop;1621690]Nope. Town hall stocks.
Minor offences = X amount of time in the stocks, with the public allowed to go and throw whatever rotten food, etc, at them. 24hrs a day, rain hail or shine.

AND

...our entire military forces total approximately 8000 persons. Thats army, navy and airforce.

What can they do?

Especially when you realise that our police force now numbers almost 10,000 persons and have proven to be ineffective at combating this problem.

The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act made any real form of punishment and pre emptive enforcement a non event. Attempts to introduce laws against gangs have been poorly thought through and are unworkable, a little like the terrorism thing not long ago...

That Police chief in the States has the right idea....

Put em in tents - Waiouru at this time of the year is real pretty.....

Pink overalls only - no "colours" to worry about....

Work hard for your food - and pay for it out of your own pocket from the work you just did... No power or heating costs here....

Hard labour.

No TV/Computor/Cell phones - no power thing here again....

No gym/weights - just work harder. That'll get ya fit.

Chain gangs - the only acceptable gang in NZ

The prisons now are just short of multiple "star rating" accommodation - better than what most have at their places - free food, matey bonding, playing mamas and papas, weights/gyms, free accommodation with the nice trappings....

Make prisons unpleasant - so they don't want to go back there. Quite the opposite of what it is now......

[Genestho]

I hear there is a certain large group that are looking at the Sheriff Joe initiative with the pretty in pink scenario, chain gangs, tents behind barbed fences, peanut butter sammies and the disney/weather channel.

Mind numbing. low cost stuff.

How many people earn what it costs to house a prisoner per year, seems bloody ridiculous when some people earning good coin are only just hanging on, in this economical climate, and yet here we are footing this horrendous bill for convicted prisoners.



As you can see we are sharing our community with time bombs and the excuse is - sorry the prisons are too full. The cost is too much.

Yea the cost is too much. They got that right.

Think outside the square. We dont have to do the same thing over and over, as obviously what we're doing now is not working.

[Ixion]

http://www.stuff.co.nz/4598823a11.html

[awayatc]

The intimidation power/strenth of any gang lies in its numbers......
"Normal" people are very numerous, and therefor could and should be a very powerfull force.
All we have to do is start to take contol of our society again and start backing up our own.....

I have seen it happen: The Dutch said enough is enough in the late seventies when the Ambonese "militants" hijacked a train and took a Kindergarten hostage....
Squashed the whole Ambonese gang/terror movement overnight.
Normal citizens of all ages and backgrounds united and stood up physicly against the Ambonese....they trashed a very substantial gang overnight nto submission

[Dave Lobster]

The intimidation power/strenth of any gang lies in its numbers......
"Normal" people are very numerous, and therefor could and should be a very powerfull force.
All we have to do is start to take contol of our society again and start backing up our own.....

I have seen it happen: The Dutch said enough is enough in the late seventies when the Ambonese "militants" hijacked a train and took a Kindergarten hostage....
Squashed the whole Ambonese gang/terror movement overnight.
Normal citizens of all ages and backgrounds united and stood up physicly against the Ambonese....they trashed a very substantial gang overnight nto submission

The population is here is too lazy to do anything like that. And, you can't rise up against the brown people. They have rights, you know..

[98tls]

The population is here is too lazy to do anything like that. And, you can't rise up against the brown people. They have rights, you know..

Absolutly correct.Had a chuckle the other day when i heard that rabid dog Clark ranting about the shit going on in Zimbabwe,wtf was that about,shouldnt she be more concerned with whats going on in her own backyard.Gangs made up of native kiwis black or white are bad enough but yet still we let the Islanders in to fill any possible vacancies in the prison system,to make things worse whilst on the waiting list for that we work to feed the fuckers.No wonder they love NZ.

[Patrick]

I hear there is a certain large group that are looking at the Sheriff Joe initiative ......

As you can see we are sharing our community with time bombs and the excuse is - sorry the prisons are too full. The cost is too much.

Yea the cost is too much. They got that right.

Think outside the square. We dont have to do the same thing over and over, as obviously what we're doing now is not working.

So, so true.. Bring in the Sherriff Joe initiative, lower the costs and put those costs into the hospital waiting lists for example - to the very same people who worked productive lives paying their taxes... time they reaped some of their hard earned taxes back.


Interestingly, I see a prison (near Wellington I heard) is temporarily shutting down because it doesn't have sufficient prisoner numbers to justify running full steam... Good on ya Labour.... Home Detention is working..

[Zuki Bandit]

Get the army in there to clean the filth of the streets.

On second thought, there are probably more gang members than soldiers, and the gangs would have more guns too!

[n0regret5]

shotgun, tarp, ute, shovel, concrete mixer, big plot of land somewhere..then make a big apartment blocks and hope like hell you haven't just unleashed a poltergeist situation..haha

[Mr Merde]

The population is here is too lazy to do anything like that. And, you can't rise up against the brown people. They have rights, you know..

"Come the revolution..........!!!"

[peasea]

Gotta say; "It's election year folks!"

There is no quick-fix to the gang culture in any country and in NZ the cops are often ham-strung and not backed up by the courts. Then, should the cops manage to lock up some dirtbags, the perps get a life of ease with their mates. NZ is way to politically correct when it comes to housing inmates. Sure, give them blankets and a feed but anything above that is a right they forfeit when they commit a crime serious enough to warrant imprisonment.

I have read an in-depth thesis on NZ gang culture put together by a guy who is a bit of a dab hand with sociology. It points to many (but not all) gang members coming from broken/violent backgrounds, so that's all they know. Then there's the cammaraderie within a club, the mental security, a sense of belonging; something they so often didn't have at home when they were in their formative years. Then the spiral continues.

You might (might) be able to remove a kid from a violent home but many foster homes generate gang members too. Some (not all) foster parents take kids on as a means of income. The kids get the basics so the caregivers are ok in the eyes of the law, but neglect comes in many forms. If the 'olds' just sit on the couch drinking beer, tea or whatever and don't interact with the kids then the sense of belonging will fade. It's also possible the olds might both work, the kid feels (on the inside) abandoned, neglected and so on.

Little Johnny finds a few mates to bum around with after school, one has a big brother who knows a guy etc etc........hanging out is cool, then it might get up to a beer or two, smoking a joint, robbing a house to be 'the man' or feed your new pot-smoking (or p-smoking) habit and off you go. Your mates don't say anything, so there's your security net/blanket.

If you want to cruise into everyone's home and tell them how to run their lives (good grief, the nanny state is bad enough as it is) then you could probably turn some of this around. One way into people's homes is through the mass media, papers and television. These are the very clowns who deliver doom and gloom on a daily basis. Television was hijacked at a very early stage and yet it could be a wonderful tool; same goes for the Internet. The educational capabilities of tv are immense, but how much of it do you see? The Wiggles? Give me a break. Playstation games have a lot to answer for also.

An increase in the skill levels of parents could surely be achieved through the constant screening of positive, educational tv ads, snippets and/or programs, instead of the constant barrage of mindless shite we are subjected to on a daily basis. Our tv has an 'off' button and it gets well used, but so many kids (and adults for that matter) just get sucked into that jelly mindset and sit there mesmorised for hours every day. If they were already sitting there, why not try educating them.....? For those who are out on the street what's wrong with the old 'thee-strikes and you're out' method? We all make mistakes, maybe even twice but after the third.... you've had your chance.

For now, if you're going to throw the cops and the army at the problem then the courts need to back those two groups to the hilt. Currently they appear to fail at this. Things like soft sentences in soft cells, early parole, home d (where the perp's mates all come round for tea and biscuits anyway) and so on, aren't helping. You could argue that the harder crims become institutionalised and perhaps many are a lost cause but if they'd had the right message at a young age perhaps they wouldn't have got to the stage they're at now.

How does it go? "Show me the boy at seven and I'll show you the man" Something like that? You need to start on the young, by the time the teen years roll around it's going to be tough to straighten them out and even tougher when they're older adults.

New Zealand parents need to sharpen their act and look no further than their own front gate to get to the bottom of so many problems.

[svr]

Gangs satisfy fairly fundamental needs for their members - the need to belong, have respect, gain power (violence - or more typically the threat of - is the most basic form of power), status and income (drugs).
If you look the realistic chances of gang members satisfying these needs in a `legimate' mainstream manner, and look at the environments that gangs draw their members from, gang membership is pretty understandable and will remain an entrenched feature of NZ's violent underclass.
On all the media coverage I have yet to see one criminologist interviewed for opinion (there are about 5 in NZ, paid for by our taxes - gotta wonder why we never ask the experts). None would offer any simple solutions - they are smart enough to talk in `correlational' not causal terms.
I'm not encumbered by proffessional caution so I reckon:
1. With more relative poverty in NZ now we'll have more gangs - its a path we've taken and its part of the deal
2. Social welfare is poorly targeted - the only way to give kids born into 2nd generation underclass homes a chance is to provide free, quality education and healthcare for all i.e. not the `subsidized breeding' programs we have at the present. Education $$ can be justified purely in future tax take, and really cuts birth-rates
3. Deprive their illegal income source by smashing the p labs. (Use the cops giving out tickets on SH1)
4. Forget longer sentences - there's actually f.all evidence that greater (or different punishment) deters crime. Although it makes us feel better it costs shitloads and does nothing.
The same US states that enforce the death penalty (the bible / gun belt)have the worst homocide rates. People arent that rational, it seems.

[skidMark]

Put them in a paddock....give them all knifes....

Go hard boys...

[Trudes]

I find it interesting that a lot of guys that get out of the gangs tend to then turn to the church or their marae for guidance, membership and support, the things they were probably looking for within the gang, but minus the negative influences and illegal activities.
I have to wonder if the young people that are almost destined to join a gang for the things they need (belonging, role models, guidance etc) were steered towards their marae or a church or even a supportive youth group would see that they don't need to live a life involved in gangs and illegal activites to get those things. Just a thought, maybe if the community leaders and kaumatua closest to at risk youth took an active role in the community to 'recruit' these kids like gangs would, and got these kids involved in positive things if they could be steered away from the gangs.