Law and order policies 'no magic bullet' on crime and gangs - experts

"There's no magic bullet to crime prevention or crime reduction ... political parties can use and abuse crime statistics," - Criminologist Trevor Bradley 

Law and order is shaping up as a hot topic for next year's election, but experts say crime is not as bad as it's been portrayed and many proposed policies would be ineffective. 

The government has been under pressure over recent ram raids, daylight burglaries, and an outbreak of gang violence fuelled by tensions between the Tribesmen and Killer Beez in Auckland.

Former Police Minister Poto Williams brought in a $6 million crime prevention fund to help local retailers, and said Aucklanders should "absolutely" expect a decrease in gun crime. 

But she struggled to fend off the constant attacks from the opposition benches and, in June, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern brought in one of her most loyal and capable ministers - Chris Hipkins - to replace Williams. 

Hipkins promised quick progress and soon announced expanded police search and seize powers along with a broadened definition of intimidation with a firearm offences. 

Notably however, he didn't do what opposition party National is calling for - their own election policy - of cracking down on gang insignia and gatherings. Party leader Christopher Luxon has consistently criticised the government as soft on crime, soft on the gangs, and ineffective. 

His prospective coalition partner, the ACT Party, announced its own suite of law and order polices in Auckland this week to the support of local businesses. On top of gang-focused policies, the party would increase police powers to seize assets, repeal firearms laws, and reinstate the recently repealed three strikes law with additional inclusion of burglary to the list of 'strike' offences.

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• Police Minister announces new measures to help tackle gangs
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Both parties have continued to characterise crime as rising uncontrollably, but Victoria University of Wellington criminology senior lecturer Trevor Bradley says politicians need a reality check. 

"No, it's not spiraling out of control," Bradley says. "If you look at the recorded crime statistics, yes, there have been increases in some forms of offending but decreases and other others and over a long, long period, we've seen quite a significant reduction in offending.

"Some of the more recent increases have to be offset against those much longer-term decreases or drops."

Bradley says opposition parties - regardless of who that is at the time - are more prone to promising law and order policies that are not based on evidence - and there's a tendency to focus on gangs. 

National's gang-focused policies in particular have been tried before, and "utterly failed", he says.  

"There's no magic bullet to crime prevention or crime reduction, or to increasing levels of community safety ... political parties can use an abuse crime statistics and we've got to remember that the official recorded crime statistics are hardly a comprehensive and reliable measure of crime in the first place."

He says the crimes being perpetrated are serious, but also notes crime statistics only account for those crimes reported to police - leaving those that go unreported to be hidden away.

Other statistics are also easily skewed. 

Senior research advisor at Parliament's library Paul Bellamy has been working on gang membership numbers in New Zealand, but collating public knowledge about people who don't want their activities known is not easy. 

Estimates suggest gang membership grew from the 1980s to the late 1990s, declined until about 2010, but has been on the rise since - although Bellamy warns the quality of historical information is "particularly problematic". 

The current official record of gang membership, the National Gang List, gets a lot of publicity but has only been in place since 2016. 

The number of people on it rose from about 4300 to 7800 between 2016 and 2022, but Bellamy says - given it's easier to verify if someone has joined a gang than if they've left one - the list likely overinflates the numbers and would tend to naturally increase over time.

Prison populations are also not a great indicator - Bradley from Victoria University notes that until recently New Zealand had a higher prison population than many other comparable countries like England or Wales. 

"I don't think anybody would argue that the crime situation in New Zealand is worse than it is in the UK. It certainly isn't. But we were still imprisoning a lot more people than they were," he says.

This is a focus of some of the smaller parties. 

The Greens' justice policy targets community-based mediation, restoration, and rehabilitation, which it says is cheaper than pouring money into prisons.

Te Pāti Māori wants to establish a Māori legal service and a parallel restorative criminal justice system based on tikanga Māori, embed a code of ethics for police into the law, require officers to wear body cameras, and bring in evaluation surveys of policing in areas with high Māori populations.

Statistics indicate Māori are much more likely to enter the criminal justice system, and although the number of young offenders has fallen by more than 60 percent in the past 10 years, a disproportionate number of rangatahi Māori are still appearing before youth courts. 

Bradley says new policies or interventions are inherently political, but the government in recent years - constrained by the rigours of office and they knowledge they will be held accountable - committed to an evidence-based approach he says is having an effect. 

"Over the past four years, we have made some progressive reforms, and we are making good progress on reducing the prison population and so on," he says.

He warns National and ACT's policies would be unlikely to affect rates of crime. 

"We need to be a lot more rational, we need to be a lot more honest. Politicians need to be a lot more honest with the public about their abilities to improve the situation and the honest about the costs of the policies that they're proposing."

In today's Focus on Politics podcast Political Reporter Anneke Smith digs beneath the politicking around gangs, guns and crime.

Listen free to Focus on Politics on Apple Podcasts, on  Spotify, on iHeart Radio or wherever you get your podcasts.